Keeping Up With The Kalish's: Relevance And Urgency

How do we create relevance and generate a strong sense of urgency to act. How do you take someone who has struggled to make changes and get them to move beyond their past failures. When I am able to do something I see my patients are able to do it as well, they learn through transference. I find 100% of my credibility in asking a patient to start to meditate rests on the fact that I meditate for two hours most every day. Patients find that inspiring and I set the pace as the role model so that when I ask them to meditate for 5 or 10 minutes every day, all of a sudden it seems doable to them. Similarly with alcohol and caffeine, I can only ask a patient to stop all alcohol for 3 months or to get off caffeine if I’ve led the way and been able to do this myself. So it starts with our own personal habits, once we have these mastered we can then follow some basic sales and motivation techniques to get patients enrolled in what we are already doing ourselves. Although I do the same lab work ups (hormones, GI and Organic Acids) on every new patient, the reasons for testing vary. In order to establish relevance and a sense of urgency to act to purchase a lab kit we have to explain in an easy to understand way why this specific test makes sense for this specific patient. So for example, if someone’s chief complaint is fatigue I’ll explain how hormone imbalance, neurotransmitter deficiencies and mitochondrial energy problems can all in and of themselves create extreme fatigue. The kicker here as I speak to the patient is that I’m not sure what is the exact problem for you so we’ll need to do all the testing to figure out exactly what’s wrong so we can fix it. If someone has a primary problem with depression or anxiety, it’s again the same testing, but in this case for different reasons, we consistently find hormone imbalances and poor neurotransmitter function due to stress causing depression. Yet we also see many patients with gut inflammation who end up depressed as a direct result of the GI tract tissue damage and of course we often see neurotoxins triggering anxiety or depression so again, we need to test all three body systems to determine the root cause of your problems. While the protocols are individualized and specific to that patients particular labs, the actual lab work up I order remains the same 90% of the time.