Dr. John Bartemus is a Chiropractor, Certified Functional Medicine Practitioner, and Board Certified in Integrative Medicine. He is the #1 International Best-Selling author of “The Autoimmune Answer,” and he hosts the Life at Optimal podcast. Dr. Bartemus has nearly 800 videos on his YouTube channel where he shares his expertise with doctors and patients alike. Dr. Bartemus has been in full time practice for 12 years and excels at getting results with chronic disease cases where conventional medicine has failed.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Dr. John Bartemus about living your optimal life by looking at the big picture instead of simply treating symptoms.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How autoimmune diseases force us to to look at everything we’re exposed to so we can treat them.
- How our environment and the choices we make contribute to our overall health.
- How conventional medicine gets it wrong compared to functional medicine.
- How a book can educate people in a way that a TV spot, or YouTube video can’t.
- How writing a book gives authors authority and enables them to help others in a way that they couldn’t before.
Connect with Dr. John:
Links Mentioned:
functionalmedicinecharlotte.com
Guest Contact Info:
Email
drjohn@functionalmedicinecharlotte.com
YouTube
youtube.com/c/drjohnbartemus
Facebook
facebook.com/pages/functionalmedicinecharlotte
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/johnbartemus
Rob Kosberg:
Welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here. Super excited to bring you a fantastic guest for our Publish, Promote, Profit podcast. Dr. John Bartemus is an international best-selling author of The Autoimmune Answer. We’re going to talk quite a bit about that today. He is a chiropractic physician of more than 10 years in the healthcare field and a certified functional medicine practitioner, which we’ll talk about what that means and, and how patients fly from all over the world to go to his practice in Charlotte, North Carolina. John, of course, is also great family man, married with five children. As though you have all the time in the world, you’re also a competitive CrossFit athlete. John, great to have you here. Thanks for being on the podcast with us today.
Dr. John Bartemus:
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it and I am excited to be here and to contribute to the community.
Rob Kosberg:
Thank you. We always like to go on two tracks. The first track is, I want to hear about The Autoimmune Answer. I want to hear about what you do, and how you’re helping people, and how you’ve built an amazing practice that people fly in from all over the world to come and see you. Of course, medical practitioners would love to have a practice like yours where they don’t have to deal with insurance every single day and are able to actually serve people, but then we also want to talk about your book, which I know you’re really proud of. It’s done exceptionally well as a best seller. Talk a little bit about how your book has helped to bolster your authority and grow your practice as well. Why don’t we start first with what is, the Autoimmune Answer? Who are the people that are suffering, and who, with what you do with your magic, does it help?
Dr. John Bartemus:
I’ll answer that last question first. The autoimmune disease avatar is typically female, 30 to 55. Autoimmune diseases, there’s over a hundred of them right now in terms of diagnosis codes. The statistic is over 50 million Americans have autoimmune disease right now. The likelihood is that that’s an extremely unreliable number on the low end because what autoimmune disease is, is a chronic disease, and chronic diseases don’t have a singular cause. In my book, I talk about three big nerdy words that are probably going to make the listeners tune out, but just hear them and then let them go. One is called exposome, and that’s the scientific field of study of everything we’re exposed to from conception forward that has the potential to impact our health. So, mom and dad’s health at conception impacts their offspring’s health, and then everything forward from there could be leading to good health or poor health. That’s one thing we want to observe. People hear genetics and think everything’s genetic. It’s not what it is. The epigenome is epigenetic, and epi means control from above. So, the gene is controlled from somewhere above, which would be lifestyle inputs, our choices, et cetera. Then the last word would be microbiome, and that’s probably the one that sounds most familiar to some listeners, because if you read health blogs, you hear everything’s connected to the gut. The microbiome is the microbial soup in our gut, or our probiotics, or the ratio of good bugs to bad bugs. That’s the framework that I approach each case with, where basically everything potentially matters. How are their choices feeding into what they’re suffering from, and how do their microbes and the immune system’s relationship to that all combined to present certain ailments, such as with Rob, maybe rheumatoid arthritis, in John maybe psoriasis? Ultimately, conventional medicine is great at what it should be doing, which is acute care. If I get hit by a bus, don’t bring me to me; bring me to the emergency room, but once I’m stabilized and I’m going to live and I need to get healthy, now I need to go to me because they’re great at lifesaving, but they’re very poor at chronic disease. If you need evidence for that, look at obesity and diabetes in the US. Autoimmune disease fits in there the same way because it’s multifactorial. You can’t point to one thing and say, “This is the cause. Here’s the pill to swallow to stop that cause.” You need to zoom out and you need a health detective, or someone who can put the pieces together, which are the metaphors I use in the book. Essentially, we need to look at Rob, not as rheumatoid arthritis, but I want to zoom out and see all of Rob’s case because the rheumatoid arthritis isn’t happening in a vacuum separate from the rest of Rob’s choices or Rob’s physiology. I can get a thorough history from birth to now. It all potentially matters. I can request previous medical records and put that all together to say, “Okay, here are the sticks and the spokes in Rob’s physiology. Some make sense to a rheumatoid arthritis model, but some, a certain doctor wouldn’t necessarily consider because if I’m just a neurologist, I’m only looking at brains. If I’m just a gastroenterologist, I’m only looking at gut.” We want to consider everything because your RA case is going to have different contributing factors than the other nine RA cases in line behind you. If I treat everyone the same, I’ll help four to six out of 10 of those people, but four to six out of 10, will leave frustrated. If I treat everyone as an individual, I’m probably going to help nine out of 10 of those people. That’s a huge impact when you’re talking about 50 plus million people suffering from these types of diseases.
Rob Kosberg:
You mentioned too, maybe those are two of the bigger ones that people are familiar with, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. Can you give me the top three, four, or five other ones that people were like, “Oh man, I’ve been dealing with that for years. I just thought it was something that runs in the family.”
Dr. John Bartemus:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, the number one autoimmune disease in the US is called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It’s an autoimmune disease that causes low thyroid or hypothyroidism. 90% of hypothyroidism in the US is actually autoimmune. That’s one of the most, if not the most, mishandled autoimmune diseases by conventional medicine. I talk about that in chapter seven, and medicine will treat, we’ll just use a woman because it’s most commonly female, will treat a woman with hypothyroidism the same whether it’s an autoimmune disease caused or not, because their only treatment is hormone replacement. The problem is, we can give you hormone replacement and that may cover up symptoms, but it’s not stopping the cause. The metaphor I use in the book and with patients is that, and we’ll use this for thyroid autoimmunity, but it’s the same for all autoimmunity. Hashimoto’s disease affects the thyroid. Conventional medicine is worried about naming it and suppressing symptoms. All they care about is, “Oh, this is thyroid. These are thyroid symptoms. So, let’s give them a drug to provide the hormone to make the poor hair, skin, and nail health, the constipation, the brain fog, they can’t lose weight, and make that go away.” The problem is the thyroid, and the thyroid symptoms is the victim crying out for help. The immune system is the perpetrator, it is the one assaulting that victim. If we only give hormones, we’re duct taping over the victim’s mouth and allowing the perpetrator to continue. So, in the Hashimoto’s patient, they take the hormone, they may feel better short term, but over time, they need a higher dose or else they’re going to continue to feel bad, even on the hormone replacement. Why is that? The perpetrator’s still damaging that gland, damaging the tissue. What we want to do is tackle the perpetrator, which is the immune system. That’s the cause. We have to deal with the immune system, and then the victim can stop screaming. So, that’s in Hashimoto’s, or to answer the rest of your question, that could be lupus, that could be ankylosing spondylitis, that could be Sjogren’s Syndrome, that could be type one diabetes, that could be rheumatic fever, which is strep induced heart autoimmunity. That could be Crohn’s Disease or ulcerative colitis. That could be multiple sclerosis. All of these are autoimmune diseases that are unfortunately common and becoming more common because our choices in our environment are not getting better or healthier.
Rob Kosberg:
I’ve known people for years and years with Crohn’s disease, a debilitating disease. I’ve seen these people really struggle with it. If the autoimmune system is the issue and the problem, does that mean that not only are these things treatable, but curable?
Dr. John Bartemus:
They are absolutely treatable. Curable, we have to be careful in how we speak.
Rob Kosberg:
I’m not a doctor, so I can use those words.
Dr. John Bartemus:
The FDA doesn’t like that, but in reality, scientifically where we sit right now in June 2021, we don’t know how to cure autoimmune disease because scientifically, we’d need to be able to delete memory cells from the immune system. We don’t know how to do that yet. The clinical goal is asymptomatic or making the disease process dormant and obviously halting progression of it. When I’m speaking to a patient, we need to set the correct expectations. I don’t want to say, “Rob, I want to write a book. Can we do it by next week?” That’s not a good expectation. We need to set the right expectations and say, “Rob, we’re not going to cure your rheumatoid arthritis, but if we can make you asymptomatic, that feels like a cure, right?” The goal is asymptomatic and then as much time between flares as possible. When you flare, we want those flares to be the shortest duration frequency and intensity. You’re going to flare. We live in a toxic world. There are toxins everywhere. There’s stress everywhere, but can we create as much time between flares as possible? Can we empower you to be able to notice sooner when a flare is coming on and stop it sooner? You can take a self-inventory and be like, “Oh, I’ve been burning the midnight oil too long, not sleeping properly. I’ve eaten and drank some things I shouldn’t. I’ve been sedentary. I have some toxic relationships around me,” or whatever it may be. The expectation is, let’s get it dormant and keep it there.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I can remember growing up and, watching my parents and grandparents go to the doctor and it was just pills and potions. I don’t know what it was within me, but it seems like maybe my generation, and I’m a little bit older than you, but my generation, or at least from my perspective, was maybe one of the first generations that said, “You know what, I don’t want to take these pills. I don’t want to be stuck on high blood pressure medication for the rest of my life.” My wife, as an example, had an issue with a kidney stone 20 years ago. It was the first time she ever had a kidney stone in her life, and they wanted to put her on a medication for the rest of her life for kidney stones. She was like, “You know what? It’s the first time I’ve ever had one. I think I’m going to just kind of ride it out and see if I ever have a one again.” She’s never had one again. Is that something that you’re seeing with people that are younger, where they just say, “I don’t want to just suppress the symptoms. I want to figure out more of what it is.” Are the younger generations embracing this kind of thinking?
Dr. John Bartemus:
I think overall, they are. I think a driver of that is seeing our parents. Believe it or not, chapter one is on Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s actually is an autoimmune disease. I made a post about it yesterday on two new research articles coming up, talking about imbalanced microbiome driving Parkinson’s disease and researchers looking at Parkinson’s disease brains and finding the fungal species and bacterial species in the brain. I posted that on Facebook and one of my patients in Ohio said, “Man, I wish I knew this years ago. My father died with Parkinson’s, and he was on 28 medications.” I responded, “Holy poly-pharmacy.” Essentially, he was on medications for the side effects of medications at that point. Our generation has seen our grandparents and our parents basically die that way. They were on tons of meds and their quality of life continued to decline. We’re putting these pieces together like, “There’s got to be a better way.” I think that’s led to us wanting to be better advocates for our own health. So, I think overall, it’s moving that way, and functional medicine as a paradigm is seeking to optimize quality of life in the most natural way possible. Medications have a role. If I get hit by that bus, I’m going to need medications to stabilize me and keep me alive, but then when we are actually seeking health. Health is lack of medications as a baseline because for medication to be a medication, it actually has to be a drug. A drug is a less than a lethal dose of a toxin. The less lethal doses of a toxin you’re on, the healthier you are. The natural bent is growing. I think that’s what’s going to help make functional medicine 21st century healthcare. The obstacle right now is that pharmaceutical companies kind of own the marketing, and advertising, and the brains of the nation. We have to overcome that probably from a grassroots method. That’s where the book comes in because I can educate people with a book in a way that I probably can’t reach them with a TV commercial, without having millions and millions of dollars.
Rob Kosberg:
How can you compete against the billions of dollars that are coming from these pharmaceutical companies that are getting people on. Their intentions may be sincere. I mean, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, but they want to put somebody on a medication for the rest of their life. As I gave the simple example of my wife having a kidney stone, that just doesn’t make sense to me.
Dr. John Bartemus:
An example that will resonate with the autoimmune listeners out there is an autoimmune drug called Humira. We’re talking about rheumatoid arthritis or we’re talking about psoriasis and it’s offered to both of those patients. What that is, is it’s a biologic, meaning it’s going in and targeting the inflammatory chemicals that drive tissue destruction and drive pain, but I’ve had lots of people on those that don’t feel any better, and it’s like $1,800 a month. So, for the rest of your life, or is that sustainable if you’re not getting benefit? If we can say, “Listen, Rob. You’ve tried Humira. It hasn’t helped. It’s bankrupting you. Why don’t we investigate for causes? Why don’t we find the perpetrator? Why don’t we tackle that and observe if you get more benefit from that than you do from the Humira? Oh, by the way, the last 45 seconds of the commercial for Humira is, ‘Could die of cancer, tuberculosis, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.'” Nothing we’re going to do is going to provide those potential side effects. All we can do is win.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Now, obviously I mentioned at the beginning, you have people flying in from all over the world to come to your practice, to look into those three big words that you gave in the beginning. You gave us some insight into what those things are. You’ve talked about the microbiome several times. Can you give me a general lay of the land of what that might look like? If somebody has psoriasis, and obviously it being critical to the point where they really either need and they’re on medication, or thinking about it, but then they realize, “Okay, let’s deal with the perpetrator.” in your example.” What kind of battery of tests, or what things are you looking at for that individual that comes to you?
Dr. John Bartemus:
To me, protocol is a dirty word. I don’t have something that I do to everybody in terms of the same tests. My secret sauce is the initial workup. Initially, I need to know Rob’s history from birth to now because it all potentially matters and it could matter from, “Hey, these things are exacerbating your disease, or these things could help us neutralize it.” I want to look at those. Then, I want to request your previous medical records so I can see what’s been done, what hasn’t been done, what’s been called normal that to me isn’t, what have lab trends been, what treatments have worked or not worked? With all of that, I’m combining that with your history to say, “Rob, based on knowing you as thoroughly as I can up to the minute, here’s the five things from your history and records that are waving their hands saying look deeper over here.” Based on that, I want to look deeper over here with these tests, and the tests could be blood, or urine, or saliva, or stool, or genetic, or hair, or biopsy, or whatever we want to do to understand the red flags that we’re seeing in your case. When those come back, we now have gone from, “Here’s the five things that I think. These are informed guesses based on your case history that labs allow us to then say objectively, ‘Rob these three, forget about it. Disproven by X, Y, and Z right here. Those actually don’t matter. Cool. Don’t have to worry about it. But these two are proven by A, B and C right here.’” Now we’ve objectified clinical targets on paper at baseline. Then we can take action and retest down the road and say, “Remember this number? Now it’s this number. Great.” So, your physiology under the hood is changing. You can also fill out questionnaires along the way to say, “My quality of life is changing too. My anxiety is zero to a hundred percent better. My GI function, zero to a hundred percent better. My sleep, zero to a hundred percent better, my pain, et cetera.” Then I can say, “Rob, your physiology is changing. Your quality of life is changing. We’re winning. We’ve documented it. We’re both accountable to it. We can show other doctors. We could publish it in research.” In my book, every chapter is a case from my office on a given disease. Chapter one is Parkinson’s with this patient, chapter two, psoriasis, chapter three, Crohn’s. I’m nerdy enough to care about that stuff. I like to see change, but then it also helps you write a good book because here’s a real-life person. I just changed their name, but everything else is real. Here’s their labs at the beginning, here’s their labs at the end, here’s what we found. It helps people understand their own case in a way and understand, “Here’s the type of practitioner I need to find. If I’m not going to fly to Charlotte, is there one closer to me that’s practicing from this paradigm that can help me in a non-drug way or a least drug way?”
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Obviously, there are people flying to you because you’re doing something different. It sounds to me, from listening with layman’s ears, you’re treating every case as a complete individual, like you said, looking from birth to present. That includes genetics, history, I imagine diet, exercise, and then all of the medical records and then tests. I want to be treated right as an individual in every part of my life. Why wouldn’t I want to be treated as an individual when it comes to some kind of medical problem that I’m having?
Dr. John Bartemus:
That’s really the key for me. I’ve had some patients call conventional medicine, “McMedicine.” On average you get seven minutes and you leave with a prescription. Those doctors are less doctors than vending machines if you think about it. Right. Like you said, they got in not to be nefarious. They got in to actually help people, but they end up in the system that makes them a dispenser, and physician suicide is actually a very big issue. Part of it is because they’re not fulfilling their purpose, but they may not be aware of an option like functional medicine. They feel trapped and it’s like, “Oh, I got in all this. I have all these loans and I can’t even do what I thought I was going to be doing.” Another reason I wrote the book is because I wanted to help guide patients to the care they need. I also am hoping that it reaches practitioners and they can have that light bulb moment and be like, “Holy cow, I can go practice and help people the way I originally entered to do that.” They tell you to write at a sixth-grade level in my introduction. In the book, I said, “This is what they teach us to do. I’m not going to do that because in order to teach you what I need you to know you need to know higher than sixth grade level. So, I’m going to give you these nerdy terms, but I’m going to give you visualization, metaphors and pictures along the way.” I wanted to, with one book, help the Crohn’s patient and help the gastroenterologist that wants to help the Crohn’s patient beyond just doing a colonoscopy and saying Humira.
Rob Kosberg:
That brings up several questions and angles. Let me see if I can remember these and go through them. We were talking earlier, and I want to change gears just a little bit. We were talking earlier about the book and getting the book written. You’ve said several things that just lead me back to that. I think for anybody that is interested in writing a book, probably your experience is a good one. You are a content creator. You have a great YouTube channel. You have a great presence on social media. Talk to us about how The Autoimmune Answer came to be from the perspective of you ended up with a chapter on all of these different patient case studies that somebody can now, if they have Crohn’s, they don’t need to read your entire book. They can read the one chapter and get it. Talk to me about the challenge initially with the book you thought you were going to write, and how you got to the book that you actually wrote.
Dr. John Bartemus:
I was probably like many of my patients because as you said, I have a YouTube channel with almost 800 videos on it. I originally started the video to have content out there, to attract patients, but then I also knew that the longer my digital trail becomes, the more content I have, that I could transcribe and quickly produce a book out of it. When I joined BSP, I was speaking to some of the employees and I was like, “Listen, this is taking too long. I have the book right now. Let’s do it,” and they’re like, “Ah, just be patient follow the process.” Thankfully I did because the book I would have written, that I thought I had, would have been garbage. I wouldn’t be sitting here with you, but by following the BSP process, just like I followed my process, history first, medical records first, then testing, you guys said, “No, sit down and hash out a rough outline, then hash out a more in-depth outline. Then discuss it with people who know how to write and blah, blah, blah.” That led to a bestseller instead of something poor.
Rob Kosberg:
I love what you did too. I love the idea of you tackling these diseases individually. They may all come under the umbrella of autoimmune, but now somebody can get their answers without having to read hundreds of pages or scour the internet. They can go right to a case study and see how they fit into those exact shoes. I love what you did, and I imagine that it’s made a difference in your practice as well. Maybe you can talk for a moment about that. How do you use the book? In one sense, you’re educating your competition, which I mega respect. You just said something that a lot of people don’t say, and that is, “I didn’t want to just help the patient. I want to help these physicians that want to help patients.” You’re educating your competition, but you’re doing that obviously to help the end user. Talk to me about the whole package of using the book and goals there.
Dr. John Bartemus:
Before I jump into that, I just have to share an experience from yesterday because my staff, one of my staff’s wife bought my book. I have my book available on eBook, paperback, hardcover, Audible. She bought the Audible six months ago when it first came available to support me. She’s in here yesterday, sitting doing some therapy and she’s listening to the book and she told me that she told her husband Scott, “I listened to chapter one, which is on Parkinson’s disease. I finished chapter one and told Scott I think I have Parkinson’s.” Scott laughs and is like, “Your book is creating patients for you.” I didn’t write the book to talk people into something they don’t have, but I was thankful for that statement because it helps confirm for me that she’s a lay person and that chapter one might be the thickest in terms of science stuff, for those who are going to read it. If she left there really internalizing it and thinking, “Hey, I might have this,” instead of thinking, “Oh, that was too much science I’m out,” that made me happy because that was my goal. I don’t want to drive people away with the information. I want to pull them in and have them internalize it and maybe think a little differently than they have before. Audible is one way that I can reach people because again, we have to reach people the way they want to be reached. If I only publish a paperback, there’s a lot of people who aren’t going to read a 270-page paperback, but there’s a lot of people stuck in traffic who might listen to it. Audible opens a whole new world for me so I use it. It’s in every medium that it can be in. It’s available that way. When I work with patients, if they haven’t read it, I’ll include that in their plan so that they have the option to. It’s out there. I receive patients from it because there’s people in California that I don’t know, and Facebook or, whatever I’m using, maybe they haven’t found my YouTube channel, but they found the book. They read it. They read chapter five and have a history of head injury and realize, “Hey, this is me. I’ve never been helped. This guy I think can help me.” They read the case of a real person that probably had some of the things that they’ve suffered from so they can relate to that. It has been a direct patient attraction as well. Books author authority. It helped me have authority in a way that, no matter how many videos I have on YouTube, a book says authority higher than a YouTube channel. The book is something I’ve always known I was going to do and wanted to do. It’s a manifestation of thoughts become things for me. It’s a pride piece for me. It’s on my business card. Once it was published, I added author. It’s the next level thing where if you’re looking at multiple doctors in the community, I’m educating my competition, like you said. If it’s me versus three others, and I’m the one with the book, then again, from a perception basis, I’m the best whether or not that’s true. That’s one way. I have created an online course for teaching practitioners how to do the business side of functional medicine. I am a cash only business. If my book is swaying a medical doctor to go this route, a big obstacle for them as well, “I’ve always been on insurance. I’ve never had to learn marketing or advertising. Insurance does it for me.” So, holy cow, how do I run a business? How do I market? How do I get people in the door? My course assumes they have the clinical knowledge for functional medicine, but how do I implement it Monday in the office? Taking them through SOPs and things like that from a business standpoint. The book’s a stream of income, the course is a stream of income, and then I’m developing continuing education courses in immunology that I’ll teach to doctors because we all need continuing ed each year to maintain our licenses. It’s like, “Okay, you come to my course, I teach you the immunology.” The book can be a companion to that. I could provide a copy to everyone in the course, or I could offer it for sale at the course in the back of the room, and end the course with, “Hey, this has been great. If you want to learn how to implement this on Monday in your practice, I have this online course. Work through it at your own pace.” I have passive income, and I have a business model that if for some reason COVID hits and I can no longer see people in person or I just don’t want to see patients anymore, hopefully these other media can support me financially. I’m still helping patients, still helping doctors, still helping the world.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. I don’t normally do it on a podcast, but while we’re talking about, I think it will be helpful. I have two clients come to mind that have cash practices. One is Dr. Raj, who does stem cell therapy. He uses his book that we helped him with, in conjunction with an online funnel, and free plus shipping, similar to my stuff, but ultimately leads to either a paid appointment with him or a free appointment with his staff. Then that leads to them becoming a client. Of course, stem cell is not even something that can be insured. It has to be a check that’s written. He has patients flying in from all over the country, similar to your practice. That’s how he does it, which is cool. He used to do individual conferences, and he would put a hundred people in a room and then teach on stem cell and then sign people up, but he was doing so many of them that it was a real drag. The book became his way of getting to those hundred people without ever having to go do a conference. That could be for 50 million people, on the low side, in the United States. You and I spoke about Dr. Stockson, that he likes to travel and speak. He’s single. You have 11 things going on, five of them being your children. You don’t want to do a lot of traveling, but what he did with being on the editorial boards of all of these magazines has led to this thriving referral-based business as well. That could be a great strategy. So anyway, just food for thought there. That’s a great piece of your business right there.
Dr. John Bartemus:
Again, we can always help more people and you talk about educating my competitors. There is no competition because we’re all going to attract the people who are meant to be in our practices. I can’t handle 50 million patients on the low end, and we talked about physician suicide earlier. the numbers projected out to 2030 are that the US will be at a 120,000-physician deficit. I don’t have competition. I need help. Next week I have a biomedical engineering student who graduated and is like, “I don’t want to be in biomedical sales. I want to help people.” She’s coming in to shadow me to see, “Is this what I want to do?” I’ve had University of South Carolina students come shadow because again, if you’re in the conventional medical model, functional medicine isn’t taught in any of the schools. It wasn’t taught in my school. It’s not in any of the schools. It’s postgraduate stuff. So you’re going to have to go get the degrees that are there to vet your ticket into the game, but then to be the doctor you want to be, if it’s in the functional medicine realm, you’re going to have to go get more. If we can, while you’re going through the stuff that may not necessarily apply to real life when you get out, if you can shadow or have a mentor, or have a program, or have a book, have something to keep you focused on why you’re really going through all this, we’re going to be more successful at graduating practitioners that can then come out and do what I’m doing and what Doctor Stockson is doing and these other doctors.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s a massive need. I have a number of really good friends that are doctors, and I hate to say it, but most of them hate their life. They hate the seven-minute grind. They hate dealing with the insurance companies. That’s not what they got into medicine for. I don’t need to tell you that. You know that better than I do, but I have experienced that with my friends. These are the smartest guys, the best hearted people. They’re like, “Man, how can I give the right care in a 15-minute appointment,” and they’ve got 15 of those throughout the day. I mean, they are wasted at the end of their day. It’s rough.
Dr. John Bartemus:
I have medical doctor patients. They’re there and it’s real. These people want to do the right thing and want to help you, but the model they’re in doesn’t allow them. When I came out in practice, I said, “I’m going to build my practice around my life, not my life around my practice.” Working with Rob allows you to do that because again, it creates the authority. It’s an income generator, a patient generator. It’s just a way to do it, to allow you to thrive in a cash world so you don’t have to enter that insurance model and be enslaved to a seven-minute visit. To practitioners who are out there wondering, “Can I do this?” Absolutely, you can do this, and you don’t have to have a YouTube channel or any of that. All you have to do is have a passion for an idea that Rob and his team can then help you sit down and hash out the outline and they have the steps laid out. You just have to commit to doing it. I remember when I held the first paper back. It was like my sixth child. When the eBook was published, that was cool, but it’s still kind of out there in the ether. When I have that physical paperback right there and I can hold it and smell it and highlight it, that’s awesome. If you’re on the fence, jump off onto the BSP side for sure.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, thank you. Thank you for your kind words. Great, great interview. Let’s give some people directions on where they get more information either on the patient side or on the physician side. Let’s tell them where they can find you and take next steps.
Dr. John Bartemus:
The book is on Amazon, of course, The Autoimmune Answer, in any form that you want it. My practice website is FunctionalMedicineCharlotte.com, just spelled out normal. My YouTube channel, if you just go on YouTube and search John Bartemus, my channel will come up, and there’s hours and hours of free content for patients or doctors who are interested. If you want more information, I’d say just contact through the contact page on my website. That’s the best way. I do offer a complimentary 15-minute consultations to patients so I can get to know you, can get to know me, are we a good fit together, or can I point you to the right place for you.
Rob Kosberg:
Thanks for what you’re doing. Thanks for the practice that you built. I love it. I think it’s a great model for other physicians to follow and obviously for the people that you serve. So, thanks for being with us on the podcast today, my friend.
Dr. John Bartemus:
Yeah, my pleasure and privilege. Thank you for having me.
