Six years ago, I started putting together content and the idea for a mentorship.
But not just any mentorship – I wanted a community that I didn’t have when I started my career in functional medicine.
I have had training from over 16 organizations and practiced exclusively as a Functional Medicine PA-C for 12 years in various practices. I have worked with patients in the following settings:
- High cost and concierge-like practice
- Moderate cost and membership-based practices
- Fee-for-service
- Owned a practice (where I focused on low-cost services)
- Insurance-based care
However, there were limitations in my training.
Very little of my training addressed the “practical” implementation of functional medicine that could help with patient follow through, providing functional medicine care more affordably or efficiently, or the art of educating patients to improve patient empowerment.
I joined a few mentorships, and was able to get some clarifications by utilizing Facebook forums, but then they didn’t provide exactly what I was needing in real-life practice. So I came up with an idea….
Could I create a community that is similar to Facebook but more organized and less “Wild West” (e.g. many who comment on posts tend to give a list of treatments to use, but it looks like a regurgitation of training vs real-world experience)?
And I wanted the community to be comprised of like-minded licensed clinicians who:
- Want to provide “practical” and methodical, yet effective functional medicine care
- Are trying to avoid “green allopathy“
- Want more evidence-informed medicine (and maybe even a database that is similar to UpToDate)
- Know they have a supportive community to lean on
What do I mean by "Practical"?
This means using an effective approach that takes into consideration real-world clinical settings and patient needs/preferences. Although my training was invaluable, there was limited education on how to address the following key factors which impact functional medicine care:
- Time Constraints: Most practitioners don’t have the time to spend an hour or more on gathering and organizing patient history, or reviewing comprehensive labs, let alone type out a treatment plan based on this information.
- Patient Nuances: Patients aren’t often given options and expectations in their care. All the training programs I have gone through included case examples, but they mostly showed the initial presentation and the outcomes. They didn’t discuss the “in between” (e.g. trial-and-error treatments, factors that influenced successes, what the patient – or practitioner – felt was most helpful).
Why do I call this a "collective" mentorship?
- Collective = done by people acting as a group
- This is a place to learn from each other, co-work together, and co-create a community that is focused on staying curious and practical in the practice of functional medicine