Dr. Datis Kharrazian is a clinical research scientist, Associate Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, and the founder of the Kharrazian Institute. His books Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms? and Why Isn't My Brain Working? reframed how a generation of clinicians approaches thyroid and brain care.

Ask him what drove all of it and he doesn't say curiosity. His family left Iran in 1979. His mother was severely ill for most of his childhood — psychiatric admissions, electroconvulsive therapy, drug after drug, no response — until a chiropractor working with nutrition made a difference nobody else had. Decades later he would learn she had neurological autoimmunity: antibodies to her own serotonin and dopamine. "I don't think I was just curious," he says. "I think I was just a scared kid that never stopped being scared, and was just trying to figure out how to help someone who wasn't getting help."

The business conversation is unusually concrete. He ran a small practice three days a week, scheduled six hours for a new patient, and priced a filter at the front door.

In this episode

• Leaving Iran in 1979, and a childhood spent watching the healthcare system fail his mother
• Finding Jeffrey Bland's literature reviews as a student — checking out five years of them and flow-charting every one to learn how he was thinking
• Taking over Harry Eidenier's blood chemistry seminar series in his mid-twenties: "You're a kid, what are you doing here?"
• Brain dissection at Bastyr — twelve brains, three weeks, pulling pathways apart "like string cheese"
• The PhD in Aristo Vojdani's lab: how chemicals can change the configuration of albumin, create a new antigen, and cross-link to neurological autoantibodies
• Harvard as a research fellow, then a master's in clinical investigation — going back to school because he felt intimidated when someone cited a study he couldn't evaluate
• The practice model, in numbers: a $1,500 case review (raised from $500, because $500 didn't filter), a $5,000 exam and workup including four hours in the chart, and $500/hour follow-ups — three clinic days a week
• Why 10–15% of case reviews get sent somewhere else first: chronic patients who gave up on medicine and still have undiagnosed disease
• The expectations conversation — "the minute I'd hear cure or reverse, I'd have to have that discussion" — and the Parkinson's patient who was furious about it
• Home runs are 10–15% of a practice. Erik's breakdown of the rest, and why nobody tells new practitioners this before they burn out
• Time as a clinical skill: reading how long a patient actually needs, and refusing to charge when he ran late
• Practitioner bias — "whatever helped them is what they think everyone has"
• Filming his own patients for two years, including the partial responders and the failures: "It wasn't theoretical anymore"
• Why the seminar junkies never grow, and what he tells master-class teachers to do instead
• Cash practice reality: "if you're not top dog, you're irrelevant"
• An introvert who taught almost every weekend for fifteen years — and hid at lunch
• Where he thinks it all goes: individualized medicine, or no career

About Dr. Datis Kharrazian

Datis Kharrazian, PhD, DHSc, DC, MS, MMSc, FACN is a Harvard Medical School–trained clinical research scientist and Associate Clinical Professor of Preventive Medicine at Loma Linda University School of Medicine, where his research centers on autoimmune molecular mimicry and environmentally induced immune reactivity. He is a Fellow of the American College of Nutrition and of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a two-time Researcher of the Year of the International Association of Functional Neurology. Through the Kharrazian Institute he has trained more than 5,000 clinicians across some thirty countries.

Links

• The Kharrazian Institute
• Dr. K News
• Why Do I Still Have Thyroid Symptoms?
• Solving the Puzzle with Dr. Datis Kharrazian — his own podcast

Teona Ducre is a physician recruiter with Pinnacle Health Group, specializing in concierge, direct primary care, and membership practices. She screens seven to ten doctors a day across primary care, urology, rheumatology, and gastroenterology, and works markets from Texas and Kansas to Chicago, California, and the UAE.

Ask a physician what their practice is worth and you'll usually hear about the build-out, the equipment, the years. Teona's answer is much shorter: your patient panel. Almost nothing else counts.

She didn't arrive here through healthcare. She was a journalist, then spent eleven years in education. Then, on April Fool's Day 2016, at 41 and a single mother of two teenagers, she was diagnosed with stage 3 pancreatic cancer — when the five-year survival rate was seven percent. The advocacy work she took up afterward put her in rooms full of physicians, and a recruiting firm owner noticed. Ten years out, she screens candidates for compassion and connection as hard as she screens for clinical skill, because she has been on the other side of that exam room.

In this episode

• Journalism, then eleven years teaching, then a stage 3 diagnosis — and how advocacy turned into a recruiting career
• What being the patient permanently changed about how she screens physicians
• The numbers behind the shift: concierge and DPC practices grew more than 80% between 2018 and 2023, with physicians entering the model up nearly as much. "This isn't a niche market anymore."
• Why employers — airlines, big-box retail, car dealerships — are now buying direct primary care for their staff
• Specialty direct care on the rise: the Chicago endocrinologist who flipped to a membership model and kept about 70% of his panel
• The compensation conversation nobody has in medical school: RVUs vs. income guarantee vs. straight salary, and the answer she hears most ("I have no idea what you're talking about")
• The 1,800–2,000 patient panel rule of thumb for converting to concierge — and when it still works with less
• How to vet a management company: track record, panel-growth forecast, a specific marketing plan, territory, and the 10–12% vs. 15–20% fee question
• Davin on his own exit from a health system — the sabbatical year, and why a physical office mattered more than he expected
• Succession planning from day one, and the question that reframes it: would you buy your own practice today?
• What a valuation actually looks at — subscription rate times panel, 7–10% expected attrition, real estate in, furniture and equipment essentially out
• What she's seeing from private equity in functional and integrative medicine, and why more fellows are heading into private practice
• Longevity medicine abroad — her UAE client, and the thought she had in Portugal after treatment

About Teona Ducre

Physician recruiter with Pinnacle Health Group, the Atlanta-based national search firm, focused on concierge, direct primary care, and membership practices. A ten-year survivor of stage 3 pancreatic cancer and an advocate with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, she came to healthcare recruiting by way of journalism and more than a decade in education. She writes an ongoing LinkedIn series on the business of concierge medicine and direct primary care.

Links

• Teona Ducre on LinkedIn — her concierge and DPC series
• Pinnacle Health Group

Dr. Richard Horowitz is a board-certified internist, the creator of the 16-point MSIDS model, and the New York Times bestselling author of Why Can't I Get Better? — the book patients call "the Lyme Bible." Over 41 years he treated more than 13,000 patients with chronic Lyme and tick-borne disease. In November 2025 he closed his clinical practice, and more than twenty advocacy organizations jointly honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

But this isn't a victory lap. It's the story of what it actually cost.

Early in his career, Horowitz did what a well-meaning doctor does: he brought the insurance companies in to look at what he was finding. They told him he'd "spent $70,000 on a disease that doesn't exist." The medical boards investigated him. The panels threw him out. He lost 2,000 patients in one stroke and remortgaged his house to keep the doors open. His wife told him she'd understand if he wanted to stop.

He didn't stop. In this episode he explains why — and the answer turns out to be less about stubbornness than about a two-hour-a-day meditation practice he started in medical school, precisely because he knew he'd need it.

In this episode

• Bringing the HMOs in to validate his findings — and what happened instead
• Losing 2,000 patients, remortgaging the house, and deciding whether to keep going
• Why he's never been successfully sued in 41 years, and what his documentation had to do with it
• Meditating two hours a day through medical school — and a Jewish physician's path into a Tibetan Buddhist practice
• How the MSIDS model was discovered by listening to patients, one unexplained finding at a time
• Dapsone combination therapy, now backed by eleven peer-reviewed papers
• The Alzheimer's case: reversing p-tau 217, the most sensitive biomarker, in a live patient with chronic Lyme
• Why Ending Chronic Illness argues all 16 MSIDS factors apply well beyond Lyme — including cancer
• What he'd tell a physician who is certain they're seeing something their specialty says isn't there

About Dr. Richard Horowitz

Founding member and past president-elect of ILADS. Served on the HHS Tick-Borne Disease Working Group and co-chaired its co-infection subcommittee, which delivered recommendations to Congress. Founder of the MSIDS Foundation. Author of Why Can't I Get Better?, How Can I Get Better?, and Ending Chronic Illness (Simon & Schuster, October 2026).

Links

• cangetbetter.com — books and consulting
• MSIDS Foundation
• Medical Detective — his Substack

Looking back across the first 20 episodes, they revisit standout moments: Chris Magryta's work securing local funding to feed underserved pediatric patients; a physician's pivot from high-end concierge care to building a direct-primary-care company that helped catalyze the membership movement; and one-liners that stuck — "ready, fire, aim," the two-stakeholder simplicity of cash-pay care, and Tieraona Low Dog's "knee to knee" patient connection. They credit guests like Jeffrey Bland and Jill Carnahan for pairing rigorous science with genuine human healing.

Most tangibly, the brothers share how the show reshaped their own practice — layering a membership model over insurance-based care, tightening compliance, and refining their niche and branding. They close with what's ahead: all 20 episodes rolling out as videos (~2/week on YouTube) and Season Two's topic-driven episodes. For clinicians weighing a move toward integrative, membership-based care, it's both a recap and an invitation.

Travis breaks down a distinction most clinicians miss: a GPT prompt simply answers, while an AI agent makes decisions and acts autonomously — sometimes spawning other agents. He explains why prompts are only ~50–60% reliable ("a pinky swear with a robot"), how one rogue agent erased a company's entire production database, and why the deploying practice, not the developer, is who regulators hold accountable. My Compliance Citadel acts as a fortress around that risk: a runtime layer that intercepts agent actions and renders one of three verdicts — pass, pause, or prevent — logging everything to a tamper-proof audit chain. Erik stress-tests it against two real scenarios: pasting patient labs into open ChatGPT, and using AI to comb an EMR for high-risk patients.

For clinicians, students, and small-practice owners excited about AI but wary of HIPAA and PHI exposure, it's a grounded primer on innovating boldly without betting the license.

The conversation moves through the structural forces driving the shift — flat insurance reimbursement against rising overhead, the stakeholder problem of insurers and PBMs sitting between patient and physician, and what Jess in her recent reporting calls the demoralization of America's doctors. They wrestle with the inherent scaling tension in cash-based care, how AI is more likely to be deployed to maximize insurance margins before it relieves physician burden, and what international models (Kenya, Canada, global health insurance) can teach Americans about price transparency and personal responsibility. Jess closes with a journalist's challenge: keep questioning, follow the evidence, and resist letting health policy collapse into political tribalism.

For physicians evaluating a model change, employers reconsidering benefits, and anyone trying to understand why so many doctors are walking away from the insurance-based system.

She reframes imposter syndrome as evidence you're stepping into a bigger game, makes the case that "people seek experts, not generalists," and offers concrete tactics: a signature talk that doubles as lead-magnet content for YouTube, podcast, and social; capturing email lists everywhere you speak (since 50% of prospects buy within 18 months — but only 3% buy now); collaborating with 5–10 aligned partners who share your patient avatar; and optimizing for both SEO and AEO (AI-engine optimization) so AI assistants surface you to the patients you're meant to serve.

The conversation closes on the bigger shift — moving from transactional fee-for-service to transformational programs, why AI is actually creating more demand for trusted human authorities, and JJ's mantra: "You shouldn't have to sacrifice your life to save others."

For practitioners ready to stop trading time for money and build a sustainable, mission-aligned practice.

His current obsession is AstroDoc and its AI health agent Astrid ("A System To Reinforce Infinite Doctors"), designed to be for billions of patients what Samir became for his own parents when they were sick. The conversation digs into healthcare versus sick care, why AI will change the physician's role without replacing it, the ethics of non-clinicians building medical AI, and Samir's view that the next generation of doctors will function as coaches and cheerleaders — not gatekeepers of knowledge.
For physicians weighing DPC, founders building health AI, or anyone thinking about how the doctor-patient relationship evolves in an era of voice-enabled, multilingual, clinician-led tooling.

The conversation dives deep into the structural forces shaping healthcare — the rise of managed care and HMOs in the 90s, how the "gatekeeper" model distracted primary care from its healing mission, and why insurance-based reimbursement remains the biggest barrier to integrative medicine adoption. Goldman draws on his experience  producing the Heal Thy Practice conferences (2009-2016) to share what made practitioners successful: confronting their psychology around money, breaking out of professional silos, and being willing to take risks even when the path isn't clear.

Looking forward, Goldman argues the tipping point won't come from government but from Fortune 500 employers demanding better care models from insurers. He calls for the field's "different tribes" — naturopaths, MDs, nurses, chiropractors — to present a unified front and position integrative medicine as the core of healthcare, not a side dish. Essential listening for any clinician navigating the business side of integrative practice.

Dr. Mehrdad Soleimani joins Dr. Erik Lundquist and brother Dr. Davin Lundquist to share the journey from ICU nurse to emergency medicine physician to med spa entrepreneur — and the common thread through all of it: taking care of people. Mehrdad discusses how his nursing background gave him a fundamentally different perspective on physician behavior and burnout, ultimately leading him to switch from surgery to emergency medicine when he didn't like the person the lifestyle was making him become.

  On the business side, Mehrdad offers candid lessons from building a med spa in Temecula: the importance of hiring the right people over the cheapest option, partnering with an experienced practice manager, starting lean without a large space, and the costly trial-and-error process of finding a marketing firm that actually delivers. His advice: hold vendors accountable, set deadlines, and fire fast when it's not working. Instagram and organic community engagement — including Chamber of Commerce involvement and supporting small businesses during COVID — proved more effective than expensive agencies.

  The conversation closes with Mehrdad's passion for physician wellness, his root cause analysis approach to physician behavioral issues, and the simple power of asking a colleague "how are you doing?" — a question many physicians say no one has ever asked them.

  For practitioners exploring med spa models, navigating marketing vendors, or thinking about physician burnout from a systems level.

He recounts co-founding IFM with Dr. David Jones, coining the term "functional medicine" in 1990 (over considerable pushback), and personally investing millions to institutionalize the movement. The conversation turns to today's convergence of wearable tech, AI, and portable health records, which Bland sees as empowering patients while elevating the clinician's role to teacher and guide. He warns that ultra-processed food is an existential threat — citing declining fertility — and describes his Big Bold Health ventures in regenerative agriculture and minimally processed fish oil. His parting advice: find your peer group, start with high passion, and the world will protect you.

For practitioners exploring functional medicine, students seeking inspiration, or anyone curious about the movement's origin story

Here is the link to the publication in the IMCJ (Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal)
*** Note from the Editor. There was a mistake in what link I posted. Here is the link to the actual article mentioned"

The Paradigm-Shifting Future of Health Care: Rise of Predictive, Personalized Lifestyle Medicine - PMC
The Paradigm-Shifting Future of Health Care: Rise of Predictive, Personalized Lifestyle Medicine (2025) takes that foundation and projects where it's heading — a tech-enabled, predictive, continuously monitored health system.

Functional Medicine Past, Present, and Future - PMC
Functional Medicine: Past, Present, and Future (2022) makes the case for why functional medicine works based on history and evidence. 

She emphasizes the power of presence and stillness in clinical care, arguing that being fully attentive with patients sharpens diagnosis more than extended appointment times alone. A deeply personal story about a dying AIDS patient who hadn't been touched in months crystallized her belief in the healing power of human connection.

On the business side, she reflects candidly on the challenges of running one of Albuquerque's first integrative clinics — overloading on Medicaid/Medicare patients, lacking a common clinical language across disciplines, and learning to charge appropriately for her time. She advocates for micro-practices, sliding-scale cash models, and an entrepreneurial mindset — being flexible, iterating on your model, and not waiting for perfection before starting.

She closes with a hopeful vision for the future: integrating functional and lifestyle medicine into all medical training, nurturing clinician wellbeing to combat burnout, and empowering patients and communities to demand better care.

Kristin walks through the origins of her cash-based membership model, which bundles provider visits with health coaching and dietitian access to keep patients engaged and avoid the "excitement and drop-off" cycle she saw at other practices. She explains why she built a brand around the mission rather than herself, invested early in scalable systems, and prioritized patient retention as her number-one marketing strategy. She's candid about the emotional toll of scaling — the loneliness of entrepreneurship, the whiplash between feeling like everything is thriving and everything is falling apart — and how joining an entrepreneurial peer group helped her feel less alone. She shares her leadership mantras ("find peace in the chaos," "let the fires burn," "delegate and elevate") and encourages practitioners to focus on one priority at a time, hire people better than themselves, and cast a wide net for mentors outside their immediate field. Looking ahead, she sees functional medicine moving fast toward AI and genetics-driven personalization but hopes brick-and-mortar care will remain central to the patient experience.

Note from TRC-BOM Podcast - Kristin mentions using a 3rd Party software for her clinics for taking calls etc. That software is "Weave"
Here is a link to their site.
https://www.getweave.com/

She describes launching an ambitious hospital-backed integrative clinic early in her career, the overwhelming overhead it created, and the misalignment she felt working inside a system driven by metrics opposed to her healing philosophy. This led her to restart her career in Boulder with low overhead and a deep sense of autonomy, eventually partnering with functional medicine leader Dr. Bob Rountree.

Jill explains how authenticity, storytelling, and spiritual alignment helped her grow her brand, become a national speaker, write her book, and create a documentary. She encourages clinicians to trust intuition, embrace imperfection, and take courageous first steps—even before feeling “ready.” With AI poised to shift medical practice, she believes the future of functional medicine lies in deep human connection, community building, and purpose-driven care—things no technology can replace.

He describes the challenges of maintaining integrative ideals during traditional medical training, and the importance of mentors who helped him blend functional, conventional, and Eastern approaches. Robert discusses building an integrative pain program within a major health system, navigating reimbursement obstacles, and using team-based care to stay financially viable in insurance-based medicine.

The conversation also explores burnout, the power of teaching, the value of lifestyle medicine, and how personal practices like Tai Chi and writing sustain his well-being. They touch on the future of integrative medicine and how AI could complement clinicians by handling complexity and freeing physicians to focus on human connection.

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His entrepreneurial path—from early digital health ventures to developing clinical tools—led him to his current role as Chief Medical Officer at Fullscript, where he now helps scale integrative care for clinicians nationwide while still maintaining a small patient panel. Jeffery discusses the challenges of leaving insurance-based practice, the ethics of selling supplements, the importance of honest communication, and how clinicians can take actionable steps toward independence.

He also predicts continued rapid growth in integrative medicine as patients become more informed, influencers expand direct-to-consumer health content, and AI tools reshape expectations—all increasing the need for skilled practitioners who can offer deeper expertise and relationship-centered care.