Episode 376: Functional Medicine, Reimagined: Why Functional Medicine Isn’t Working Anymore (And What to Do Instead)
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Functional medicine isn't broken, but in a world of quick-fix protocols and “labs first funnels”, it's time for the next evolution of wellness for both practitioners and patients.
In today’s solo episode, Erin is sharing a solutions-focused perspective which builds on the strengths of systems biology and root-cause thinking, expanding care to include the nervous system, trauma, and lived human experience. By weaving together labs with client storytelling, science with discernment, and clinical skill with true coaching, Erin’s framework has the power to strengthen the industry from the inside out.
Intuitive Functional Medicine™ doesn't replace functional medicine. It expands on it, and more than ever, we need practitioners ready to step into this deeper work.
Learn more about the fall 2025 cohort of Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™ and apply today!
In this episode:
The current state of the functional medicine industry, and why overemphasis on labs and protocols creates more problems than solutions
How the new wave of complex, highly educated clients is changing the industry
What the “nocebo effect” is and how it undermines healing in functional medicine
Why Intuitive Functional Medicine™ weaves in the nervous system, trauma, and belief systems
Real-world examples of how blending science with client storytelling leads to deeper results
Resources mentioned:
Applications are now open for the fall 2025 cohort of Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™.
Check out our free masterclass for practitioners on Functional Lab Testing.
Episode 321: Neurobiology of Chronic Conditions
Episode 326: Has Functional Medicine Created More Problems Than Solutions?
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Intuitive Functional Medicine™ really expands the map to include the terrain of the mind, the emotions, the subconscious, and the lived experience. We bring in the lens of psychoneuroimmunology, which looks at how the psyche, the nervous system and the immune system are constantly communicating. So it's not just the gut impacting our brain or the brain impacting our gut. It's also the beliefs stored in the nervous system that shape immune function, inflammation, and even hormone output. In this reimagined model, trauma imprints, thought patterns, belief systems, all of these matter just as much as labs and supplements.
Welcome to the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™ where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello, we are back with another episode and today I'm talking about functional medicine reimagined. Why functional medicine isn't working anymore, at least in some of the ways it's being practiced and what we can do instead. Definitely gonna be a longer episode. Today I sat down to write this and really had to kind of reflect on my life's work. I've definitely been in some contemplative phases lately, a lot of think pieces coming out of me, but I didn't wanna rush through this one. So take me on a walk, take me on a drive.
If you know someone in the wellness space, you'll probably want to send this episode to them so that we can together look at some of this stuff head on and reflect on different ways of doing things. As you'll hear me say, I don't like just presenting problems. So I'm also going to present some solutions that are really effective as well. So be sure to listen all the way till the end for how we solve these problems in our practice. So today's episode, here's it in a nutshell. We're going to talk about why functional medicine isn't broken and I really want to highlight a lot of the places and spaces that functional medicine gets right. But then we'll also unpack where it is incomplete, where functional medicine might fall short as an industry and for the clients it's supposed to serve.
I'm going to give you my take on anti science or pseudo science claims, especially as they're being lobbed against functional medicine. I want to briefly touch on the new wave of clients that we're seeing, what they need and how we can help along with exploring the new paradigm of care that's really changing the game for both clients and practitioners and what specifically that looks like in practice with some real world examples. So this whole entire show was actually inspired by a question submitted this past spring by an FNA student, a Funk’tional Nutrition Academy student. So shout out to Justin for this one. And right now I have all things Funk'tional Nutrition Academy on the brain because enrollment is officially open for fall cohort. So be sure to get your application in if you haven't done so already. You can get started as soon as you enroll, and if you need to talk through anything as you are making your decision, we've got you. You can schedule a free discovery call once your application is approved, so be sure to get it in and we look forward to hearing from some of you guys.
Okay, so Justin's question was around the rise in Instagram accounts coming after functional medicine lately, and he states, it's made me reflect on where the line is between thoughtful clinical inference and making claims not grounded in evidence. So I really unpacked and addressed that question in full in class. But I wanted to bring parts of the conversation here to the show because the wellness industry is feeling extra messy right now. It's kind of hard for me to articulate. It's generally not a problem for me. But this one, I can't quite put it into words, and I've heard other clinicians and people I follow and respect also flounder around a little bit trying to explain and articulate it. It's almost like it's more of a felt experience, a feeling of frequency, like something just feels off, but we can't quite put our finger on it. And I'm sure if you're here listening to the show and you're a practitioner, you might be feeling.
Similarly, there's Cortisol coaches and GLP1 coaches with zero credentials, zero education, zero experience outside of their own. The only thing they have is a following in an affiliate account with like gray market peptides. Like that to me is wild. I've always kind of said the wellness world is like the wild wild west, but it feels even more wild now. There's wellness influencers hawking supplements like everywhere you go, and the average person can't really discern the difference between a wellness influencer and a practitioner that happens to be on social media. So a lot of people are getting a lot of their health education and information from a mixed bag of resources. And what I've noticed is that because functional medicine and functional nutrition has been more a part of the alternative health space, the industry itself is kind of being swept up in the wellness world messiness right now. And it's giving people the ick at best.
And at worst, it's having accounts refer to this whole industry, functional medicine, as anti science. And then in addition to all of that chaos that's happening on social media, there are some pockets of functional medicine that have become more retail focused, more labs focused, more supplement focused, than client centered. And I'm saying this to you as somebody who takes meetings with a lot of these companies, a lot of functional medicine companies, and we as the practitioner, as the clinic leader, we are encouraged to upcharge labs as a revenue stream. We do not do that. Just to be clear, this is what we're being told to do. We're not doing that. We're encouraged to build out labs first funnels, meaning that don't ever talk to the client, just run a bunch of labs. That's your revenue stream and then you can talk to the client.
And I recognize that this is very good for retail, this is very good for business. But we are a human first practice. We are a client centered practice. So a lot of the advice that we're being given from these functional medicine clinics flies in the face of how we actually want to practice with integrity. So I say that because I can hold my own. I've been in this for 15 years. I can say, nope, we don't do that. Nope, we don't do that.
Erin Holt:
But I think about the new practitioner, the green practitioner, coming to functional medicine. And if this is what practitioners are getting exposed to as soon as they enter the functional medicine space, space, I can see how things can go pear shaped quickly. So I do think that some of the criticisms and critiques of this industry are warranted. And I will share my own gripes with you here today, but I want to be super crystal clear. There's a difference between calling something out in an effort to dismantle it entirely, like steal the kickball. I don't like this. So I'm going to pull it away from everybody and then calling something out to help it evolve. So as it relates to anti functional medicine accounts or anti anything really, my viewpoint is that it takes a lot of energy to be anti something.
I prefer to channel that energy into building something new. There's a difference between presenting problems and presenting solutions. I think the world has no shortage of problem presenters, but solution oriented people are a lot harder to come by. So I'm always striving to be that and I think it's okay. I think it's even necessary to call out problems in our industry. I sure should do it. I'm going to do it today. But I also love our industry and I think that that is the difference.
I do this because I love our industry so much that I want to see it move forward. I do it with the intention of making it better, like an all ships rise situation. And I do think that the health and wellness industry does need to go through quite a bit of an evolution. Same with functional medicine. Our needs are changing, patient needs are changing. Camille, who is another F and a student, was recently studying and she shared in her Instagram stories a photo of one of our modules in FNA and she said this is what this industry needs, which is obviously one of the biggest and best compliments you can give me. I want to pile onto that. I want to add that also what this industry needs is more practitioners that are willing to dive in to everything that I'm going to talk about today.
I believe we need more good, well rounded practitioners in the functional medicine space, not less. And my concern, and really why I wanted to speak into all of this and have this podcast episode, my concern is that some of the back talk around functional medicine or some of the negative experiences that clients are having with functional medicine will deter people from joining the field. In fact, I'm even seeing more content or around why I left the functional space pop up. But rather than just like exit stage left, having good practitioners leave the functional space, what if when we see problems, we just address them head on and then we get to change the industry from the inside out. Functional medicine isn't broken. I don't believe that it's broken, but I do think the model as it's being practiced is incomplete. And I think it's time for the next evolution of functional medicines to start to take shape and take form for both practitioners and patients. So instead of starting off with the drawbacks, I would love to first start off with what functional medicine gets right, because there's a lot, it brings a lot to the table.
If you're a practitioner listening to this, trained in functional medicine, you probably fell in love with it the same way that I did systems biology, root Cause thinking, personalized care, it made sense when everything else felt like a broken system. Now, systems biology is the study of how all parts of the body work together as an interconnected system, rather than isolating individual organs or symptoms. So it's very different than the conventional traditional medicine model. Instead of looking at like the thyroid, for example, in a vacuum, systems biology looks at how your gut influences thyroid physiology, how your liver affects the thyroid, how the thyroid interacts with sex hormones, how your diet, your blood sugar, your insulin levels can all impact the thyroid. It really sees the body as an interconnected system, and it reflects the complex and dynamic reality of the body. So systems biology really shows us patterns, relationships, root causes, and it shows us how to treat everybody as an individual. And this is really the foundation of functional medicine and why it resonates with so many of us and why it gets people different results than the conventional medicine model. You've probably, if you're listening to the show or you're a practitioner, you've probably had your own personal experience with it.
And maybe it was the first time you felt like medicine finally made sense, you finally got some answers. Because it's a model that explains what traditional medicine misses. It asks why instead of just what. And for so many of us, both practitioners and clients, it was really the first time that we felt seen or understood. And so this is why such an advocate for functional medicine. And it bums me out to see people having negative viewpoint of it, because again, functional medicine has brought so, so much to the table for so many of us. And I probably don't need to spend a ton of time here because if you're listening to the show, you probably already know and understand this. You probably already get it.
I've been talking about it for eight years now on the show, but I did want to say that there is so much wonderful stuff that functional medicine brings before I get into the next part, which is where it falls short in the first place, that I'm going to start with. This is the same thing I've been talking about for years as well in functional medicine, the way it's being practiced now, there is an over emphasis on labs. So I do have multiple podcast episodes on this and even a free master class for practitioners. We'll link it up in the show notes. It's all about functional lab testing, a unique approach to accelerate your client's transformation so you can snag that anytime. Functional labs are a wonderful clinical tool. We use them daily in practice. But labs themselves don't heal.
Labs themselves don't get people better. How we leverage labs, that's the skill set and in art form. And so we are always using labs in combination with client centered coaching. And that is often the thing that gets missed when we position labs at the forefront of functional medicine. And with this overemphasis on labs, we have newer practitioners misunderstanding labs to be the epicenter of how they practice functional nutrition and functional medicine. And this is where I think some of the claims against functional medicine are actually warranted. So let me explain what I mean a little bit. Last spring I taught a four day series on autoimmunity.
So it was a training for practitioners. And we met for an hour 75 minutes, four days in a row. So it's like a four to six hour training all in. And the number one question that I got from practitioners reaching out to me, new practitioners was, will this teach me how to interpret labs? And I was like shook because I'm like, again, this is four to six hours of curriculum. So anyone that thinks they can learn and understand lab interpretation in four to six hours, that's a problem. That's what I mean by when we push out labs, we over emphasize labs and like position it at the epicenter of how we practice functional medicine. We run the risk of really green inexperienced clinicians just being like, oh, all I have to do is take this quickie masterclass and now I know how to run labs. Like that's actually a problem.
Because in this mad dash scramble to learn labs as quick as we can, you can rush the process. As a newer clinician, you can rush the process and miss all the important clinical context that actually gets people better. And I know that there are some of you guys listening and like nodding your head vigorously along with what I'm saying right now. Probably some of my old seasoned vets. But I'll be honest with you, this is where I get into a little bit of hot water with some of you. Because when I talk about stuff like this, you say that I'm not supporting practitioners enough, which is ironic because that's like literally what I do. I've graduated over a hundred clinicians from the academy, so I'm quite literally a practitioner supporting other practitioners. But sometimes that support doesn't just look like rubbing you on your back and telling you everything's going to be okay.
Sometimes it looks like calling out problems and saying, hey, if you're doing this, like, let's reevaluate that approach again. It's all ships rise. I say this stuff. I spend hours and hours and hours creating content like this so that all ships can rise, so that you can learn from what we've seen in practice, so you can learn from my mistakes and other people's mistakes. This is actually a good thing if you allow it to be. The reality is I've seen the disastrous consequences of approaching functional medicine this way, and it's why people have some really negative things to say about the industry. And as somebody who loves this industry and loves functional medicine, as somebody who wants to evolve this industry, I will continue to speak into problems. And I'm sorry if this hurts feelings.
And I don't say that in a snarky, sassy way. I genuinely never set out to hurt anybody's feelings. But if there's problems in this industry and we are seeing the downstream side effect, I will continue to use this podcast to speak into those problems until those problems go away. So there is that. So another issue with positioning labs at the epicenter is that we begin to rely too heavily on labs instead of client storytelling. So just looking at labs, just looking at the data, oftentimes will miss the human context, the lived experience, the trauma, the nervous system, the belief system. We shouldn't prioritize lab data over lived experience. Both need to come online.
It's not an either or, it's an and also. And I did get into this in a lot more detail at episode 326. Has functional medicine created more problems than solutions? Ooh, provocative title. Episode 326. So you can check that out. So I do think anytime we're getting trained in interpreting functional labs or it should include some conversation around how to interpret and understand the human being behind the lab data, and we're just simply not going to get all that context, all of that training in like a quickie masterclass. Right, Right. And a pretty big criticism of functional medicine is the cash money that's involved with getting functional medicine care.
A lot of it is cash pay. A lot of these labs are expensive. And functional medicine, I will say I don't think it always does a great job at using clinical discernment with where money is spent on labs. And so this is what I was saying at the top of the episode, there's a lot of lab companies kind of pushing practitioners into these lab first funnels. And we see this in a lot of functional medicine clinics. It's good for revenue, it's good for retail. But like, before you even work with a practitioner, you might be investing like a ton of money in labs up front or before somebody will see you they want to see certain labs, and we just take such a different approach. Like, we want to get to know the human being.
We need to hear your backstory. We need to hear your health history. We have to understand your symptoms. And from there, that's where we're recommending lab testing. Like, okay, how much more data do we need? We are looking at your story as part of the data collection, and we might need more to fill in the gaps with that story through lab testing. But we're using that client storytelling as a way to discern what labs we need. So I think that is another warranted criticism against the industry is that people are spending gobs and gobs of money up front on labs that might not even be necessary. Another big issue that we can see, and we do see with this approach of just running all the labs up front, is the nocebo effect.
I talked about this in episode 326 as well. But the nocebo effect is like the placebo effect, but it's the opposite. So it's where someone can experience a negative outcome based on what they're told about their health. So how this kind of goes is that somebody finds functional medicine, they find a practitioner, and they're like, we have to run all of these labs. So they spend tons and tons of money on all sorts of lab testing, and they walk away. I don't mean to laugh, but they walk away with a leaky gut diagnosis, mold illness, candida food allergies, heavy metal top toxicity, and a collection of other labels or diagnoses that were slapped on them. They're like, oh, my gosh, I have all of these problems. And in my experience, the more tests you run, the more things you can and will find wrong.
The more things you find wrong, the more labels you will give someone. And the more labels you give someone, the more likely they are to reinforce the idea that they are a sick person. So it perpetuates this loop because rather than getting people out of it, and this is a pretty big, again, warranted criticism of functional medicine. And that's really why I unpacked a lot in that show and said, is functional medicine causing more problems than solutions?
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Okay, so we have this overemphasis on labs that can cause issues. And there is also over emphasis on protocols or what I've called for years, template medicine. What I mean by template medicine is that if that then this. It's an if that, then this approach. If we see that imbalance on a lab, then we do this supplement protocol or if they have this diagnosis, then we do this treatment.
What it might look like is if you have autoimmunity, then we do a leaky gut protocol on you. And the rub with this approach is that it just repackages the old paradigm of conventional medicine with a new shiny label of functional medicine. So instead of conventional medicines, a pill for every ill, it becomes a supplement for every imbalanced lab marker. And we know that spot treating symptoms is not root cause healing, but spot treating imbalanced lab markers is not root cause healing either. Unfortunately, there are a lot of practitioners being trained this way. And I will say there are a lot of practitioners looking to be trained this way. When I first started mentoring practitioners five, six years ago, I realized that most people are looking for the answer, what do you do if so if a client comes to you with this, tell me the exact next steps to take for them. And I found myself so often saying over and over again, the protocol doesn't exist.
The protocol doesn't exist because that's not individualized care. That is templated care. And I know that statement the protocol doesn't exist can feel a little scary and a little overwhelming, especially if you're a newer practitioner or you're new to the functional approach. Especially if you don't have the right supportive mentorship and guidance to walk you through stuff. Which is why I think people want to put things in like clean, clear cut boxes. Being trained in protocols and a templated approach is way more straightforward and easier to understand. It's way less messy. It's so much easier for people to teach protocols than it is to teach clinical reasoning skills and critical thinking.
But you guys, there's a huge difference between clinical critical thinking skills and protocol memorization. And this is the difference between an excellent clinician that can move their patients or their clients out of being stuck in a mediocre clinician who just knows how to put a protocol on their client and then doesn't know what to do if that protocol doesn't work. So yes, teaching protocols, memorizing protocols, templated approach, it's so much easier to teach and it's so much easier to learn and it's a lot less messy. But healing can be messy and we need more clinicians who are ready to like, dive into the dirt. Recently I was going through curriculum for a functional nutrition training. It was a lot of info and it was really good info and it was organized really, really well. So surface level, the training was fantastic, but it was very straightforward. So there was zero.
If this doesn't work, then try this. If this doesn't work, think about this. And this is what, as somebody who's done a crap ton of functional trainings, this is what a lot of them are like. And this is why the collective experience is clients who are kind of like bouncing from one provider to the next, still stuck. They're like, I did this protocol with this one, I did this protocol with this one. But nobody can really get them over the hump. Practitioners that are trained this way in a templated approach oftentimes will hit the limits of that model because protocols aren't people. The body doesn't always follow the textbook cookie cutter plan.
If only it were that simple, you know, template medicine might work for. If we think about a bell curve that bell that like 70 to 80% in the middle, it might work. But what about the outliers? What about the 20 to 30%? So this is where functional medicine is still underserving the outliers, which are the very people we're supposed to be helping. And speaking of which, now I would love to talk about the new wave of clients and what they need. So this is how a lot of our clients in our practice are presenting. And I have no doubt that if you're a practitioner listening to this, you're seeing a lot of the same number one is that they are more complex, more chronic. In multi layered presentations, this isn't just as simple and straightforward as like, oh, it's estrogen dominance or oh, it's a parasite. Today's clients are really presenting as a mix.
It's burnout, autoimmunity, hormone chaos, mystery symptoms, chronic stress, nervous system dysregulation, little bit of medical gaslighting floated into the mix. Today's clients are presenting as webs that need to be disentangled. So if your functional training begins and ends that this is what to do for clients with estrogen dominance. This is how to find a parasite overgrowth. Here is the parasite protocol. You're going to bump up against the limits of that model pretty quickly with this new wave of clients. Another thing that we're noticing is that clients are really educated. They have a lot of access to information and they are using it.
Clients coming to us are just so much more educated. They're smart cookies. They're asking the right questions and they're looking for more well rounded practitioners that can answer those questions and meet them at the level that they're at. And how do I say this? They're like willing to take less shit. And I say that in the best way possible. Like, I'm really proud to see that there's been a lot of patient empowerment over the past five to eight years. I will say this is the upside to social media and all the podcasts. Patients are more aware of medical gaslighting and they're a lot less willing to settle for it.
There's just so much, much more self advocacy with their health. And I love to see it, but this is not their first rodeo. So they're coming to you like, ready to go. They've done the protocols, they've tried different supplements, they've purchased the online programs. They're still not better. And they're looking for someone to really uncover what the heck is going on with them. And they're a lot less likely to settle. So they're not bringing you the straightforward cases anymore.
They're coming to you from the, the messy middle. It's not black and white. It's really different shades of gray that we're seeing in our clinical practice. And most likely these clients don't need another protocol. They don't need yet one more lab test. I mean, some do for sure, but not all. So if that's what your training has taught you to do, if your functional training kind of begins and ends at lab testing in protocols, you're gonna feel at a certain point like you're coming up short. And I think the drawbacks of how functional medicine is currently being taught, how functional medicine is currently being practiced, combined with the new wave of clients, is leaving clients feeling dissatisfied with their experience and practitioners feeling disconnected from the work or feeling like something is missing in their practice.
In this is what we are starting to hear from a lot of practitioners. So like I said, we are currently open for enrollment for F and A right now. So we've been talking to a lot of different practitioners and this is the thing that I'm hearing the most right now. I feel like, something is missing in my practice. So that's another reason that I wanted to speak into this. Like, I get it, and you're not alone. I think that's the most important thing I want you to understand is other people are feeling this shift in this pull as well. So you might be running all the right laps.
You might be giving the perfect protocols. Like your protocols might be on point. They might be really, really good protocols, but your client still isn't getting better, or maybe not all the way. They're not thriving in the capacity that you would like them to be. You're practicing in the way that you're trained, but you're starting to feel the limits of the model. You've hit a point where you realize it's not. Not quite enough. And I just think it's such an interesting time in this space because I think both client and clinician are looking for something similar, a deeper understanding of what's happening beneath the physiology, the nervous system, the beliefs, the trauma, the chronic dysregulation that's not going to show up on a GI map or a Dutch test.
Or even better, we're using these functional labs as a way to access what's going on under the hood. And maybe you know this, maybe you feel this intuitively. If no one has ever taught you how to work in the gray, it's really easy to get stuck. If none of your trainings have addressed the messy middle and how to navigate people through and out of it, it's really easy to get stuck. So that is why I created a different model for myself, for my clients, for our practices, clients, and what we teach now in FNA, and I call it Intuitive Functional Medicine™. So as we discussed, functional medicine gives us systems biology, a way to see the body as a network of interconnected systems. But the way that I'm reimagining functional medicine takes this concept even further. So Intuitive Functional Medicine™ really expands the map to include the terrain of the mind, the emotions, the subconscious, and the lived experience.
We bring in the lens of psychoneuroimmunology, which looks at how the psyche, the nervous system, and the immune system are constantly communicating. So it's not just the gut impacting our brain or the brain impacting our our gut. It's also the beliefs stored in the nervous system that shape immune function, inflammation, and even hormone output. In this reimagined model, trauma imprints, thought patterns, belief systems, all of these matter just as much as labs and supplements. It's where root cause isn't just physiological. It's also psychological and emotional. So we're not just asking, hey, what's the root cause here? We're also asking, what has this body been through? What stories has it carried? What beliefs is it operating under? What's the pattern beneath the pattern? It really integrates the science with the subtlety of the human experience. So this Intuitive Functional Medicine™ model is a practice method that emphasizes the body mind connection.
We really see body mind as one unit, just like Candice this put out. So we need to have tools for both body and mind. It understands the impact that emotional and mental states can have on physiology. We use data, but we also use discernment. We lean on evidence, but we also lean on our own empathy. We get to address symptoms in context. With patients stories, it all comes online. You know, you get to use your clinical stills.
You're still ordering and interpreting labs and creating protocols. You're doing all of that. We're still doing all of that in our practice. We teach all of that in FNA. But you're also learning to read the room, not just the lab results. You're tuning into the patterns beyond symptoms. Language, belief, subconscious narratives, nervous system tone. In episode 321 of the podcast Neurobiology of Chronic Conditions, I talk about how your nervous system can essentially lock you into a state of symptom exacerbation.
Supplements and protocols rarely, if ever, work in these situations. So we need to be able to assess that and have tools for that. You're understanding the why beneath the what, which ultimately makes your care more effective, more complete, more long lasting, and honestly, in my estimation, more human. And in the age of everything becoming more automated, more templated, more robotic, I think this is what people are going to be craving more. Because again, real people are not protocols. And if we want to lead people into transformation, we cannot ignore their humanity. So Intuitive Functional Medicine™™ doesn't just replace functional medicine. Right? We're not throwing the baby out with the bath water.
We are building and expanding on it. And I do believe in my heart of hearts that this is the next evolution of care, because it honors everything functional medicine gets right, all the amazing things it brings to the table, and it weaves in the part that it leaves out. And I know that as I'm talking about some of this, it might feel a little woo to some of you. And that's totally, totally, totally okay. This is potentially where we start to tiptoe our way into the zone of another criticism of functional medicine, that functional medicine is, is anti science or pseudo science or making claims that are not grounded in science or evidence. And so I thought that this show would be incomplete without me really speaking into this one criticism of functional medicine. And what I have to say about it is this number one, science isn't a set it and forget it thing. It is, is ever evolving.
So the people that are screaming until they're blue in the face and frothing at the mouth trust the science. But we have to understand the science can be manipulated and it's ever evolving, it's ever changing. So my goal first and foremost has always and will always be to teach you to trust yourself first and foremost. Before we trust blindly any external authority figures telling us what to do with our bodies and what to do with our health, I want you to trust you. My goal in my work has always been to bring people back to themselves. Healing as a homecoming, returning to self. Number two. I want to really, really share my viewpoint on this, that lived experience is evidence.
In my book, lived experience is evidence. So if someone tells me something about themselves, about their lived experience in their body, I'm not diving into the research or waiting for a white paper to come out to back up what they told me before. I choose to believe them. That has been really at the front, the forefront of so much of my work, which is why I think I was able to connect, connect with people, build rapport with people and build trust. Right out of the jump, I can look at somebody in their eyes and say, I believe you, I believe you. And I'm going to take what you're saying, I'm going to trust your experience and I'm going to use that as evidence. I do not think that what we see in the research has more weight than what somebody is telling us about their own lived experience. Part of this new model, this reimagined model, if you will, is returning people to themselves as the expert on their own bodies.
It sees and honors the body as sacred. It is co creative care. So it establishes the practitioner as the guide, but not as the authoritative guru. We stop asking people to outsource their healing. We show them how to self source. This is where science meets self trust. So the way that I think about an evidenced based practice is that I allow the evidence to inform, but I do not allow it to dictate or to limit. We can make space for what we currently know to be true with science to meet the sacred wisdom of the body.
This is why I always say where science is meets the sacred. What happens when we stop trying to choose this or that and instead we allow them both on board because the reality is not all our clients who are struggling have 10 plus years to wait for a white paper. Sometimes as practitioners, in order to help, we have to play in the messy middle. We have to operate in the gray. And there are a lot of things that are criticized for not being quote unquote evidence based that have been in practice and used for thousands of years by other cultures that might not have the white paper research to back them up. But does that negate their efficacy? We can unintentionally position the Western viewpoint as the best or the only valid lens when we get really hyper focus and hyper fixated on the science and the evidence. You know, sometimes what we label as pseudoscience is really just thinking in new ways. I use this example all the time.
But handwashing would have been considered pseudoscience before we understood germ theory. The idea that there were invisible germs that could cause infection was laughable. So the second we are unwilling to change our beliefs or reevaluate our beliefs or see things in a new way is the second we close ourselves down to healing opportunities. And in fact, in order to heal from chronic health challenges, years ago I had to change my beliefs. I had to evolve past what the current medical model was telling me about my health. And this has informed so much of how I practice and also how I mentor other clinicians. So I'd love to share what this looks like in practice. We've been kind of speaking in theory a little bit, and I'd love to ground some of this with real world examples.
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Now, when I'm talking about Intuitive Functional Medicine™ being a reimagined approach, one of the ways it's slightly different is it's a slightly different way of interpreting labs. You're not just reading labs, you're reading the person behind the labs. So we're using stories to find root causes.
You're not just looking at at cortisol on a graph. You're understanding how someone's lived experience has shaped their HPA access. So here's an example. A client came to me, she had low energy, she had brain fog, she had hormonal issues and she had kind of had a functional medicine at its worst experience. So she went to a prominent functional medicine clinic, she had a bunch of labs done. Those lab results weren't even discussed with her, which is a whole other thing that I didn't even get into into on the show yet. But essentially I believe in transparency with labs. So if you're going to cough up a bunch of coin to do a functional lab test, then the practitioner that ordered that lab better go over those results with you.
So you walk away with a very, very clear understanding of what the results mean. Because when we are positioning functional labs, when we're using functional labs, we're really trying to connect the data on the lab with the human being's lived experience. So, for example, we run gut panels, which is essentially a GI MA with an analysis. And I won't look at somebody's gut panel without an intake form. I need to know what you're experiencing. I need to know how you feel in your body. I need to know a little bit of background on you before I ever look at your lab. Okay, so that's just like a little bit of a side note tangent, but it's really important in my estimation if we want to be good practitioners.
So essentially all these labs were done. They didn't go over the results with her. The doctor just said, you're estrogen dom dominant. He gave her this label before the lab results even came back in. So this is kind of like templated approach. You walk in, oh, you're a woman in your early 40s. Estrogen dominance, bingo, bango, dodge Durango. That's what we're doing here.
And just put her on the protocol that he puts all quote, unquote, estrogen dominant women. So when she came to me, I actually looked at her labs because we had all this wonderful data and I'm like, cool, let's use it. You know, let's do that. She was an estrogen dominant and the diet, the low carb diet that the functional medicine doctor had put her on was actually contributing to her fatigue. So we had to rework the diet. But the real issue, the real issue was, and I learned this by the way, through talking with her, having dialogue with her, caring about her backstory and the way that she had been living her life up until this point, her real issue was the fact that she was caretaking everyone else else. She's kind of like your typical eldest daughter, caretaking her dad, caretaking her two children, putting her needs last, not leaning on the resources that she had available to her, the help and the support that was there. But she felt guilty taking it because she had this underlying belief that she had to do everything herself.
And here's the deal with those type of beliefs, those identity, like core beliefs, your body's never going to outperform them. And so that is so much of what we had to work on and unpack in her life in order to resolve some of the low energy, some of the brain fog, some of the hormonal issues that were happening. So, yes, it's the labs, but it's also the story behind the labs. Here's another example of how we can use labs as. As clues to uncover the story beneath. So this is actually, I think, the very first case study that's in FNA, and it looks at undereating, how undereating can contribute to amenorrhea. So this client came to us because she had lost her period for a while, and she had been to a nurse practitioner who prescribed progesterone because she had low progesterone. But rather than ask the question, like, rather than ask the why question, do the digging, the undercover root cause research of why she was low in progesterone as a girl in her early 20s.
She just gave her the progesterone prescription, and she also congratulated her on her low cholesterol. Now, this low cholesterol was a red flag because it was really low. And cholesterol is a building block of hormones. So part of the reason that her hormones were flatlined is because she didn't have enough of the building block to actually create them. Why was cholesterol low? Because she was dramatically under eating. That's also part of why progesterone was low. So that is the conversation that we had to have. That was the real root cause work that we had to do together.
So her labs invited us into this much bigger, deeper conversation that needed to happen. Another similar example is we had a client with an insulin of under 2. And that can, and not always, but that can be a sign of under eating, either intentional or unintentional. And so that was brought up to this client, and she got very emotional when it was brought up. And she shared that she did have a history of eating disorders, but it was not something that she had shared on the intake paperwork. So lab work essentially caught this, and it became the entry point for the conversation. And we could use that to enact change. And that is an important thing to note, because $3,000 of lab testing can't do for you without behavior change.
So if we have a bunch of functional providers running around ordering labs without effective coaching skills to walk someone through behavior change, you can see how someone can have a not so great experience with functional medicine. They were like, well, I tried functional medicine, but it didn't work. Of course it didn't work. If that was the approach with Intuitive Functional Medicine™, we're also taking a slightly different approach when we build protocols. So when we are building and creating protocols, we're not Just creating them for the physical body. We're also considering the emotional body, the mental body as well. We're considering the nervous system. The first client that I referenced, part of her protocol was having conversations with family members about what she was no longer her willing to do what she was giving up.
Her and I had to build out a protocol of where she was willing to let go of control in her life. Protocols can often include specific meditations or guided practices. So the protocols aren't just supplement. One of our practitioners, Nicole, recently shared that she's seeing an uptick in clients coming to her with either chronic or even lifelong constipation. And so we were talking about different supportive therapies from a supplement standpoint, but also nervous system, brain, gut connection support as well. So we're not just suggesting a GI protocol. We're also assessing how does their nervous system respond to stimulus. Do they have the ability to self source safety in their bodies? Yes or no? Is that the place we actually have to start? And this is just so much more than telling someone they need to like manage their stress, by the way.
So the protocols look a little different. Different. And then the third place that Intuitive Functional Medicine™™ looks a little different in practice is clinical care meets coaching. I kind of alluded to this already, but a new student who just joined the fall cohort has a lot of coaching background and she joined FNA. She said this is her language, not mine, to bridge the gap between the coaching model and deeper clinical application. And I just love that. I think that's amazing. And also the reverse of that can be very true where someone might have done a lot of labs training but has no idea how to coach someone through the results and the behavior change.
So you can be an expert in functional medicine and be kind of a crappy coach because coaching is a totally different skill set. Or on the flip side of that, you can be an awesome coach but have no idea about nutrition science or how gut health impacts hormones, for example, example. So we need the information, right? We need the, the functional medicine background. But it's good coaching that helps us turn information that helps us turn lab data, for example, into implementation, into behavior change, which is what gets people the transformation that they're after. I really think of this quote from neuropsychologist Rick Hansen. He says that I think that professionals are generally effective at activating various states of mind, but generally poor at installing these as beneficial traits in the brain. And I think it's this quote that helps get to the heart of why functional medicine. The Way that it's being practiced right now for a lot of people might not be enough, or why it's catching some slack, or why we're hitting the limits of the model.
In clinical settings, we're really good at initiating change, getting a client to feel better for a moment, or creating short term momentum, right? Activating those temporary states. But the real work is in helping those changes stick, helping those changes last. We want to get really great at translating this into long term change, not just tweaking protocols or running more labs. We want to connect all of that to their lived experience, to the way they see the world, to the way they think about things, to their model of reality. This is good coaching, right? Good client centered coaching. We want to connect what's happening in their body with what's happening in their environment. We want them to begin to see their own patterns, recognize when they're playing out their own patterns. We need systems thinking that is beyond just the physical body, right? This is mental, this is emotional, this is how they think, this is how they feel.
But this is where most practitioners can feel stuck. They know there's more going on, but they don't yet have the lens to decode it. So this is what we teach within Funk'tional Nutrition Academy. Yes, we teach you lab interpretation in depth. Yes, we do teach protocols because protocols, protocols are effective. Again, we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Intuitive Functional Medicine™ doesn't replace functional medicine. It builds on it, it expands on it.
And more than anything, we teach you how to see, how to see your clients, how to see patterns, how to see what labs can't reveal. And we teach you not just how to build protocols, but a path forward for your clients and for your practice. FNA. It's not just more education. It is a transformative experience in how you practice and how you see your clients and how you witness yourself. So if you feel like something is missing from your practice, you're not alone. There is another way to work. And I believe we do need more practitioners stepping in and doing this type of work in this way.
So if something in you knows you're meant to do this deeper work, this is your next step. You can learn more and apply for the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy in the link in our show notes. I would love to have you for the fall cohort. It is shaping up to really be such a powerful group. I'm a big energy girly and I can feel the energy building. And it's an exciting time. It really is an exciting time. I have so much more to share and to give and I'm so excited to be your mentor and to build this reimagined model together.
You know, like I said at the very beginning of the show, yeah there's some criticisms to be had with this industry but we don't want to get rid of the industry. We want to rebuild it from the inside out and I just think we can build something so great together. So would love to see a lot of you guys in the fall cohort in either which way. I will see you back here next week here on the podcast. I'll see you then.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.