Episode 327: How to Increase Your Value by Adding Functional Labs to Your Practice
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Simply offering to run functional labs in your practice isn't what makes them valuable—it’s being able to use them to meet your clients' needs that does. Learn the bennies of running functional labs—from validating your clients' symptoms to figuring out the next best step in treatment, and using the results to make lasting changes for your clients…and so much more.
In this episode:
Advice if you’re feeling overwhelmed by functional labs [9:38]
Using labs to validate client symptoms [18:57]
Using labs to encourage compliance with behavior change [30:19]
Showing client progress with biomarkers and lab data [35:20]
Connecting clients to deep inner work through functional labs [36:17]
The difference between worth and value [38:00]
Resources mentioned:
Funk’tional Nutrition Academy™
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 20% off your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia NAD+ (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Learn more about Functional Nutrition & Strictly Biz
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model. They're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do, and that's why creating a new model is my life's work. I believe in the ripple effect.
Erin Holt [00:00:39]:
So I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review, and share because you never know whose life you might change. And of course, keep coming back for more. Hello, my friends. I'm so excited to be back here with you in your ear. What are you doing? You in the car? You out for a walk? That's one of my favorite times to listen to podcast, walking and listening to a podcast.
Erin Holt [00:01:25]:
I get so excited when a new podcast pops up in my feed and I'm excited to listen to it, I, like, lace up my sneaks and head out. It's the best. The best. I would love to know if you ever feel inclined to take a picture of where you are, what you're doing when you're listening to this podcast and tag me on Instagram so I can see. I get excited. I also love listening to podcasts when I'm cooking dinner. That's another favorite of mine. Anyway, today we're gonna get into how to increase your value by adding functional labs to your practice.
Erin Holt [00:01:58]:
So this is definitely a more practitioner forward episode. So I am creating it with practitioners in mind. If you are new here, hi. Welcome. This podcast is really created for folks who are looking to learn about health, better their health, advocate for their own health, take this information, apply it to their bodies, or bring it to their practitioners, maybe eventually work with us. We can be your practitioners. But I also have quite a lot of practitioners who listen to the show to help them with their own clientele, which is a beautiful thing. And sometimes I lean more into that side of the audience, especially when FNA is open for enrollment, which it is right now.
Erin Holt [00:02:42]:
FNA is our 14 month. That's right, 14 months, longer than a year. It's robust by design. This work that we're doing in the functional medicine space is a heavy lift, and so you need heavy training. So it's 14 months of education, training, and mentorship. And like I said, we are currently open for enrollment. FNA shortcuts your path to a profitable and impactful practice. So you can help a lot of people with the tools that we teach you, and you can make a living doing what you love.
Erin Holt [00:03:14]:
And I can tell you from experience, there's really no better feeling. So I love, love, love helping practitioners do that through FNA. So today is going to be for you guys, my practitioners. If you're new here, you can still catch a vibe. You can still learn a lot. But if you're like, I don't even know what a functional lab is, well, I'm going to send you back to episode 212, which is a Functional Medicine Approach to Labs. And that's an episode where I really highlight the differences between functional medicine and conventional medicine in terms of how both approach labs. So that can really help you understand a lot of what we're talking about here.
Erin Holt [00:03:50]:
Episode 245, we talk about our favorite functional labs. So again, if you're new to this whole world, I would check out those episodes. For today, we're going to talk about how adding functional labs to your practice can help to increase your value. Be sure you stay through to the end of this, because I'm going to define and get into what value actually is going to be a little mini business lesson for you. Because what I'm not saying in this conversation, what I'm not saying is just add labs and then you can charge three times as much. That is not the undertone of this discussion. We want to be sure if you're adding labs, you're using them with precision and clear intention and integrity. And what I mean by integrity is not running labs that you're not equipped to handle.
Erin Holt [00:04:44]:
I think people are so eager to run functional labs, which is great, because as you're going to learn today, they can add a lot of value to your clientele. They're so eager to run them that a lot of people are running labs with extremely minimal training. And the people who suffer on the other side of that is their clients. And it's very, very, very hard to maintain a solid client roster and get really good results. And have really good word of mouth if you're trying to analyze labs off of minimal training, just, it's not a good long term strategy. And it's like I think, well, I know sometimes people get their feathers a little ruffled when I speak into some of these sort of downsides of our industry. And I even have a podcast review that says, oh, she's so hard on practitioners, or something like that.
Erin Holt [00:05:35]:
And I think we all have to hold ourselves to a high standard and we should always be growing and evolving if we're stepping up to do this work. It's like wanting to practice law, but saying, oh, well, law school is too expensive and it takes too much time, so I'm just going to do the six week course for a few hundred dollars and practice anyway. That's obviously insane. When I talk about a different industry, we can see how insane that idea is, but that's kind of the state of affairs of functional medicine. That's part of the reason why we're seeing some of the messiness in the functional medicine space. And if you don't know what messiness I'm talking about, go back to last week's episode, because I really set up this week's episode with last week's episode. And we receive DM's, Instagram comments, emails on the regular talking about their experience with this. I'm not just making this up to be contrarian.
Erin Holt [00:06:27]:
This is stuff we hear all of the time. And so I think it's important to pre frame everything I'm about to say about the value and the benefit of functional labs with this. You need, you really need the appropriate training in order to be able to do this work, to run these labs. And I'm not just saying this to sell FNA, although I do recommend FNA. We help our practitioners utilize functional labs with discernment. With discernment kind of being the critical key there. Our practitioners are very, very trained on how to interpret labs. We have deep, comprehensive, robust training on what to do with all of the data once you receive the labs, because running the labs is just a small, little tiny portion of it.
Erin Holt [00:07:15]:
Understanding which labs to run, running the labs, and then understanding how to communicate effectively the data from the labs like that takes a lot of training, a lot of mentorship to really understand that. And we want to make sure that we're delivering the data in such a way that it creates healing opportunities for our clients. It's kind of a lot of what I was talking about last week because it's the healing opportunities that is the value add. To be clear, it's not the labs themselves that's the value add. It's the healing opportunities that the labs can potentially create. And so when we practice this way, when we practice in the way that we train you in FNA, it creates the type of practitioner that people seek out after they've been to the functional medicine practitioners.
Erin Holt [00:08:04]:
That's what we see in our own practice. It's what we see with FNA students. We're going to see a growing demand of this because so many people are taking more of a templated, cookie cutter approach to functional medicine, and they don't have robust training, so they're really not generating results. So people are going through functional medicine feeling deflated, and they're looking for practitioners that have, that can offer a more comprehensive approach. One FNA graduate just told me, she said, I just talked to three potential clients who all had previous functional medicine labs yet were still experiencing the same symptoms. They were given supplements and elimination diets, and that's it. No mention of the foundations, like, are you sleeping? What does your blood sugar look like? What are you eating? It's truly concerning. So we have to be able and willing to take a more comprehensive approach.
Erin Holt [00:08:54]:
And so that's why I say the value isn't just saying I offer labs. The value is in you being able to thoroughly understand how to determine which labs to run after hearing someone's symptoms, their health history, what they're currently doing, what they've had tried in the past, what they're trying now. Have you worked with other practitioners? What have they done? What worked? What didn't? Where did you have success? Where did you not have success? We have to understand the data from the labs and connect it to their symptoms, and we have to interpret the data in such a way that we can connect it to a treatment plan that will take them where they want to go, that will generate results that's going to be very valuable. And the last thing that I'll say here before we tuck and roll into the bennies, into the benefits of functional lab testing, when people start getting into functional labs, it's not uncommon for them to feel a little overwhelmed. And so maybe you're there right now. Maybe you saw the title of this podcast, and you're like, oh, I just started running functional labs, and I want to tune in. And so if you feel absolutely overwhelmed, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. Okay.
Erin Holt [00:10:03]:
In my opinion, overwhelm is a good sign. Labs can feel overwhelming because they are. I think anyone who isn't overwhelmed by labs, especially in the beginning, is probably not thinking about them in the right way. I was lucky enough to have. So obviously, I'm a tough love type of gal, right? But I do really well with tough love. So I must have just attracted mentors. I shouldn't say that all my mentors, but I did attract some mentors, were kind of, like, straight shot, tell it like it is, no sugar coating, willing to call out all the BS in the industry.
Erin Holt [00:10:43]:
Like, I attracted some of those. I also had very sweet, supportive, nurturing mentors as well. I kind of think that's the beauty of what Rachel and I bring to FNA, is that, like, I'm, like, the tell it like it is. And I definitely. Rachel's, like, more gentle with stuff, so we make a good team. But as I was saying, one of my mentors said this early on, if you are not comfortable with webs on top of webs and systems on top of systems, then functional medicine isn't for you. Dramatic pause. So here's the deal.
Erin Holt [00:11:16]:
The body is like a spider web, and I'll be the first one to admit that it can be really overwhelming to walk into that web, which is why I actually think we see so much templated medicine, because it's easier. It's easier, it's more clear cut. It's step one, do this. Step two, do this. If this, then that. We're trying to take something super complex and make it more systematized, which can work to some extent. It can help to reduce the overwhelm and see things more simplistic. But, like, simplicity is only going to get you so far, especially if you're attracting complex clients.
Erin Holt [00:11:55]:
So just kind of keep that in mind. And I know I've shared this Gabor Maté quote all of the time. The more specialized doctors become, the more they know about a body part or organ, and the less they tend to understand the human being in whom that part or organ resides. Because trying to address the whole human, it's messier, it's more complicated. It's just, it is, it is. Bodies can be complex, or they are complex. But I think the beauty of functional medicine, why I love it so much, is that this is what we do. This is the task that we signed up for.
Erin Holt [00:12:27]:
You've heard me say that the root of the root is usually deeper than a lab test. And I love that. I love going deep. I love going deeper than a lab test. But I'm also okay with starting at the lab test, with starting with the data, which might seem in direct contrast to what I was talking about last week. And it's why I wanted to have that conversation first before this one, because we do have to practice holding multiple truths at once. That's part of the messiness of functional medicine. So for me, it's not an either or.
Erin Holt [00:13:00]:
It's not either we're doing functional labs or we're doing the deep, emotional sort of excavation work. For me, it's and/also, it's always and/also. We get to do both. That can feel really overwhelming, or it could feel like possibility. There's so much more to explore, and that's when I move into overwhelm. I'm just like, great. There's just so much more opportunity for growth and for learning here. And so I just.
Erin Holt [00:13:27]:
I do want to say that because it's pretty common to be in overwhelm when you first start tucking and rolling into labs. We see it a lot at the beginning of FNA.
Erin Holt [00:15:19]:
Okay, now let's get into it. How do labs add value? I will tell you that my nutrition practice really grew, really expanded pretty darn quickly when I started offering functional lab testing. It was definitely the right move for me, both from a career standpoint and what I was able to offer, how I was able to help, the impact that I was able to make. But I also, financially, my business grew.
Erin Holt [00:16:13]:
So at the time, my clients had already spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort, googling, trying things on their own, throwing things against a wall to see what stuck, you know, the whole song and dance routine. So functional lab testing offered them a completely new approach. And the way that I do lab testing, and I run lab testing, it's very much so catered to the individual. There's not, like, a standard set of labs I run on everybody. It's like, what's going on with you? What are your symptoms? Okay, let's be really selective with what kind of data we're looking for. But by finding this data, by leveraging these functional labs, I was able to find clients the answers that they had been looking for for, like, up to years sometimes, and then finally get them results. And I think that the maybe, like, the unspoken truth here, because it's not sexy, it's not glamorous, but the fastest way to grow a practice, it's not actually going viral on social media. Believe me, I've gone viral on social media.
Erin Holt [00:17:11]:
The fastest way to grow a practice is to do really good work, and it's to generate good results for your clients or your patients, because then they go on and tell the people that they love about you, about their work with you, and then those people want to work with you. And my practice was built on word of mouth in the beginning. We have a lot of applications to our one on one stuff, and a lot of them, a big chunk of them, are people that have. Rachel sees the majority of our clients right now at this time, and it's a lot of people who have worked with Rachel gone on to tell a family member or a friend, and then that family member or friend comes and wants to work with Rachel. So word of mouth, getting people good results makes a huge, huge, huge difference, and that's what's going to grow your practice. So if lab testing can help you get those results for your clients, then it's going to be a very valuable thing. And I know I'm just kind of talking about my private practice, but this is something that we see replicated with our FNA students.
Erin Holt [00:18:11]:
The same thing is happening with them. So I actually, rather than just tell you my experience, I actually asked our FNA students on our latest live call, our last live call, what have you seen as the benefits of adding these labs to your practice? How have they enhanced the clinical outcomes of your patients, your clients, the clinical outcomes? And then what's something that adding functional labs to your practice has allowed you to do that you weren't really able to do before adding functional labs? So those are the questions that I asked, and then I wrote down all of the answers and I've pulled them all together here for you today. And there's like a lot of overlap in the categories, as you might expect. So the first one, the first is validation to client symptoms, so allowing the client to feel validated based on how they've been feeling. And this is especially true after the conventional medicine merry go round where they're going to a lot of doctors and specialists and nothing's wrong. Nothing's wrong. Nothing's wrong. When we run functional labs, we can say like, oh, no, no, there's definitely some things here that are out of balance and that they need to be addressed and that can feel like safety for someone, that can feel like support, that can feel like taking someone from being hopeless and confused to, there's a path forward. That is highly valuable being able to offer, that is highly valuable.
Erin Holt [00:19:37]:
After being told for years they're totally fine, even though they feel anything but fine. These patients, these clients start to second guess themselves. They start to feel like, oh, gosh, maybe I can't trust myself. A client of mine once said I was gaslit so hard I started to gaslight myself. Another client said, I just assume all my symptoms are in my head because that's what's been told to me my whole life. So this is the lived experience of a lot of people with the conventional healthcare model. And so when you reveal the results of a functional lab and you carefully explain what the results mean, that's a huge, huge, huge, important piece of it. You have to, if you're going to be running these functional labs on people, you have to be able to articulate what the data means and connect it to the person and to their symptoms and to their lived experience and to what they're feeling and what they're experiencing.
Erin Holt [00:20:31]:
But a really common reaction is tears. Like, I knew it. I knew I wasn't crazy. And last week, I said sometimes, if used correctly, sometimes functional labs and lab data can connect people deeper to their own intuition. It, like, reconnects people to themselves, where they say, like, oh, my gosh, I knew it. I knew it. I can trust myself after all. And I think that that's a really beautiful thing.
Erin Holt [00:20:59]:
And this validation, I've said it before, I'll say it again. The validation can be a healing in and of itself. And it's truly, truly one of my favorite parts of running functional labs is that validation piece. The potential flip side of this is that we can. This is exactly what I talked about last week, so I would head back to that episode. But we can validate people right into their own limiting harmful beliefs in narratives about their health, too. So we just want to be mindful of that, of reinforcing self limiting or harmful narratives about their health. So, like I said, head back to last week, if you haven't listened yet, I do think it's a must listen if you run labs or you plan to run labs in your practice at any point.
Erin Holt [00:21:45]:
So another benefit is that. And maybe I should have led with this one, another benefit is that functional labs offer different insight than conventional labs. So, I had a client who has autoimmunity and is working with a gastroenterologist and is pretty mired in the conventional approach to things, I would say. So the belief is, well, I'm working with a gastroenterologist, and so my gut has already been tested. But what not everybody understands is that the tests in the labs that a gastroenterologist would run may be different than a functional medicine provider or practitioner would run. And I'm not saying one tool is better than the other.
Erin Holt [00:22:34]:
They're just a different set of tools that can explore and find different things. Now, if this person was working with their gastroenterologist for the past few years, which they were, and they were feeling better and their autoimmunity was in remission, or they weren't on immune suppressants, or they felt really good, that would be kind of a horse of a different color. But that wasn't the story. And so the conversation needs to become, okay, well, we have these tools that are different, that will look at your gut in a different way. So, for example, a. Sorry, I keep banging my desk. I think it's whacking my microphone.
Erin Holt [00:23:07]:
An example of this would be the GI Map from diagnostic solutions. That is the stool test that we tend to run. And it looks at certain bacteria that can initiate or trigger the autoimmune process, especially with rheumatoid arthritis, which is the condition that this client had. So citrobacter prevotella proteus, there's different bacterial species that can impact, or can, like, essentially turn on or impact the autoimmune process in rheumatoid arthritis. So for me, for somebody who is struggling with RA, who does not have it anywhere near remission, this would be a really good next step. But it's a different tool than a conventional doctor or gastroenterologist would run. Another example of this would be a thyroid panel. So it's not uncommon to ask somebody, have you had your thyroid checked? And they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, my doctor ran it and I'll say, did you have a full thyroid panel? Oh, yeah, yeah, the full thing.
Erin Holt [00:24:05]:
I said, can I see them? And it's maybe TSH and T4. And functional. A functional approach to thyroid health would be looking at a lot more markers than that. So again, I talked about that in episode 212. So you can, you can head back to that episode if you wanna. If you wanna catch that. So essentially, these functional labs can serve as a clinical tool to identify root causes, which can provide insight into those healing opportunities. Because if we identify certain things that are going on under the hood, we have the opportunity to correct the imbalance and then hopefully get the person feeling better.
Erin Holt [00:24:42]:
Okay. Another benefit shared by an FNA student. It helps me get my clients more targeted healing and care. So kind of what I was just saying, it gets, it allows us to get to the bottom of what's really going on here. Lab testing can provide help with decision making and next steps. So another example that just came up last week, I ran a DUTCH test on a client based on her symptoms. I'm like, her estrogen levels are going to be through the roof. This is what I was assuming.
Erin Holt [00:25:13]:
And all we did was a DUTCH test for budgetary reasons. And so I looked at it and the symptoms and the estrogen levels. Like, the math wasn't mathing, so it was a bit of a head scratcher. It's not what you expected to see. Sometimes you see exactly what you expect to see, and it's great. And sometimes you need to do a little bit more digging. And so this was a case of doing a little bit more digging, and so what I needed to see to make some next steps for assessment is thyroid panel. I needed to see blood work with liver markers, and also a stool test was highly recommended so we could see phase three estrogen clearance and what's going on in the microbiome and the astrobulum to see if we could make some sense her symptoms.
Erin Holt [00:25:56]:
So that lab gave me insight into next steps that we would need to make and some clinical decision making that we might need to make as well. I'll share this quote from an FNA student. She said, coming from someone who couldn't run labs to someone who now can, I can say that I love that I can see data and analyze it rather than just grasping at straws and guessing what is going on, throwing things up against a wall and seeing what will stick. It's like we have a looking glass inside and we can see what's really going on, especially when we have people who have done everything, all the basics and the needle is not moving. Totally. So it's like our clients can come to us feeling like they're throwing things against a wall to see what will stick. But sometimes without tools, we might feel that same way with as practitioners. And the tools I'm referring to are those functional labs.
Erin Holt [00:28:18]:
Okay, so another benefit of functional lab testing and how it can add value is it can help confirm what you are already expecting. So based on clinical context clues, you probably have some suspicions about what might be going on with your client. And so looking at labs can validate your suspicion as the clinician, or in the case of my last example, totally, totally say no, no. Like, you're on the wrong track here. This is a low estrogen picture, not a high estrogen picture like you thought.
Erin Holt [00:29:12]:
So you got to keep looking. You got to keep digging. It can also, labs can also reveal a nocebo effect that we talked about last week. So someone might come to you saying, my hormones are an absolute mess, and that's the story that they're telling themselves, and therefore the story that they're living by, maybe based off of what they've seen or what they've read or what they've heard on TikTok, they're like, oh, my hormones are a mess. But then you run a hormone lab, and maybe their hormones are doing really well, and so that they can stop that inner narrative, that inner dialogue. I'll see this with SIBO occurrence. I think I mentioned this last week, but some people really carry around this belief that SIBO will come back. Sibo will come back.
Erin Holt [00:29:53]:
SIBO will come back. Because a lot of practitioners will say that. And so if somebody's like, oh, I think I have SIBO, or I need to make sure that I'm checking for SIBO, and we run a SIBO test, and it looks pretty good, and it's, like, pretty straightforward negative that can kind of let them relax and let them unwind a little bit and sort of negate that nocebo effect. Another huge benefit that a lot of FNA students and grads wanted to share was compliance. So huge benefit of adding functional labs is that they can encourage compliance with behavior change. Some people just really do need to see the data to make the requisite changes for their health. I'm sure that you've had at least one person say to you, I'm my own worst enemy, or, I know what I should be doing.
Erin Holt [00:30:41]:
I'm just not doing it. Maybe they even know a lot about health and nutrition, and so they're applying a lot of different information. Maybe they're applying, like, too much information at once, and so then they're getting overwhelmed, and then they just kind of, like, quit on themselves. And so oftentimes, seeing the actual data can be the thing that gets them to acknowledge, like, wow, okay, something really has to change here. And then it increases that motivation. And I will say that this is the most common benefit that FNA students shared when I asked that question. It's seeing things on paper. People really need to see things on paper.
Erin Holt [00:31:23]:
People love seeing things on paper. It can make it more real. It can help them with compliance. When people see the real physiological effects of how their current diet, lifestyle, or stress load is having on their body, they are more likely to take the appropriate action. They can't just put their head in the sand anymore and pretend it's not happening. They're seeing it. And so I think that functional lab testing can really help our clients hold themselves accountable to themselves. And it really makes that connection between how you're living your life and your symptoms, your body, your health, how you're feeling.
Erin Holt [00:32:04]:
I have a friend who's working with Rachel. She's a client of Rachel's, and she does a lot. She runs her own company. She has three children. She's very involved in her school community. She's very social. So a lot of. She's like, kind of like a lot of people's person, you know? You know, one of those.
Erin Holt [00:32:26]:
So she just manages a lot. She has a tendency to put herself last. And when she saw labs, specifically immune markers, some blood work, and then her hormones, she was like, okay, like, it's time. Like, I can't ignore this, and I can't avoid this anymore. It is time. I also want to highlight something she said to me. She texted it to me, and I wrote it down because I felt really proud. She said, referring to Rachel.
Erin Holt [00:32:56]:
She's so great. She presents it in a way that feels so doable and not scary. It's really lovely to work with her. She presents it in a way that feels so doable and not scary. That is a skill. That is an art form, the ability to take potentially scary information and deliver it in such a way that it's going to motivate behavior change but not scare someone is skill. This is what we help you do in FNA because this is so important. It's so important to your client's outcomes and your client's success in the narrative that they're telling. Building somebody up to be like, you got this, we can do this.
Erin Holt [00:33:42]:
Like, we're going to get through. This is so much different than being, like, fear mongering with the data again, talked about some of that last week, and especially, you have to know your audience. If somebody, I remember working with a mentee who is telling a mom of, like, little tiny kids that she needed to get, like, 10 hours of sleep every night if she wanted to recover, and I'm like, you gotta know your audience a little bit, too. So Rachel approached my friend with a lot of grace and compassion, knowing that she is managing a lot in her life. Okay, so we know that a lot of people know about the basics. They know about the foundations.
Erin Holt [00:34:21]:
They kind of know what they should be doing, but they're not doing it. And so that's where you, as a skilled, functional medicine practitioner, can come in. You can help them build a bridge from where they are to where they want to go. And labs, in my estimation, can really help you build that bridge. Another benefit, another value add, more eagerness to implement my recommendations, someone said. Because it's like, understanding the whys behind things really helps us to anchor in change. So if you have somebody just saying, oh, you got to eat more broccoli, okay, maybe. But if you're, if somebody's telling you, like, let's add more broccoli sprouts to your salads every single day, because that's going to help with estrogen clearance, and that's going to make you feel better in XYZ ways.
Erin Holt [00:35:06]:
Okay, I'm going to go out and buy those broccoli sprouts. I'm going to put them on my salad. I'm going to do that because now I understand the whys. And so functional lab testing can help us explain some of the why's. Seeing progress and hard work on retest, that's another benefit, another value add of functional medicine. I have a current client who is not losing any weight. Now, to be clear, she did not come to me for weight loss. Absolutely was not a goal when we initially started working together.
Erin Holt [00:35:34]:
It was all about health optimization and longevity. But she's like, I'm putting all this effort in, and I'm not seeing weight loss. And that's the external reward for her. That's the thing that's going to say to her mind, like, hey, your hard work's paying off. And so if that external reward isn't happening, biomarkers can be the external thing to help her see, okay, what I'm doing actually is paying off. It's paying off inside my body right now. It might take a little minute for the external, the outside to catch up. So I do think that labs can show progress.
Erin Holt [00:36:08]:
Biomarkers and lab data can help to show progress when somebody isn't seeing it for themselves. And then the last one that I will add in here, and this is truly one of my favorite, if not the favorite, way to use functional lab testing. Lab testing can connect people to the deeper inner work. And you know, I love me some deep inner work. Sometimes the data points are actually the entryway in. So we know common characteristics of people who get sick include the need to feel in control, the inability to say no, inability to pace oneself, inability to assert feelings, putting oneself last. So we might be listening to somebody. I'll use my friend as an example, my friend who's working with Rachel.
Erin Holt [00:36:56]:
We might be listening to one of our clients, and we might know that if they learn to say no, if they figured out a way to set a boundary, if they were able to make themselves a priority in their own life, they would feel better. But just telling them that might not get them to make the change. But showing them the data points through lab testing can actually open the doorway to the start of that conversation. And I always say it's not up to me to decide where their healing entry point is. It's just up to me to meet them wherever they want to come in. So some people might want to come in through lab testing. I'm still going to get that deep work in.
Erin Holt [00:37:39]:
Don't you worry. That is what I will do. But I'm totally fine with letting labs be the entry point into those deeper conversations, for sure. Without question. Okay, so those are all of the ways, or at least some of the ways, that functional labs can add value to your practice. Now, let's close out with the last few minutes of explaining what value actually is, because just adding functional labs doesn't increase your value or the value of your services. It might increase the cost, but not necessarily the value.
Erin Holt [00:38:13]:
So we had a client recently come to us in the past couple of months from a very popular functional medicine clinic. They had run a ton of labs on her. She had spent, like, buco bucks. She was on over $1,000 worth of supplements, and she was feeling worse, so she left them and she came to us. So that's a really good example of just adding a bunch of functional labs doesn't actually increase the value. So let's talk about value, because sometimes we entangle value and worth. The two are not the same. Your worth as a person, your worth as a clinician is inherent.
Erin Holt [00:38:48]:
Your worth is never up for question. But here's the deal. People don't pay you what you're worth because we can get caught into, like, low self worth stories. This isn't about your worth. People don't pay you what you're worth. They pay what it's worth to them. They pay what they value. Value is subjective.
Erin Holt [00:39:11]:
It can be situational. It depends on the person in question. It depends on the situation that they are in. So let's say I can get someone's autoimmunity into remission, but if I'm not speaking to someone with autoimmunity, then my service isn't very valuable to the person that I'm speaking to. Highly valuable to somebody with autoimmunity who is trying to get it into remission. So value is kind of in the eye of the beholder. Someone, for example, who's been struggling with GI issues and significant bloating to the point where they can't even button up their pants. And let's say she has a wedding in six months, and she's highly motivated to not only feel good for her wedding, but to be able to wear a slim fitting wedding dress.
Erin Holt [00:39:53]:
Highly motivated. So the person that can help them resolve their GI issues and their bloating is going to be very high value. So, in order to understand value, you have to be clear on who you're talking to. The people that are coming to you or the people that you want to work with, what are they actually struggling with? And then you have to understand how functional labs can be part of alleviating that struggle for them and can be part of connecting them to their goals, to generating results. And the way to get clear is to talk to people. You really need to understand the people that you want to work with. This is field research. It's having conversations.
Erin Holt [00:40:32]:
I can't tell you how many people get really caught up here. They're like, I don't know how to market. I don't know how to sell. I don't know how to showcase my value. Well, it's like you have to know exactly who you're talking to, what they're looking for, what their struggle points are. That's the secret sauce. You have to get familiar, you have to talk to people, boots on the groundwork, maybe teach some workshops, talk to people in your community, maybe through DM's, maybe through emails, maybe get on conversations or phone conversations with people, whatever it takes.
Erin Holt [00:41:00]:
But you really need to understand where your client is coming from because that will help you understand what value you can add to them and you can position that in such a way that it sounds valuable to them. So if somebody's coming to you having a hard time sticking with healthy eating, and maybe they've labeled it as self sabotage, well, okay. I know that data, having people see the hardcore data on paper can really drive that behavior change and help people be consistent. So I'm going to talk about how functional lab testing can do that for them. If somebody's coming to you with weight loss resistance, well, we know that there's a lot of underlying factors with weight loss resistance, and we can address some of those or suss some of those out via functional lab testing. So all of a sudden lab testing becomes a lot more valuable to that particular customer. And I'm not saying you have to niche down.
Erin Holt [00:41:54]:
There's a lot of talk about niching. I think if you love it, you can do it. I'm not always the biggest fan and I think we can run into some troubles with people niching in functional medicine and it's a whole thing. I could talk about it for a long time. I don't know if I've addressed it here on the podcast, but I know we talk about it a lot in FNA. Anyway, I'm not saying you have to niche down, but I am saying that you have to intimately know your clientele. This is going to be a huge part of you adding value. This is all stuff that we teach you in the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy.
Erin Holt [00:42:26]:
In FNA, we have what we call a course within a course. It's the Mindset and Business Builders where we get into a lot of this stuff. A lot of clinicians are really good at their work, they're really good at their job, and they shy away from the marketing piece. And so it's really important that we can connect your clients to you because you have a lot of medicine, you have a lot of gifts to share, and we want to make sure that the people that need it can receive it. So that's a big part of what you will learn in FNA. If you're interested, we'd love to see your application come through. We start soon. Fall cohort, you ready? It's like back to school vibes, you know? It's getting a little crisp in the air here in New Hampshire.
Erin Holt [00:43:10]:
I'm ready for it. I'm ready for it. Head to Funktionalnutritionacademy.com. Functional is spelled like the podcast. We'll link it up in the show notes and just come help us build out the new wave of functional medicine. It's gonna be great. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review you share with a friend and keep coming back for more.
Erin Holt [00:43:38]:
Take care of you.
