Webinar Link https://gut.alessifunctionalhealth.com/main-page
(0:00) Introduction, health care costs, and gut health signals (1:20) Total Gut Reset protocol and patient story (3:30) Real cost of not fixing health issues (3:45) Overview: Cost of conventional sick care (4:27) Design flaws in insurance-based healthcare (6:02) Comparing costs: Functional medicine vs. conventional care (7:05) Opportunity costs of ignoring health issues (13:14) Prevention vs. disease management (13:59) Who Ascend Functional Health serves (15:22) Upcoming episode preview (16:29) Call to action and contact information (16:58) Closing remarks and subscription reminder00:00:00
Average American family spends approximately $25 a year on health care.
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Premiums, deductibles, co pays, out of pocket.
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That number is higher in Florida for many demographics as well.
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So let that sink in, know, dollars 25 a year.
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And for most people, the return on that investment is, Hey, we'll treat your heart
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attack when it comes around.
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Or, We'll manage your type two diabetes with this medication.
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Come back when you need a higher dose.
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Here, we'll prescribe some antidepressants for your hormone driven mood disorder.
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That is a reactive system.
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We are living in a reactive system, and you're paying an enormous amount of money to be caught
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when you fall, not to be kept from falling in the first place.
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Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
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host, doctor Alessi and Matt Tack.
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Health Decoded listeners, if you're dealing with bloating that just won't go away no matter
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what you eat, no matter what you try, I need you to hear this.
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The bloating isn't the problem.
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It's a signal.
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Every external symptom you're experiencing, the discomfort, the fatigue, the frustration has a
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root cause.
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And in my years of clinical practice, it almost always leads back to the gut.
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Nothing else in your body can fully heal until that foundation is restored.
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I built this framework from my own health journey.
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I was that patient, frustrated, dismissed, searching for answers.
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I took everything I learned, refined it through years of clinical testing, and have since
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helped hundreds of patients achieve complete relief from their symptoms.
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That became the Total Gut Reset, a step by step protocol with one goal, reset your gut in six
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months or less.
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If you're ready to learn exactly what's causing your symptoms and eliminate them for good, I'm
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hosting a free webinar where I walk you through the entire framework.
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The link is in the show notes.
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Go ahead and register, and I'll see you there.
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Few months ago, I remember talking with a patient who came to see me who had been in the
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conventional health care system for ten plus years trying to solve her health problems.
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Ten years.
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And in that time, had seen her primary care physician, endocrinologist, a rheumatologist, a
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gastroenterologist, a psychiatrist who prescribed her antidepressants for symptoms
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that were, as we later discovered, actually hormonal.
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She had insurance, you know, on paper, really good insurance.
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She paid her premiums every month like clockwork.
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When she sat down with me, she had done some math.
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I remember she had a piece of paper she even brought with her and she was almost embarrassed
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to show it to me.
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Over ten years between premiums, co pays, specialist visits, prescriptions, out of pocket
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costs for things that her insurance wouldn't cover, she had spent just over $74 on her
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health.
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$74 and she still wasn't even well.
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She looked at me and she said, you know, I almost didn't come to see you because I
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couldn't justify the cost of a cash pay clinic.
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But then I looked at that number and I was like rocked by this.
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And this is the conversation that we need to have today because the question is never just
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what it cost.
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The question is what does it cost to not fix this?
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So welcome back to Health Decoded.
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I'm Doctor.
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Alessi.
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In this episode, this is episode two of a four part mini series that I'm putting together.
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Last week we talked about the difference between not being sick and actually performing
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at your best potential.
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This week, we're gonna talk a little bit more specifically about money, specifically why the
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framing that most people use when they evaluate healthcare spending is backwards and what the
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real cost of conventional sick care actually is.
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I know this topic makes some people uncomfortable and good, it probably should
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because the story you've been told about how to invest in your health is one of the most
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expensive lies in modern medicine.
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And it's about what your insurance actually pays for.
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And so let's start with the fundamental design flaw of insurance based healthcare.
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It is not designed to keep you healthy.
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It is designed to pay for your illness once you're sick enough to require intervention.
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Think about what your insurance actually covers: visits to the hospitalizations,
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surgical procedures, acute illness management, prescription medications specialist visits
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after referrals and prior authorizations What your insurance does not cover or covers so
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minimally as to basically be useless is root cause investigation, comprehensive hormone
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testing, functional nutrition assessments, gut microbiome analysis, micronutrient testing,
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peptide therapy, bioidentical hormone optimization, preventative protocols used
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before disease actually manifests.
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In other words, everything that would actually prevent you from needing the expensive
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interventions that insurance does cover.
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Now let's look at the economics.
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The average American family spends approximately $25 a year on health care.
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Premiums, deductibles, co pays, out of pocket.
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That number is higher in Florida for many demographics as well.
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So let that sink in, know, dollars 25 a year and for most people the return on that
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investment is, hey, we'll treat your heart attack when it comes around or we'll manage
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your type two diabetes with this medication, come back when you need a higher dose.
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Here we'll prescribe some antidepressants for your hormone driven mood disorder.
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That is a reactive system.
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We are living in a reactive system and you're paying an enormous amount of money to be caught
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when you fall, not to be kept from falling in the first place.
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Compare that to what functional medicine costs.
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A comprehensive initial workup at Ascend Functional Health, including labs that no
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conventional physician would actually order, runs a fraction of what most patients have
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already spent on conventional carousel.
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A six month protocol, all inclusive.
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It's a number that makes people pause because until they do what this woman did and actually
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add up what they've been spending, they don't really understand.
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Now, this isn't a cheap alternative that I'm talking about.
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We operate a premium clinical model, but the comparison point is not free.
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The comparison point is those ten plus years of specialist visits, prescriptions, co pays that
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didn't even really solve the problem.
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Now anybody who knows economics or business or these types of terms understands the term of
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opportunity cost.
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That's the cost that nobody's actually calculating.
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And so here is where most people stop the conversation at the dollar figure on the
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invoice.
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But there's a second ledger that almost nobody looks at.
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I call it the opportunity cost of not getting this right.
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And I want to walk you through this because when you see the full picture, your framing can
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actually change.
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And this is something that we have to coach through patients is the first opportunity cost
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is that productive output.
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So if you're more of a high functioning professional and you're operating 70% of your
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cognitive and physical capacity, which is where most of my patients are when they come to see
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me, what is that costing you?
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If you run a business, you make decisions, you lead people, you generate revenue, your
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cognitive performance is your most valuable professional asset.
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And operating with brain fog, fatigue, mood dysregulation, it's not just uncomfortable,
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it's expensive.
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If optimizing your function gets you back to 90 or 100%, what is that worth in additional
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output?
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What is that number?
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It's not a small number, I know that.
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Now, the second opportunity cost that is so important is time.
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Again, the conventional healthcare system is extraordinarily time expensive.
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The average wait time to see a specialist in The United States is several weeks to months.
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Then you get twelve to fifteen minutes with the physician.
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Then you wait for your labs.
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Then you wait for a follow-up.
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Then they refer you to another specialist and you start again.
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The patient I talked about earlier had seen six different physicians over that ten plus years.
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That is hundreds of hours of her life.
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Time off of work, time in the waiting room, time on the phone with insurance companies,
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time that she will never get back and at the end of it, she still didn't have an actual
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concrete answer.
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The third opportunity cost is the compounding health decline.
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This is the one that keeps me up at night as a clinician because every year that goes by
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without addressing the root cause of a health problem is a year that problem compounds.
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It's not linear.
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Insulin resistance that goes unaddressed becomes type two diabetes.
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Chronic inflammation that goes unaddressed becomes cardiovascular disease, autoimmunity,
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neurodegeneration, things like Alzheimer's.
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Hormonal imbalances that go unaddressed, these accelerate bone loss, muscle loss, and
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cognitive decline.
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They're not hypothetical.
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These are the natural progressions of unaddressed root causes.
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And once you're managing a chronic disease, truly managing it, the lifetime cost of that
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disease dwarfs anything you would have spent to prevent it.
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Now, the fourth opportunity cost is your quality of life.
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I'm gonna say something that sounds obvious, but it needs to be said.
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You cannot get back the years you spent not feeling like yourself.
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The forties and fifties when you could have been performing at your best, showing up for
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your family, doing the work you care about at the level you're capable of those years are not
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replaceable.
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This is the only true finite resource.
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Investing in your health isn't for vanity it's a rational allocation of resources toward the
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thing that makes everything else possible.
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The fifth opportunity cost is what we talk about our downstream medical costs later on.
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And so, let me give you some numbers to anchor to this.
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The average lifetime cost of managing type two diabetes, including medications, complications,
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hospitalizations, associated conditions because it's not always just the one thing, is
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estimated at over $300 for the average person.
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The average total healthcare cost for someone with cardiovascular disease in the decade after
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their first cardiac event is around that same, dollars 300 to $350 These are not
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unusual patients.
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These are the predictable outcomes of the chronic inflammation, the insulin resistance,
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and the hormone disruption that the conventional system catches often far too late.
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Now, prevention is not just cheaper.
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Prevention is exponentially cheaper.
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And yet, we culturally accept that spending enormous amounts of money on disease management
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while hesitating at the cost of prevention, that the hesitation is one of the most
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expensive decisions that a person can make.
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And so how to think about it is to think about your health as your most important asset as an
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investment.
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I want to give you a framework for thinking about this that is different from how most
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people approach their healthcare spending.
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When a high performing professional evaluates a business investment, they don't just ask, What
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does this cost?
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They ask themselves, What is the risk of not making this investment?
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And what does this enable that wouldn't otherwise be possible?
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Now, if you apply that framework to your health, what is the return on getting your
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hormones optimized?
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Having more energy, better cognitive function, improved body composition, better mood,
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emotional regulation, better relationships?
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How about sharper professional performance?
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What's the return on healing your gut?
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A reduction in inflammation?
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Better immune function?
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Improved nutrients absorption?
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How about the reduced risk of chronic disease?
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What is the return on having a complete clinical picture of your biology?
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Well, you stop guessing.
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You stop spending money on things that don't work.
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You get a protocol that is actually designed for you and for your system.
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The return isn't an abstract, it's measurable.
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I track it in biomarkers at every follow-up and it compounds.
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The better your health, the more everything else in your life will function at a higher
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level.
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And so, what is the risk of not making that investment?
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Well, we just went through that compounding decline.
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It's preventable chronic disease, lost years of performance and quality of life.
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Eventually, medical costs that dwarf what the prevention would have actually cost you in the
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first place because there's a window of time at which prevention is an option.
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Now, what does this enable?
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It enables you to have a version of your fifties and sixties that's not about managing
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decline, but about continuing to build.
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And that's not a small thing.
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Look around you.
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How many people do you know in their fifties or sixties who are optimizing their health?
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Who are managing and actually building their health, not just managing a 100 different
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diseases?
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I'm not telling you that functional medicine is free.
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It's not.
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I'm telling you that when you look at the full picture, not just the invoice, but the
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opportunity cost of the alternative, it's one of the highest return investments you will
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actually ever make.
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Now, let's get into a little bit about who this is for and maybe who this isn't for.
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Because it might not be for you and it might not be for everyone.
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And I want to be straightforward with you about who Ascend Functional Health is designed for
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and who it isn't.
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We are not for the person who's looking for the quick fix or the cheapest possible option.
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We're a premium protocol driven clinic model.
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We invest significant resources into every patient, advanced testing, personalized
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protocols, comprehensive follow ups.
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It's a lot of time that I and my team put into it and that has a cost.
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We are for the person who has decided that their health is not a place to cut corners,
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that they understand that the body is a system and that system deserves the same level of
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attention and investment that they give to their business, their home, their relationship,
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their retirement account, who's done accepting normal when they know they're capable of a lot
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more.
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If you've been on the conventional carousel of medicine and you've had the co pays, the
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specialists, the prescriptions, and you still don't have the answers you want, I want to have
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a different kind of conversation with you.
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I want to have the conversation that starts with a complete picture and ends with a
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protocol that's actually built for your biology.
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And if you've never tried to get to the root cause because you assumed it would be too
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expensive, I want you to do what a lot of my patients do.
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Get a piece of paper, add up what you've already spent, ask yourself, is this status quo
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actually cheaper?
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Now, I know that this episode can ruffle some feathers.
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It can make people uncomfortable to have these kind of conversations.
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And I even debated whether or not I was going to film this.
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But I think it's at that point in our country right now where people are not understanding
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that they are just a piece, of they're just a rabbit on a wheel in this conventional medicine
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model.
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And you're getting just worked through a system that isn't designed for you.
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It's designed for managing hundreds and thousands of different people it's never going
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to really be personalized.
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And so, I want you to stay with me here.
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Next week, episode three of this mini series, we're going to do a clinical breakdown of why
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the things you've already tried, the diets, the medications, the supplements even from the
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health food store haven't produced lasting results.
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It's not because you did anything wrong, but because those approaches weren't designed to
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address the root cause and they weren't personalized to you.
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And that's a significant conversation worth having.
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If today's episode connected with you, if you've been hesitating on the cost side of
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things and this may be reframed how you're thinking about it, come talk to us.
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A discovery call costs you nothing.
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We'll look at where you are, what you've tried, and we'll be upfront too if Ascend Functional
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Health is even the right fit for you.
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The link is always in the show notes, ascendfunctionalhealth.com.
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I'm Doctor.
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Lesse.
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Thank you for joining me today on Health Decoded, and I'll see you next week.
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Thank you for tuning into Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things health
00:17:03
and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
00:17:06
If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
00:17:11
someone who needs to hear this.
00:17:13
For more resources, personalized support, or to have your questions answered live on the show,
00:17:18
visit Ascend Functional Health and head to the contact page to connect with us directly.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember, your health is in your hands.