Chris Kresser: Great question, and it’s one of the reasons why I asked Keith to provide access to his authority course as part of the pre-course, because I do think that having an online presence can play a really important role in attracting the kind of patients that are interested in and open to a functional medicine approach. That’s not to say that you can’t find those patients locally, but someone who doesn’t know anything about functional medicine and is not interested and just wants to go to the doctor and get a pill for their problem is probably not going to be your ideal patient. It takes both the clinician and the patient to make functional medicine work.
To the first part of your question, I can’t really speak to it, unfortunately, because there was no time where I was getting patients and I didn’t have an online presence. I built my online presence while I was still in school. I’ve told this story a couple of times. I can’t claim that it was part of any great vision that I had. It was kind of an accident, really, in my case. I just started a blog to keep track of the research that I was doing on heart disease and cholesterol, and people started leaving comments on some of the blog posts that I was writing just for my own edification, which was a surprise to me, and then one thing led to another, and that online presence grew considerably. So by the time I graduated from school, I had an online presence that was big enough that I basically just sent a few emails saying that my practice was open, and it filled up pretty quickly. I recognize that that’s not how it happened for a lot of you, and you’re going to have to take a different approach, but I really do think that following the path that Keith lays out in the authority program is super, super important and helpful in terms of attracting the right patients.
By the way, I hired Keith when I was about two months out of school, and it was a big step for me. At that time, I was just starting out. I didn’t have a lot of patients, I didn’t have a lot of income, but I knew intuitively that working with him to build my online platform and grow my practice was going to be really a good decision. I had to stretch financially to pull it off, but it certainly did work out, so I think his program is fantastic, and I would definitely recommend working through that if you haven’t already.
Another great way to build a practice, though, and to attract the kind of patients that you want to attract is to offer maybe functional medicine seminars in your community. One thing that I did locally a little bit was I taught a couple of seminars on nutrition for fertility and pregnancy, and that was the genesis of The Healthy Baby Code. Preparing for those local seminars and delivering them, I then took that content and made it into my first digital program. You could do something like teach a class on some of the more commonly used over-the-counter medications and then how functional medicine might approach those conditions and make some nutrition and lifestyle suggestions that you’ve gained from this course or that you already knew before, and then talk a little bit about how important it is to get to the root of the problem and how that’s what we do in functional medicine. That’s good because you’re educating people about the need for functional medicine, you’re giving them some practical solutions, they getting experience of you as a clinician and as a professional, and then you can take that content that you provide for those seminars and repurpose it, put it on your website, make it available, and do public webinars. If you just start thinking this way about how to repurpose and reuse content, get yourself out there in the local community, and then make that available online and spread it through your social network, then it can definitely work. It’s probably even easier to do now, in a way, than it was when I started because of social media and all of the tools for sharing this kind of information. Hopefully that helps.