Chris Kresser: I wish there was a really easy response to that question. It turns out that supplements and how you handle supplements in clinical practice is a big challenge, and it’s one that I don’t feel like we’ve still fully cracked. We have a plan that I think is going to crack it, and it’s going to probably be really helpful for you, as well, if we can pull it off. Typically we dropship supplements to patients. We don’t carry inventory. We have this lean distributed practice model, as I’ve talked about, so we don’t have space in my office to carry a huge amount of supplements that would be needed for patient care. I have no desire to do that and no space even if I did have the desire, so we dropship. We use a distributor. Emerson Ecologics, we use their distributor that carries a lot of products, and they handle all the shipping and returns and stuff like that. They’re great, we’ve had good success with them, but the problem is Emerson only carries about 50 percent of the products that we use in our protocols, so what happens is when we order … let’s say we do a case review and we end up prescribing the antimicrobial protocol and then a few other supplements. While we can dropship maybe 50 percent of those from Emerson, but then we have to send GI-Synergy from Apex, and MegaSporeBiotic comes directly from that company, and you can’t really get it anywhere else, so the patient might end up paying four shipping charges per order, which is really not a good solution. There’s no single distributor that carries all of the products, which makes it a big challenge. If there was, we’d definitely be using that distributor. There are other distributors out there who have different inventories than Emerson, but it’s all the same challenge. There’s no one distributor that has everything.
The best options would be … if you want to get into the business of carrying inventory and shipping supplements yourself, you could have a physical location where you just order all the products directly from the manufacturer that you use and then you dispense them to patients that come into your clinic in the old-fashioned way, or you dropship them from your own clinic. But of course, that requires a staff of people to handle that, or at least one person that’s working on that pretty regularly. Even just with dropshipping supplements, we have one employee that spends about 30 hours a week handling all of the supplement stuff, and she’s not even doing shipping stuff. So you need someone to handle that, you need the space to store all those supplements, and then you have to deal with returns and all of that stuff. For most people, it’s not a great solution.
The other option is to create an online store that carries inventory of all the products that your patients might need from all the protocols that you’re going to prescribe. That is actually the solution that I’m considering right now. Like I said, it’s ridiculous for patients to pay four different shipping charges. It’s inconvenient. It’s also inconvenient for the staff because then the staff has to spend all of the time I just said. It’s one person spending at least 30 hours a week actually going to these different vendors’ and distributors’ websites and placing the orders, charging the patient’s card. It’s a really inefficient process, so my plan currently is to create a store that would carry all the supplements that we use with our protocols. Then our CCFM patients could be directed to that store to order the supplements that they need, and we wouldn’t have to have a dedicated staff member that’s handling that. Patients could place the orders on their own time, whenever they need it, and they can go back there and get refills. They only have to pay one shipping charge instead of four, so that’s going to increase patient compliance and just make it better for everybody involved. Then my idea is that I would also make it possible for you to send your patients there, and then you would get a percentage of those orders, just as you would if you were using another distributor. The difference is, in this situation, you would be sending them to a place that carried every single product that you’re going to be prescribing them, based on the protocols that you’re learning in this program, so it would have the benefits for you and your patients.
That’s the current plan. I’m still kind of investigating the particulars and trying to figure out exactly how it will work, but I’ll keep you posted on it because I know you’re going to face that challenge because we face that challenge and we’ve been facing it for years. We did some preliminary research in our patient base and found that, despite the ridiculousness of how it’s set up right now, where patients are paying up to four shipping charges per order, still 80 percent of our patients that we prescribe the supplements to order through us, which just goes to show that if we create a solution where they’re only paying one shipping charge and they don’t have to request orders and refills through the portal and they can just do it themselves, that 80 percent is probably going to get a lot closer to 100 percent.