Episode 127: Functional Diagnostic Testing, Lifestyle Medicine and How A Health Coach Can Help You with Reed Davis
Over the past five years that I’ve been a health coach, I’ve spent a lot of time educating others on what exactly is a health coach, what is our scope of work, making sure that I’m always staying within that lane and practice within my scope.
Joining me in this episode is Reed Davis, a Holistic Health Practitioner and Certified Nutritional Therapist, is an expert in functional lab testing and holistic lifestyle medicine. He’s also the founder of FDN, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition®.
Reed served as the Health Director and Case Manager at a Wellness Center in So. California for over 10 years and now teaches the FDN Course with over 2,500 trainees and graduates in 50 countries. He is known as one of the most successful and experienced clinicians in the world today, having provided functional lab assessments to over 10,000 clients. He’s also a Clinical Advisor for BioHealth Laboratories and lives in the US, teaching the FDN Certification Course and helping his graduates build robust private practices.
You’ll hear us discuss:
What is a health coach, what’s the scope of work for a health coach and what isn’t
How unlicensed practitioners like health coaches can use lab testing to identify opportunities for healing
What is lifestyle medicine
How health coaches are the bridge between patients and physicians
And a whole lot more. If you’ve ever been curious about what exactly a health coach does and how one can help you, this is the episode for you!
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Functional Diagnostic Nutrition (FDN) gives students the functional lab training, data-driven protocols, AND access to functional lab testing to confidently solve client’s health issues and grow a thriving referral-based business globally. Learn more about FDN.
CONNECT WITH REED DAVIS:
CONNECT WITH NAOMI:
SHARE THE EPISODE:
“There is no one lab. We’re far away from that. I learned to check hormones, immunity, digestion, detoxification, and identify what we call the healing opportunities. ”
Read the Episode Transcript...
Naomi Nakamura: Hey guys, welcome to Episode 127 of The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host, Naomi Nakamura.
Over the past five years that I have been working as a health coach, I've spent a lot of time educating people on what exactly is a health coach, what is our scope of work, how do we differentiate from other practitioners?
I've also worked to make sure that I'm always staying within my own lane, practicing within the scope that is a health coach. That's what we're talking about in this episode.
Joining me is Reed Davis. Reed, a holistic health practitioner and certified nutritional therapist is an expert in functional lab testing and holistic lifestyle medicine. He is also the founder of FDN, which is the Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. Reed served as the health director and case manager at a wellness center in Southern California for over 10 years and now teaches the FDN program that has over 2,500 trainees and graduates in 50 countries.
Reed is known as one of the most successful and experienced clinicians in the world today having provided functional lab assessments to over 10,000 clients. He's also a clinical advisor for BioHealth Laboratories and he lives in the United States teaching the FDN certification courses and helping his clients build robust private practices.
You will hear us discuss what is a health coach? What is the scope of work for a health coach? And, what is out of scope for health coach? Which I think is such an important conversation to have. We also talk about how unlicensed practitioners, like a health coach, can use lab testing to identify opportunities for healing.
We talk about what lifestyle medicine is and how health coaches are the bridge between patients and physicians and we talk about a whole lot more. If you have ever been curious about what exactly a health coach does and how one can help you, this is the episode for you. So, let's get to the show.
Hello, sir. Welcome to the show.
Reed Davis: Thanks so much for having me here, Naomi. It's a real pleasure.
Naomi Nakamura: I've been a fan of your work for a long time. I actually haven't taken your program yet. When I came out of school I felt like I was taking so many programs I thought, well, let me just pause and do some of the actual work that I had been learning, but it is definitely on my to-do list. Can you introduce your program to us and tell us about yourself and what it is that you do?
Reed Davis: Thanks so much for that. People are attracted to us because of the values that we have and people with similar values just seem to eventually hook up. I'm really pleased that you considering our program. It's all started about 20 some years ago. I came out of the environmental law field. I was on a mission back in the '90s to save the planet, air, birds, water, trees, bees, the whole thing. I was really shocked at how bad the environment was killing things.
Then around the turn of the century, I decided to turn my attention. I became concerned with, well, what is it doing to me and to people instead of just birds and bees? I mean, it's all really important, it all works together. But I went to work in a clinic where they gave me the run of the place. I was a good businessman, so they wanted me to run the clinic and the owner took me to a nutrition program she was doing. She was a chiropractor getting her Diplomat nutrition, said I could go along as an assistant. I had a real strong, ever since I was like in my teens, I loved nutrition and health, so I was just overwhelmed with how much fun it was to learn it.
Then this is amazing. She let me work on her patients in between my nutrition classes. I was just flabbergasted and became totally addicted to working in a clinical setting, doing the clinical work. Mrs. Smith, Mr. Jones, whatever it was. Matter of fact, most of the clients were women and there's something I noticed about them. This is what set me off of my mission, was almost everyone coming in the door had already seen four, six, eight, 12 practitioners already and I didn't know a whole lot back then about building health and restoring function and things, but I thought that was a big rip off. "What do you mean? you've been to six people and you still have your main complaint or most of it and you've spent all this money that's ..."
Back from the law and consumer protection and environmental protection I thought, well, here's a new group of people that I can help and protect in a way and man, I really started studying. Now, my claim to fame is that over all those years, I worked in that clinic for almost 10 years. I ran more labs than anyone else than any other office if they had five doctors working there, I just was a lab machine. I was testing, running thousands of labs on thousands of people and these were the, at the time, considered alternative labs.
Obviously, we'd look at hormones and that was my main thing at first because at that time the hormones were, everyone was doing synthetic hormones and then there was a big scare and they wanted to go to something else. While I was there, I was doing screenings two days a week for bone density, finding all of these women from around 40, 50 and older who were really concerned about their bones and their hormones and my first website was actually called bonesandhormones.com. It was kind of funny.
I was testing thousands of people for hormones and we'd work on that. Then I thought, you can't really get the hormones right if they're not eating right and breaking down their food properly. I started testing digestion and from there it went to all the other things that go on. You got to test your immune system, then you got to test their liver and detoxification system. I just ran thousands and thousands of labs on thousands of people.
I had great mentorship at the time, really good doctors to take me under their wing a bit and now, about 20 years later, I'm mentoring others. Matter of fact, I teach a course now in the principles that I discovered. In all those years, Naomi, I figured out patterns, here's what you have to test, hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, a couple of other things. Here's the program that will reverse all of those dysfunctions and diseases and things without having to take medication or just go to standard medical care.
Because after all, that's mostly why they'd seen six people already, because they weren't getting answers or they weren't fixing their problems, seeing standard care. We developed an investigative step-by-step system and a holistic lifestyle program that's also pretty step-by-step. I've been teaching it for 12 years. It's remarkable.
Naomi Nakamura: No. Like I said, I've heard great things about your program for many years. It's funny, as you were just describing your past work, I was chuckling to myself because really the people that you described helping was really me. It's like I had the hormone concerns and I didn't know why I was having all these other things going on. Then I had the whole thing like, do I go on synthetic medication? Do I not? So, I get it. I understand what that's like for someone like me who I didn't have the exposure to all of these other approaches.
It was really confusing to me about, well, what is this? What does digestion have to do with hormones? What is detoxification and all these things, because when you think of detox, you think of, oh, I should do a juice cleanse. Now as a health coach, I love that now you teach other health coaches. I also like how you have your lifestyle program to go along with how to do testing as well. Can you tell me more about what that lifestyle approaches that you take?
Reed Davis: If you have something about the way you look or the way you feel that you want to change and you can identify one or two things that are top of your list, then that's a good start. You have to want to change. You have to have something, again, about the way you look or the way you feel. It can be fairly vague.
Some physicians will run blood work for instance, and say, "Well, I don't see anything wrong here yet. Come back when there's a real problem that I could identify in my standard intake." Again, I learned to do this series of labs. There's no one lab, there is no one lab. We're way far away from that. I learned to, again, check the hormone, immunity, digestion, detoxification, identify what we call the healing opportunity. That's worth writing down. It's like what's really wrong in a sense or really close to it so that you can have an effect upon what's really wrong.
Then we can't just write a prescription. I'm not a physician. I don't want to just sell supplements, which a lot of nutrition ... I want to be a real health coach. Now, back then that word didn't exist. There was lifestyle, maybe. There was some personal coaches and there was business coaches. There wasn't any such thing as a health coach, but so we pioneered the work. People need someone that can guide them through the investigation part and then design the lifestyle recommendations unique to each individual. There's no two people alike and so, again, I was able to do a lot of work seeing what has an effect on people. How do you fix all this stuff? How does the person fix it? I can't fix anything.
Working with that innate intelligence in the body, we found that a corrective diet, which would be, I use something called metabolic typing, but it's the right diet for you, genetically. It's everything your body needs minus the food sensitivities because everyone has some, everyone has some, so we can test for that. It's the diet.
Then there's rest, of course, and some people really dismiss the importance of rest. Personally now, I've been doing it so long, I looked forward to going to bed at nine o'clock you know, like that's my bedtime because I know that I'm going to wake up early, so I have to get a good start on the whole thing and get my sleep. That way I can wake up not too dull, pretty bright actually. So, diet, rest. Then, of course, exercise. It goes without saying that exercise is, or lack ... Sitting is the new smoking they say. Sitting is the new smoking. I have a standup desk and I work at home. I work off a lot, sometimes 14 hours a day, but I go outside a lot and I take my breaks and I get my exercise. Diet, rest, exercise.
Then stress reduction or stress management. That's huge because there's so many different types of stress. There's mental, emotional stress. You live in the Bay area, you said you know what I'm talking about when it comes to these sort of executive women. Even women at home are executives of the home, they're no less under any stress or strain than anyone else. You have that kind of stress, but you also have physical trauma built up from ... Me, it's sports injuries. I wrestled jujitsu until I was over 60. I've surfed and I did a lot of skiing a whole lot. I ride a motorcycle still, so I've banged myself up a lot. Those aches and pains and injuries and nagging things are also stressful.
But perhaps, and this is going back to my environmental roots, the environmental stressors, the things that are in our food and our air and our water and in our clothing and our furniture and in our draperies, in the paint, they're in her household cleaning products, they're in our personal care products and so on and so on.
Not only is there all those environmental stressors, but there's the ones our bodies make. We make a lot of toxins and things that need to be eliminated, whether they're toxins or not and so that program, along with supplementation and that's the other factor, spells DRESS, D-R-E-S-S, and we actually have a trademark program, Dress For Health Success, diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, supplements.
Based on the investigation and the lab work, the investigation and start with the history taking and what are your complaints and all the different things that you've tried and how long it's been going on and different things like that. We assess whether we think we can help you or not. Then we'd engage ... You'd hire just health coaches and we'd send the lab kits out. We're going to look at hormone, immune digestion, detoxification and so on, and then we're going to customize that DRESS For Health assist program.
Then guess what step three is? Someone's got to run the program and that's where the health coach comes in. Health coaches really help people with setting their goals and planning on how they're going to live each day so that they can follow the DRESS For Health program or something like one if they haven't been trained by me. They're really good people to have around, they can help in the assessment and then, of course, the plan and then a little bit of accountability.
That's what coaches should be doing is holding their clients to answer and, obviously, answer questions and correct course. Sometimes you got to take a fork in the road here and there. Health coaches are the part three. Part one, investigate. Part two, customize the DRESS Program. Part three, run the program. That's what we do in a nutshell.
Naomi Nakamura: I really like that approach for a number of reasons, but one, I think functional medicine and all of these approaches have become so much more talked about and people are more familiar with it. I know a lot of people that I've come to know, they like to go straight into all the testing, which is great because I am a big fan of testing. I have so much done on myself, but at the same time, the lifestyle part, the DRESS part is not addressed.
I tell people and I'm like, "This data's great. This gives you a great starting point, but it's not really useful for anybody if you're not taking care of the diet and your rest and your exercise and your sleep," or even some people even want to go straight to supplementation without addressing diet. I always tell people, I'm like, "These things all go together. They're not as effective if you're only looking at one without the other."
Reed Davis: So true, Naomi. It probably comes from, there's a model there that that exists that people are used to and they'll come up to me and they find I'm in the health business and they'll say like, "Well, what can I take for my XYZ?" They just think it's popping a pill is going to fix it and it's because they're conditioned by standard medicine, which is you go to the doctor and it's like, what prescription is he going to write? He's going to diagnose, he may even run a lab to back up his clinical impression and then pat himself on the back and say, "I was right. It's your thyroid and here's your medication to make up the difference." Well, that might change the numbers on the paper. Matter of fact, usually you go back, get retested, and they titrate your dosage a little bit.
The doctor's happy because he's got your numbers where he or she wants them, but you're not happy because you only feel a little bit better. Well, it helped me a little bit is symptomatic, but whatever caused the thyroid dysfunction is still going on and maybe getting worse. Either the symptoms will come back or new symptoms will appear somewhere else, and then it's like, "Well, oh, now it sounds like a testosterone. So, let's check that. Yep. Pat myself on the back somewhere. Found another problem. Here's your testosterone." That's why people end up in four or five, six different medications because they're just, "Sounds like this." You run tests. You get some data on that and then, "Here's your medication."
It's very easy for health coaches and, say, non-licensed practioners to slip into that model. Especially when the supplement companies are just as aggressive as the drug company. They've got an answer for everything. What people don't really get is that if you talked to someone and they had the same problem as you, "Oh, I had that same problem and I used this." Well, they're different than you and the reasons you have those symptoms, if you will, could be completely different from the reason they have those symptoms.
When you go upstream, you really see all the branches. It's remarkable how similar symptoms could be for completely different upstream causes. If you're just going to take something that worked for your friend because they had it too, it could do one of three things. It could help you, it could do nothing or it could make you worse. Throw something else out of balance that you ... Two out of those three things aren't positive, it does nothing or it makes you worse. You'd be really lucky, really lucky if it actually did any good. That's what I think about that.
Naomi Nakamura: Back in 2009, I went to see my primary care physician because I wasn't feeling well and I was feeling very fatigued and I had a history of thyroid dysfunction in my family. My mother has some thyroid issues, other females in my family had it. I went to my doctor and I said, "Hey, I don't know a lot about this." This is before I was a health coach, long before it was a health coach. I just said, "I'm feeling off, I'm feeling fatigued, I'm gaining weight, I don't understand why when you know I'm training for marathons and all of this and this is my family history, can we just take a look at this?" She ran a TSH test and came back and told me, "Nope, everything's normal." I know that's really common for a lot of women. What kind of advice would you give someone like that?
Reed Davis: Well, I would say look deeper and look for other things besides the thyroid. Because now, by the way, the physician's not doing anything wrong. You went to a physician to see if they had any answers and they are bound by a standard of care that says, "Well, if you think it's thyroid, run a thyroid test." They can kind of skimp on that a little bit. If all they ran was TSH and they're just looking for thyroid stimulating, it's actually a pituitary hormone that stimulates the thyroid and if it's regular, somewhere in the range, they can't do anything that their standard of care says, "You're fine."
Now, they don't look is it high in the range, is it low in the range, it's just in the range, so they can't write your prescription yet. They would have to, again, that's what I said, and that's true with almost any blood test. If it's in range, you're fine, but you feel lousy because there's other factors involved in thyroid.
I do an hour lecture just on thyroid and all the different things it could really be. It's controlled, again, by the hypothalamus and pituitary. There's lots of influences on those. They're little tiny sensitive little organs in your brain that send up messengers. They're like a thermostat. They'd not only controlled the thyroid, they control the gonads, the ovaries, the testes and the adrenal gland, which is responsible a lot for sex hormones and things like that. It's really has far reaching ramifications.
These organs, all of them, are very sensitive to chemicals, to toxins your body makes, to nutrition, nutritional deficiencies or too much of some nutrients, things like that. Not to mention, again, the environment, the autonomic nervous system. Before the recording started, we talked a little bit about balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic. Are you in fight/flight all the time? That has an effect. The circadian rhythm, like not having a normal sleep cycle has an effect and so on and so on.
So, if you don't have a way of walking through the steps like what to look for, then you are at the mercy of someone who says, "Try what I took," or, "Try what worked for thousands of people," or "There's nothing wrong with you." It's really a sad thing. That's, again, that's what motivated me over 20 years ago now to start looking deeper.
Naomi Nakamura: That's what motivated me to start doing what I'm doing now as well. You mentioned, and we talked about this before, we started as the whole sympathetic versus parasympathetic system and if you're someone like me who's Type A, I work in Silicon Valley, it's a very fast-paced environment. Just, I think, living in California in an urban area, the lifestyle tends to be fast-paced. How do you recommend someone who, for someone who is so not used to slowing down and really tapping into that parasympathetic system? What would you tell someone to do? Reed Davis: For one thing, there's a lot of influences on that autonomic nervous system, including food, chemicals in food, chemicals in the environment. They're excitatory. We notice it a lot in children when they're misbehaving and poking at each other and can't pay attention and spazzing out, as they say. A lot of it is just chemicals in the food and their excitotoxins, or again, in the environment.
Reed Davis: We've talked about even guessing from their new clothing or fire retardants in the schools. There's just a lot to consider, but if you're overly sympathetic, you do need to learn to breathe and you actually have to become a little more self-aware. There is two sides of this equation. I can't stay in sympathetic mode.
Now, believe it or not, there are people who actually overly parasympathetic. These people look like slugs. They never seem to get excited about anything, but they can work all day long and late into the night sometimes too. They tend to be more like the tortoise than the hare and that's me. I'm excitable. I have a lot of energy, but I tend to be pretty laid back. I talk laid back, not just because I live in California, but because I actually am pretty parasympathetic.
One is called fight/flight. That's the sympathetic and if your adrenaline's running, your cortisol is running, it's throwing off the sex hormones, your libido goes down, you can start to gain weight, you can start to feel sad. A lot of things are going on physiologically that are just from being in fight/flight all the time and your body will keep adapting and adapting until what's called the adaptive reserve tends to be diminished. Now you start getting sick and needing medication and that could start off with self-medication. You're pounded down the coffee all day and then you have to drink alcohol at night and just kind of the self meds.
Finally, you go to the doctor for something stronger and he says, [inaudible 00:21:57]. I don't mean to be laughing, but it's like you know that you lived yourself into that and you can only live yourself out of it. If you ate yourself into it, eat yourself out of it. If you stressed yourself into it, unstress.
There are methods, and even as a parasympathetic, I listen to tapes. I can't wait sometimes to go to bed and put my tapes on and listen to meditation and things and even just educational stuff sometimes. I like to chill. The opposite of a fight/flight is rest and digest. We tend to have real good digestive systems, eat anything, nothing seems to bother you most of the time. I don't scare easily.
Naomi Nakamura: I liked that you said self-awareness because, I mean, I think that's half the battle right there. I think I get a lot of resistance from people who are in this Type A, flight and fight mode. When I talk to them about having to slow down and bringing in things like meditation or journaling, there's so much resistance there because their minds are programmed to one, be resistant to it, but two, not see the link about how is this going to help me with me not being able to sleep or me having this coffee addiction or all of these other things.
Reed Davis: You are so right. How do you get a person to notice things like that, like ask them their purpose in life? I believe in strongly, matter of fact, I know that there's something called existential angst. Without a sense of purpose and knowing who you are and what you're here for, I mean, you can wonder about some of it, but you ought to have a purpose or you're just doing things automatically and sort of aimlessly.
I mean, you might be working hard and paying the bills, but you don't really know why except for that you're supposed to. Look, you can go deeper than that. You can get a little more conscious about having a purpose in life and it changes your life. You can become a happier person. That's all anyone wants anyways is to be happy and you won't be if you're not healthy and they actually go hand-in-hand like that.
People talk about the body, mind, spirit. Well there's the body and there's your mind. You want to keep it clean and actually be able to think so you don't want foggy thinking. You can have an inflamed brain, fatty head and all these sorts of things. You can't be hung over from drug abuse and alcohol abuse and things like that, poor sleep even.
There's all these things that you would contribute to dysfunctional body, dysfunctional mind or brain. Then without the spirit, without having some sense of purpose and understanding there is an intelligence in every cell that teaches at its job without you having to teach it. Where's that source? I, at least, contemplate those things.
Naomi Nakamura: We are recording this during a time when we are sheltering-in-place amid this coronavirus pandemic and I sincerely think that a lot of people might be pausing right now at this point to consider those things and reflect on how have I been living my life. I think we all have the time to do that right now.
Reed Davis: Well, I think you're right. They're at least setting priorities now around self-preservation and family and bringing their families closer. I don't think you're any good to anyone if you're not taking care of yourself. I honestly believe it has to start with you and how you ... People ask me all the time, "What's your number one tip?" I go, "When you get up in the morning, be grateful about something and make your bed. Do something, accomplish something useful, be useful, do something useful." I get up and I either say a little prayer or just try to count some blessings or be glad about something. I'm a forward-looking person anyway. If I catch myself doom and gloom, I punch myself in the face, "Hey, knock that off, kid." Just, that's not allowed. You can't indulge in that stuff.
That's why, again, the tapes, I'll go to bed with him and I'll get up in the morning with them. You can pick whatever you like, whatever voice you like, whatever message you like and things. But at least you're doing something to help and establish that sense of wellbeing. It's easier for those of us like you, Naomi, you see the world as a cup half full, not half empty. You're not looking at what's missing off the plate, you're looking at all that great stuff on the plate in your world, right? That can be cultured. That attitude can actually be cultured. That's a big part of being happy.
Naomi Nakamura: It took me a long time to get there. I definitely was on the other spectrum when I was feeling so unwell. You start to get curious because you know you see all of these doctors and practitioners and you don't get answers so you keep asking questions and you keep looking and looking and you find the things that you and I now believe in wholeheartedly and help other people with and you start to see the connections there.
I like the tip like make your bed every day because it makes a difference in my day if make my bed or not.
Reed Davis: Because then you'll do other things-
Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.
Reed Davis: ... clean up the kitchen and stuff.
Naomi Nakamura: I get this a lot. I wanted to ask you this question is how can someone who is not a licensed medical professional order lab work for someone else?
Reed Davis: I created a program for my graduates. See, I was allowed to run labs into the doctors where I worked and they just let me do what I want. They were watched over and stuff like that, but I got this luxury of that. It was very fortunate. So, when I started teaching I had to create a program with my students could do it too, so we call it the Medical Director Program.
You can order labs through that program if you're a graduate. The same doctors who I've been working with for many, many years authorize it and there's a careful watchful eye and you have to be really well-trained. You're not practicing medicine, you're not diagnosing and treating anything. You're just using the labs that we determined were useful for identifying healing opportunities.
Naomi Nakamura: That's really the point I want to make. I see this a lot among my peers where there is a lot of health coaches out there who, I think, get the lines confused a little bit and get into thinking that they have to diagnose someone or they're healing someone. I'm like, "That's not what we're doing, actually." In fact, there's an opportunity for health coaches to work in partnership with someone's doctor much like you did to kind of bridge the gap. I know many of my own family members, they battle high blood pressure and diabetes and, of course, the doctor talks to them about, you have to eat healthier. That conversation really doesn't go beyond that and they leave the doctor's office and they have no idea how to do that.
Reed Davis: As far as the lab work goes, I had two amazing mentors. One was a naturopathic physician and he actually created a lab of his own because no one was running the work that he thought they should be doing. So, he started his own lab and they were doing saliva testing, urine testing, stool testing and such and teaching us to use those markers to identify healing opportunities. He was a naturopath, so even he didn't want anything to do with a medical diagnosis, which is usually a label for a cluster of symptoms. It's what's really wrong.
Then on top of that, I had this DO, Bill Bailey. It was Bill Timmons and Bill Bailey and he was really a good friend and came in the office all the time. I was like his alter ego because I got to do this stuff he couldn't. With licensure, your hands are bound to stay within standard of care, but he could see that I could actually learn to do something really useful without crossing over into his backyard.
I've had a best friend and we've had these discussions thousands of times on where's the backyard? Well, that's your backyard and this is my backyard. The backyard of a health coach includes lab work, but only for healing opportunities and using only lifestyle medicine. Maybe we shouldn't even call it medicine, but just lifestyle of the DRESS Program, that's why I created it to fill that niche that missing piece of the puzzle.
But we don't go in the other guy's backyard. Doctors are amazing to have around. If you get off a plane from somewhere and your temperature is 105 and you're bleeding out of your eyeballs, you don't call your nutritionist or health coach, you go right to a physician in the emergency room or call your doctor, whatever. Same thing with other conditions. There's, obviously, doctors are very useful. They save lives.
Naomi Nakamura: They're saving them right now with this pandemic that we're in.
Reed Davis: Amen. They save lives and we make observations with our lab work that we capitalize on if there's enough time for that person to, again, reverse the downward trend, the downward spiral, but if that downward spiral is so contracted that our observations can't be capitalized on, that's what physicians do. They make observations and go, "Hey, you need this right away. Here's your shot," or, "Here's your surgery," or, "Here's your whatever it is." They can halt that downward spiral with very powerful medicines and things. That's why they have licenses. You have to be licensed to use those things.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, I don't think our healthcare system is set up as it is now to even afford them that luxury. I know many of them probably want to spend more time with their patients. The system doesn't allow it. I think that's where for people who do have the time and might need after the investigative work and the identification, that whole accountability part, that's where the time is required. I think, I would love to hear your thoughts on it, but I think that sort of health coaches bridge the gap and I see it as the way that our healthcare system is set up as it is right now. Who knows, maybe it'll change after this whole pandemic, but I see that sort of they fit in or that's how we fit in in the future.
Reed Davis: Absolutely. I like to say that we bridge the gap and we own the bridge. It's our bridge. There's a line where it does require medical diagnosis and treatment and that's why our labs are different too. I mean, there's a lot of functional medicine doctors that are running some of these functional tests, but if they still have their licenses, they're bound by standard of care to write a prescription or they just don't have much choice if they're following the rules.
Another way to look at it might be that physicians take on all comers. That's their job. They don't have long to spend with each patient. Matter of fact, it takes longer to record the visit than it does to have the visit. They might have nine minutes with you and 15 minutes of recordkeeping on the kick, so that's just how it works so they can get paid by the insurance companies who are the real gatekeepers of care. People that aren't even doctors, they're just shareholder representatives.
It's not a great system for certain things. It's a great system for what it is a good system for. Doctors take out all comers and they'll listen and get some history and they'll do a couple of tests, take some vital signs and things like that. Then they will prescribe an agent to have an effect. Most of the time that's their treatment. That's how they treat. It's that or the knife, so these agents are just introduced with not a lot of regard for some of the variables. It's just whatever you're eating, whatever you're drinking, whatever amount of exercise you do or don't do, whatever sleep pattern you have and so on and so on, here's the agent.
They'll get the effect that physician wants to lower a number or raise a number. But sometimes it's really important to lower those numbers, like uncontrolled blood pressure, for instance, will certainly kill you. It'll damage your arteries and eventually you'll die. Uncontrolled blood pressure, that's a number you want to bring down from that point of view.
Now our point of view is that, well, the variables are everything. We want to know exactly who is that person, how do they live, what is their complete history, and we want to know what else is having an effect upon that person. Is it their diet? Yes. Is it their sleep pattern? Yes. Is it their exercise or lack thereof? Yes. Is it all these various stressors that we can help them sort out? Yes. Do they need to take supplements? Yes. Food just isn't real high quality. I can always go back to that DRESS, and those are the variables that means so much to us, that physicians, the nature of their business, they can overlook quite a bit.
Naomi Nakamura: It's why the work that you do is so important. Where can people go to learn more about FDN?
Reed Davis: Well I am at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com and I believe we have a special place for you guys to go and maybe you could just put it in the show notes there.
Naomi Nakamura: Of course, absolutely.
Reed Davis: My staff is really good, so it's probably not their fault. But yeah, we have a URL for you guys, but I'm also at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com if you just can't find me any other way.
Naomi Nakamura: Cool. I definitely will link that to the show notes and I will link to your social media channels as well.
Reed Davis: Oh, here it is. We're actually going to give you guys all our DRESS For Health Success guidebooks. It's going to explain that DRESS lifestyle program. It's fdn.today/fablife, F-A-B-L-I-F-E, fdn.today/fablife. This is the FAB Life podcast, right?
Naomi Nakamura: Yes, it is.
Reed Davis: Probably where they got that name from.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, thank you.
I'm excited to read through that and get that myself.
Reed Davis: Yeah, I hope it helps. It's really just some fundamentals that I think everyone should be aware of. What you want to do when you get that is read through it and go back to the area that you think your weakest in. If I say, "Oh, you have to diet and rest and exercise, stress reduction, [inaudible 00:35:44]," that's a lot to take in.
Just start with one, start with what you think is the weakest area. It could just be that ... and you know it. You know you're not going to bed on time, you're staying up late watching movies. Then you get up dragging your butt, needing coffee. Look, I drink coffee in the morning too, but what I mean is you really need it, you're dragging. That's not the way you get up. We should get up a little bit more like a five-year-old, not saying jump up and down on the bed, but at least excited to see the day unfold.
Naomi Nakamura: Absolutely. It's funny you say that because I do have some clients where I go through the whole assessment with them and I say, "We're going to start with your sleep," and they're expecting this whole diet change. I'm like, "No, I think we should start with your sleep because that's how important it is."
Reed Davis: Yeah, there's nothing like it.
Naomi Nakamura: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chat with us, so much great information that you shared with us today.
Reed Davis: Well, thank you for being a health coach and for the programs that you have. I know you have a 21-day sugar detox program that's well known and controlling your blood sugar, we didn't get that deep into the diet, but it's really critical. It works a lot better when you balance your hormones. When you start adding that in there, you're going to help even more people maybe.
Naomi Nakamura is a Functional Nutrition Health Coach. She helps passionate, ambitious high-achievers who are being dragged down by fatigue, burnout, sugar cravings, poor sleep, unexplained weight issues, and hormonal challenges optimize health, find balance, and upgrade their energy so they can do big things in this world.
Through her weekly show, The Live FAB Live Podcast, programs, coaching, and services, she teaches women how to optimize their diet, support their gut health, reduce their toxic load, and improve their productivity, bringing work + wellness together.
Naomi resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found exploring the area with her puppy girl, Coco Pop!
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