Recommendations for getting supplements for our patients. Do we need to set up accounts with each of the different vendors that you recommend? Do you keep any stock at your office or all of them shipped?

Chris: Oh yes, the old supplements thing. It’s such a drag really. We have looked at this in so many different ways. At one point, I was really moving forward on setting up a store where we could just send our patients, and we would stock all of the supplements ourselves in that store. They could reorder, and that way they’d only pay one shipping charge instead of having to order from these different vendors and pay multiple shipping charges. We may still do that at some point, but it’s a huge undertaking that requires a big capital outlay. There’s a significant amount of risk in terms of inventory and expiration. I’m already running a full practice, two training programs, podcasts, speaking, blog, etc., so I was frankly just a little daunted to take that on. What we’re doing right now still is we use Emerson Ecologics. They carry a lot of the brands that we order, not all of them, maybe I’d say 40 or 50 percent. Then for the vendors that aren’t carried by Emerson, we do just order those for patients and drop ship them from those venders, or we just give patients a link, and they can self-order. Different people have different preferences here, and we have opted for a more simple approach. We do earn some money on supplements, but it’s not the focus for our practice.

Trevor is also asking about lab fees. In California, it’s illegal to mark up the cost of a lab test. I know some clinics do that, hopefully not in California because it’s illegal, but in other states, I know some clinics charge 1.5x or something of the cost of the lab. The way that we handle that is we charge a $75 dollar fee for lab interpretation. I think that’s important to do because there is a significant investment of time and energy as you know because you’re in this program now to learn how to interpret these lab tests. Even once you know how to do it, it still takes time to do it, so you need to make sure you’re being compensated for that time in some way. Otherwise you really risk just becoming overwhelmed with work and burning out, so we charge that $75 fee for any kit that is ordered. We don’t charge it for blood work because it’s just a lot trickier. Now if if we order fasting glucose, A1c, and insulin, it takes me one minute to look at that test and interpret it, so it’s a little bit different. For the blood work in the kit that we send out, it’s much more detailed like a chronic infection, Lyme, tick-borne illness labs, then we would we do charge a fee for that.