157 : Why Functional Medicine Went Mainstream After Being Dismissed for Years

0:00Welcome to Keeping a Breast with Dr. Jen. I'm Dr. Jen Simmons. Breast cancer surgeon turned to integrative physician and founder of Perfection, Imaging and Wellness. I spent years operating on breast cancer. Then I became the patient. That experience showed me something I couldn't unsee. We've been treating disease and calling it healthcare. We've been screening for cancer and calling it prevention. Women weren't being given the information they needed to actually consent to their own care. Not the full picture, not the real options, just protocol. So I left and I built something different. And here's the thing. Breast health is health. So this show isn't confined to breast cancer. Here we dive deep into all the places medicine has been getting it wrong. Pormones, metabolism, aging, the whole picture. And we replace the old convention with real evidence and real choices. This is keeping abreast with Dr. Jen. Let's get into it. Stay with us. This is a conversation you won't want to miss.

1:05I couldn't be more excited for our guests today because not only is she a brilliant, accomplished, caring, amazing woman and physician, but she's also someone who I consider a friend. And it's so nice to be able to share this time with her and to share the special sides of her with you. So I want to welcome Robin Burzen to the show. Dr. Robin Burzen is a physician who really mainstreamed something that is so very important, which is functional medicine. And for so long, functional medicine was something that most people couldn't get to, couldn't utilize because they didn't have access to it. And she took a system which had functional medicine in a separate bucket and brought it to everyone. And she is making thousands and thousands and thousands of people healthier as a result. And I've just been watching her and her trajectory in awe. And I'm

2:11just so excited to have her here today to share with you. So Dr. Burzen, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. The best podcaster when you get to do them with friends. So I've been looking forward to this conversation very much. I'm so excited to. And, you know, of course, I want you to start out and talk about your origin story. Like, why was it important for you to be a doctor? Why did you want to go into medicine? And how did that all start for you? You know, I was not pre-med in undergrad. So I was one of those people who had to go back and do their pre-med classes in like an extra year of undergrad. And I always share that first because I remind people that you don't always know exactly what you want to do when you graduate from college. And that's on time. What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? What did you do in college? You did your national relations and economics major. And yeah. And like a minor in English and French. Although fun story, I, you have to write like a big paper at the end of college for this major that

3:15I did, which they call a senior thesis. You have to write this like ginormous really long paper. I think it was mine was like 80 pages long. And I had to pick a topic for it. And I was really interested in health. And so I did my senior thesis on the dispute between the European Union, the EU and the United States on hormone treated beef. And whether the fact that the United States treats nearly 90 plus percent or greater of its beef with hormones is a health risk or not. And the US had sued the European Union through the World Trade Organization for not letting in US beef. And the grounds that the EU wouldn't let it in was that the beef in the US is all hormone treated. And the European Union said this is bad for human health. And so the entire grounds of this massive hundreds of millions of dollars lawsuit on the global stage was around the impact of hormones in our meat supply on things like cancer and early puberty. And basically the US was like it's

4:19baloney. The EU just wants to keep our beef out to protect their own cattle industry, its BS. And the EU had all this science around the impacts of hormones. And the end of this whole thing was that the European Union loses the World Trade Organization says there's not enough science that hormones impact health. You're just doing this to protect your industry. And so the EU said we'll find we'll pay the US these fines like hundreds of millions of dollars of fines every year to still keep out their beef because we don't think it's healthy. And so if you look all the way back to my street. What's real with that? This is in 2003. I'm in Taiwan. And so it's like hilarious because sometimes you do these things in life that you think have literally nothing to do with anything. And after that, you know, I go work in New York for a while. And then I decide to go back to undergrad to do my pre-med classes. And I'm going to go to med school. But you look back at these things that at the time kind of don't make sense or aren't really relevant to anything. And then

5:20looking back, it's like, of course, I did something on public health, food supply, endocrinology, cancer risk. Of course. Well, out of curiosity at the time, what were you thinking in that were you thinking while the Europeans really have a point? Yes. I was. I was already had this personal interest in health and prevention. You know, my grandmother had died of colon cancer my sophomore year. And I had been in a class at my undergrad as well that year on cancer and sort of the biology epidemiology, sociology of cancer. Everyone's getting real torre of my college experience. I'm sorry, everyone will get to the functional medicine part. But in that class, I had learned that 50% of cancer is preventable. And that stopped at the time. Again, this is back. That was back in like 2001 really shocked me. And it gave me some exposure to doing medical research. And this was like the early days, everyone of

6:23medical research being on the internet. It was really new to be able to go to PubMed and look up articles. There was something called avid at the time that was like impossible to use. And so I think that there was just this germ really early for me around health, prevention, and public health in our environmental health that really was always there. But I didn't think of myself as a science person or a math person kind of the typical person that was going to go to med school. I had a lot of preconceived notions about who that person was, which was silly of me. But I did. And so it wasn't really until after college that I said, you know, I actually really want to work in health. And I think I want to get a medical degree. And I think looking back, all of these experiences really shaped my perspective going into my medical training. Wow. For sure. That's an amazing story. So I'm guessing you don't come from a family of doctors. I sort of do my dad's a doctor. Nobody else is, but my dad is a doctor. Yes. Okay. What kind of medicine did your father

7:28practice? Does he still practice? He doesn't know. He's retired, but he was an internal medicine doc for a long, long time. And is that where your preconceived notions of who doctors are and what they're like came from? You know, he was a history major at my same college. So like, I don't know why I thought I couldn't be a doctor, but I think it's like typical, you know, you want to rebel against your parents and you're just not whatever they do. You're not going to do it. You're not doing it. And have any of those ideas came from maybe the other kids I met in college. I don't know. There was sort of a premed type where I went to school and I just didn't think, think of myself that way. And I had never been interested in medicine. I was always more of a words person, not a numbers person. And I had whatever reason categorized the field of medicine as numbers. And really, the field of medicine is about digesting very large quantities of information, being able to synthesize them, sort them, pattern recognition and make fast decisions and then also being able

8:29to relate to people. And that stuff is way more important than, you know, your ability to finish a chemistry equation. And so I think in that way, a lot of the premed classes you take, organic chemistry, physics, regular chem are almost, they're important for going into the field of medicine, but they almost are a little bit of a red herring in a way in terms of what your actual job as a doctor is eventually going to be about. I mean, you're a surgeon, or breast cancer expert, like you're not doing chemistry and physics equations as part of your job, right? And like, that stuff just no longer has a lot to do with it, I would imagine. Yeah. So I always thought of it as, well, if you can do that, then you can definitely do what you need to do as a doctor. Like, I thought it was just kind of a right of passage, more or less. Like if you can get through all of this kind of really, really tedious work, then you're going to be fine out there as a physician.

9:30But I agree with you 100%. You know, maybe plastic surgeons do think about some of those principles, as they're designing their incisions and thinking about how they're going to put things back together in a way that was better than how they were before. But outside of that, you know, once we learn how to calculate hydrostatic pressure, we're not using it again when your patient is in front of you crashing. Like, you know, we're not thinking about the rules of osmolality. But, but, but I do think that it's a little bit of, can you play this game in that? Are you going to be able to synthesize all of this information? So let's get, let's give you a trial run. Here's some really boring stuff. If you can get through this, then I think you can figure out human physiology. I think that's, I mean, I think there is something to the rigor and the shared difficulty of it.

10:30At least it was difficult for me. You know, I remember thinking biology was a cinch and chemistry was really hard for me and actually organic chemistry in that post-back pre-med year that I had to go back and do. I kind of did better in too because I'm good at picturing things and visualization. And I could picture all the molecules and whether the confirmation of the molecule was the right way or the left way. And so my ability to picture things sort of did me well there. But when it was pure math in chemistry, I really struggled. And, you know, nothing of what I do today involves me solving equations, right? It is much more about the ability to have really memorized and synthesized huge quantities of information around all aspects of human health and then be able to make the right decisions around that. And I think that, I don't know, I didn't really understand what being a doctor was. And I think a lot of us, you know, if you're listening and you're thinking

11:32back to whatever your undergrad or your high school was and you ended up doing something different, I think that's a pretty common story. But for whatever reason, I didn't think I was going to be a doctor and never even thought about it. So then I had to go back and do this whole year of all these pre-med classes. But that inkling around population health prevention, environmental health, nutrition was there early on. I just couldn't pick up the thread of it until later. So you went to a conventional medical school. But your career is anything but so talk to me about how that happened for you. And when that enlightenment came about for you, I know sometimes I'm like, I wonder what the people of Columbia University Medical Center think of me if they ever do. There's definitely people who've come out of that institution and done weirder things than me though. So I'm sure I'm not alone. I think what they thought of you, and I'm guessing, right? Because I actually, I'm very

12:35much in a lived experience right now with someone who I consider a colleague being very, very critical of me right now. And I know that what I'm saying right now in the breast imaging space is going to be what people were saying five years ago in the functional medicine space. I'm like, who's laughing now in the functional medicine space, right? And it's going to be the same thing in five years in the breast imaging space. But in any event, I think what they would have said about you five years ago or seven years ago is very different than what they today. They're smiling year to year. Super proud that you came from there. One of these Columbia grads went off into functional medicine and wasn't crazy. You know, I mean, my mom even brought up with me the other day. I think the New York Times or something like that, maybe the journal had an article about inflammation and how it drives every disease process. And she was like, you've been saying this for 15 years and functional medicine.

13:38And now it's finally, you know, becoming conventional. And so I think, you know, at Columbia, whatever, I was just another medical student. And I knew what I wanted to go into functional medicine, which for everyone listening, if you're not familiar with functional medicine, is really just a different way of seeing medicine. We use all the same tools. We use drugs. We use tests. We use procedures. We refer to specialists. We do all the same stuff. We're all doctors. But we look at the world differently and we say to ourselves, what is the root cause of this condition? And what's the best way to treat that root cause? And so it's a much more in-depth, personalized, preventive, and holistic way of practicing medicine while using all the cool advanced conventional medicine tools that we do and that I was trained to use at Columbia, which is what I love about it. Because it's not natural or the highway and it's not totally in the box. It just takes this broader perspective. And so I was fortunate enough to

14:38know about functional medicine a little bit going into medical school. And to at that point, have become a little bit of a health nut myself in so far as like, I was into yoga. And I would always be getting on the train to go downtown in the city to take yoga class. And I would pack my lunch and I would have this healthy lunch. And so all the kids would be eating the really gross pizza and Chinese food that they feed medical student with this like, chronic when you think about it. But I was like the one who packed the healthy lunch and you know, got made fun of. And so I was this other person. But why? Why did you pack the healthy lunch? And why did you know about functional medicine? So I decided to go to medical school already with this idea that I was interested in what I would have called then integrative medicine. I had gotten into after college, I was working in New York City. I was not in medicine right away. I actually worked in a legal job for a little while. And I was at the paralegal of the US Attorney's Office and I was on the Martha Stewart trial at one

15:43point prosecuting poor Martha for her insider trading. No way. And I remember thinking somebody should definitely prosecute securities fraud. But I just don't think it should be me. I am so bored I could just fall over. And I was escaping downtown and Manhattan by like going to this random little yoga studio that I had found like in the middle of the day. Like if I had a couple hours, I'd like leave. I'd come back drenched and sweat and like put my clothes back. My business casual paralegal clothes like back on and freeze in the office. And I was getting I just found through my yoga practice. I think it was honestly just one more way that I tapped into the body, the mind, health. I started paying attention through that to what I was eating. And you know, I was like a typical college student not eating necessarily very healthfully. But I started thinking about eating organic food and what I was putting in my body. And I realized that through yoga and slowing down

16:45and eating better, I felt better. I also felt better in my body like as a young woman at the time or at least in college, I sort of thought that healthy was sort of defined by the number on the inside of the waistband of your jeans. Like healthy equal skinny. But that's what we were taught. That's what we thought, right? And then sort of through yoga and changing the way that I eat and developing a little bit of a spiritual practice and meditating a little bit, I just became more aware, more aware of food, more aware of the chemicals that were in products around me. I think like some of these things are almost cultural, right? And then again, when you look back to my college experience in this interest in health and nutrition was already there, I just glommed on to these things. I became really passionate about them very quickly. And I went to Columbia already with the idea I worked in psych research and NYU for a year to kind of get my feet wet in medicine. I wasn't so interested in psych specifically. Like I didn't want to be a

17:45psychiatrist, but I needed like a job in medicine. So I worked at NYU for a bit because I knew I had to do that to get into medical school. That was really interesting. And it was actually running pharmaceutical trials for ADHD mainly. Some other interesting addiction work too, but the ADHD stuff is ironic because I really realized later that I have ADHD. And now I have a child with ADHD. So I really, you know, some again, everyone you think you're doing these random things just to get to the next step in life, but they all have a reason. And so I went into medical school at Columbia already being what they would have described as like the weirdo who doesn't want to be a cardiac surgeon, which is like what everyone in Columbia is basically there to do, not everybody, but you know, that's like the proverbial. A lot of it's a very surgical specialty. Yeah, it's a top-based or CT surgery and fields like that. So I listened. My class was amazing. The people I met were incredible. Everyone was brilliant. And I remember as I was applying to medical school thinking, I just want

18:50to go to the best place possible and have the strongest credentials and foundation I possibly can because I know that I'm going to go off into this other field. And I don't want people questioning me and saying that I don't know what I'm talking about. And so I just kind of knew it from the beginning, but I knew I had to get this conventional training to have the confidence and the background to be able to then use that to do something that I really believed in, which again, I would have called integrative medicine maybe, but I also was lucky enough to early and before medical school actually know Mark Heimann and Dr. Oz. I worked for Dr. Oz in Oprah for a year when I was waiting to go to med school. And so Mark had sent me the Institute for Functional Medicine's textbook when I was like the radio producer for Oprah for Oz's radio shows, another weird job I had for a while while I was waiting to go to med school. And I kind of knew about functional medicine from him and from some of

19:53the other doctors who were in the field in like the mid-2000s 20 years ago. And I had this inkling and I had this exposure that I truly think God put me in those places to get and made that made me an odd up at a place like Columbia. Yeah, although not that odd in some ways because you know at the time that's where Dr. Oz was chairman of this cardiac surgery department. You know, he went off in a totally different direction eventually too from 20 years ago, but when I knew him, he was mostly, believe it or not, a cardiac surgeon at Columbia and he was doing all these other things like homicide. Yeah, yeah. And he was a very good surgeon by the way for anyone who's curious about that. He was considered one of the best cardiac surgeons ever and I've been in the OR with him a long long long time ago and you know, he is an incredible surgeon or was. So. And a super talented guy and I think has lent a lot of credibility to the yes and and what you started off with which is

21:00that it as a functional medicine physician and we're going to talk about the the problem with that whole functional medicine title because it a lot of people are putting that on their business card and putting it on their shingle and so it makes it makes the value of it a little confusing, right? Yes, because you don't know what you're getting and there's everything from snake oil salesmen to people who are really, really, really doing a good job. Yes, and everyone in the room and real science. Yes, I mean, it started partially health, essentially to solve that problem. I mean, to make functional medicine easier and easy to work with and one of the things I observed because I ultimately went and trained with Mark for a little bit and I also mainly worked with a top functional medicine doc in New York City for about a year and sort of apprenticed myself. This is after my conventional medical training. And what I saw across

22:03the field quickly was that it was inconsistent, different kinds of providers inconsistent across protocols, really expensive, hard to find, not covered by insurance and everything about it was like too hard. I was like, okay, if we want to bring this medicine to the world because it's so powerful because the other thing I saw in the time when I was practicing functional medicine working for some of these guys was that the medicine itself is incredibly powerful and effective. We were helping women get pregnant who couldn't otherwise get pregnant. We were reversing auto immune disease. We were curing GI illnesses, cleaning up people's metabolic health, solving their migraines, getting rid of their depression and chronic fatigue. I mean, the list went on and I could see all of this incredible outcomes, but I just said, okay, these tiny private practices that are hella expensive and the ones I was working in were all doctors,

23:03but there was lots to your point that were all sorts of people sort of cleaning. They were doing functional medicine and I said, this just isn't going to be primetime unless we bring more rigor, we streamline the protocols, we ensure everything is evidence-based, we ensure everybody has a strong conventional medical training in addition to their functional training and really parsley was just a response in some ways to what I saw in the world that was blocking functional medicine from getting to the people who would need it most. Yeah, and I love what you said about the fact that you know, it's not just nutraceuticals and the things that you find outside of the conventional system, it's everything married together. A little bit of what drives me crazy is I have at least two patients a week who come to me because they don't want surgery or chemotherapy or radiation for their breast cancer. And I don't know how I became the person who you go to when you don't

24:10want conventional treatment because I am not in any way against conventional treatment. I think that we have to use everything we have and I think that what each person needs is different and everyone should get what they need. So how we how I became the person that only does let's call it alternative medicine, I don't know because it's not who I am, not what I do and not what I believe it. And I think it bled out of some of these other practices which are that all or nothing that you were talking about and that's not it, right? That's not it. No, I don't believe in natural or the highway. I always say don't rake your UTI away. Take a U antibiotic into the vomit. And you know, but if you're getting UTIs over and over again, taking antibiotics over and over again is an unsustainable path. So let's figure out why on earth are getting UTIs all the time. Fix your diet, fix the microbiome, do a

25:12bit of reset. And for a lot of folks were able to help them treat them with vaginal S-bin, you know, like whatever it is. And that's the point that drove me not some conventional medicine. It was like you have a UTI, take another antibiotic over and over and over again. No one's stopping and pausing and saying, what is the root cause? Why is this treatment not working? Why are we just doing this over and over again? Or migraines, for example, you know, giving people different pain killers and then sumatriptans and then Botox and all of these different symptomatic treatments when the cause of the migraine was this person has sleep apnea and isn't breathing at night or this person's allergic to dairy really freaking simple stop dairy of the migraine, right? And so that's what I loved about functional medicine was this stop, look more broadly, get the data and then use the best treatment for the condition at hand. And sometimes that's a drug and sometimes that's a food and sometimes that's a supplement and sometimes that's a lifestyle intervention and sometimes that's all of the

26:16above. And functional medicine's ability in some ways, you know, it's so much more complex to practice functional medicine than it is primary care. Primary care today is like a list of formulas and protocols that you're just you start with this cholesterol med and then when you ask for a wide range of this one and then you add this one's a third line treatment and it's all pharmaceutical based and some of it not all of it, but some of it is very pain by numbers and functional medicine when you start introduce supplements, nutrition, mindfulness and mental health, advanced diagnostic testing, larger data sets, it's a much harder, more complex form of medicine to practice, but it's much more effective. And so what I thought with parsley was how do we streamline this? How do we train doctors in it? How do we bring that legitimacy and efficacy and evidence to functional medicine and then put it online so that anybody can have access to a functional medicine

27:16doctor. And then we went in network with an with insurance earlier this year. So now we're in network nationwide for the first ever functional medicine longevity practice that is fully in network with all major commercial health plans as of this year. And so really just a long journey of the company, but you know the whole the whole point from the beginning and still today is just to make functional medicine more accessible and easier to work with. So everyone's looking at version 3.0 of you, right? And saying like, oh my god, it's amazing and she's an overnight success, but it wasn't that way. And I know it wasn't that way. I still don't feel like I'm a success forever. Well, you are. Well, what were to do? You know, they're never as secure. And there always will be. But I can tell you for the people in the stadium watching you go, you are our champion for sure. But I think it's important for people to know where the ashes that the champions

28:20arise out of. So I want to hear more about the journey along the way. And where you got the, as we would call it, Hutzba, where you got where you got the the bravery to go out and do this, the courage to go out and do this because you've done some really amazing things like starting a this this functional medicine practice, which was more than just, you know, opening up a doctor's office. Then you took it to a different state and then you took it online to 50 states and then you took it to the insurance world. These are not insignificant feet. These are amazing feats that required attention while while you were being a doctor, by the way, you you were also building a tremendous business and enterprise. You had to go to the street for money because I know these things cost

29:21a lot of money. And it's hard for women to raise money. One percent of the VC money goes to women, one percent. And you raised a lot of it. So I want to hear about that. Yeah. I was as a back to one percent. It was 2% for a minute there. It got up to two percent of all venture capital went to female founders without a male co-founder. Yeah. I, you know, I I really, it was a lot of trial and error. And I want to emphasize the error part of the trial and error to of this past 10 years of running this business. I had co-founded a digital health company during medical school with a co-founder who's a guy in my med school class who had, you know, kind of typical guide like gone to Stanford and he'd had to start up before med school. I loved Columbia actually because there was a lot of us, you know, I had worked in the law and then I had done psych research. There was a lot of us there who were these odd docs. I wasn't the only one.

30:24Like there was a guy in my class who had been in like hedge funds or something for like eight years. And then went to medical school. And so there was like a celebrated author who had written like a top winning fiction novel in college or something. I mean, there's definitely some other weirdos which, which made it for me a really good place to land. But nonetheless, you know, I didn't have really business experience, but my friend from med school and I co-founded this first company. And I stayed involved with it for my first year of residency. And he had a lot more experience in me. He had raised money before. He raised the money for that company. I didn't have anything to do with the fundraising for that company. I had more to do with building what the actual product was. And that was an app for and software for doctors and health systems. So very, very different from personally, not functional medicine related at all. But it gave me like a little bit of a view into what building technology at the time meant for healthcare. You know, this is again like, like 18, 20 years ago. I mean, this is in my med school era. And so, I guess we formed that company

31:30in 2010 or 11. So maybe 15 years ago. And at the time, it was really hard to build software for healthcare because there was all these rules and regulations around healthcare. So to like build an app for healthcare today sounds like who cares. But at the time, it was really freaking hard to do. And so I was part of that. And I was the co-founder of that company. And I just got a little bit of a taste of like, okay, no one knows what they're doing. It turns out you just have an idea and then you go figure out each step of the way. Like if I had to summarize the main thing I learned from co-founding my first health tech company, it was that no one knows what they're doing. And it gave me more confidence, more confidence to then after my training, you know, and at that point, I was no longer involved in that company anymore. And I was really passionate about functional medicine. And I really didn't know what I wanted to do. So I went and sort of apprentice myself in functional medicine. And I consulted and health tech a little bit just to kind of understand what was out

32:35there. And I knew some founder friends. And I sort of knew like the founder of one medical. And people like that a little bit, not well. And I just sort of talked to people. I would call people up. I would get warm introductions. Probably my biggest superpower as a founder is I constantly understand what I don't know. And I just call around. Like I use my network and my friends and friends and friends and friends and friends and friends. And I just call around until I can get the people. And I understand that that's one perspective. So I'll get like a few perspectives. And I'll filter them through my crazy doctor brain to what do I actually think about this based on what they're saying or how does this relate to what I'm trying to do. And then just put one foot in front of the other. And so, you know, I started parsley totally bootstrapped. I didn't take outside money to start it. I didn't take a salary for a year. And I had some savings. And I was newly married. And we had no kids and no dogs. And so we had a really cheap apartment in New York that was my husband's before. And so we

33:36had like basically no expenses. And I as I think about now my home, my three kids, my two dogs, my nanny, like, good God. It was a very very like cheap life at the time. And I would that really enabled me to kind of go on a limb and highlight this thing. And I think as a female founder who did not have access to capital did not have experienced fundraising herself. I didn't really know VCs or bankers or private equity people as a doctor. I had never gotten an MBA. I'd never worked in business. Like I had no experience whatsoever in that world to everyone to be clear. Like it was a blank slate for me. My co founder for the first company had like dealt with all of those people because he had come from more that world. And I never did. And so I really just didn't know what I was doing. But I started the company built a patient based, totally bootstrapped. And I got like 40 or 50 people to sign up for their year in advance at a major discount. And that gave us like 50 grand

34:42of runway. And I hired a couple of health coaches and an office manager. And I said, guess what? I have three months of cash. And you might all be out of a job in literally 90 days. But if you're willing to sign on to this and find out, let's see. And one of them still works with me. And she was two days a one day a week. Then she was two days a week. And now she's our vice president of clinical operations 10 years later. So I've thus far have have yet to miss payroll. And you know, I just kind of figured it out one step at a time. So when you went to because you did eventually raise money. Oh, yes. Quite a bit. Yeah. Quite a bit. Quite a bit. Tell us about that. Because that is something that very few women get to do. And very few women are successful at. And you knocked it out of the park. It was as hard as everyone says it was. And I was aware that women often are not

35:42able to raise capital on their own. And I literally made a conscious decision to block that out. I remember thinking if I focus on that, I'm effed. Like all I'll do is make it an excuse. Or I'll worry about it or I'll feel bad about it. And I don't know if that was like the right way to think about it. But it was more of like a practical tactical way of basically blocking that reality. And saying, well, I'm going to try. And you know what? The first I gave a talk at a conference and a woman V.C. came up to me after. And this was before I started parsley. Or maybe I was in the pilot year, but I was thinking about raising some money. And she and I spoke and we stayed in touch. And she said, if you think about raising for this, let me know. She was an amazing PhD at Harvard MBA, like just bad ass woman. And I when I was getting it together, my first round of funding that I went out to raise was $500,000, which today is like a joke, right? People today when they

36:47raised their quote, pre-seed or seed round, whatever you want to call it, it's like $5 million. And I raised $500,000. This is my target. Speed round. And I went back to her and some other people. And actually the first checks into the business were women. She structured the round for me because you needed somebody to on the other side to kind of agree to terms. And I had a lawyer to help me set up the business. And he was not the right person long term to work with on fundraising. He wasn't really that kind of lawyer, but he'd sort of done enough of the early stage stuff that he could kind of do it. And he wasn't too expensive. And first person who wrote me an angel check was a woman who was a big executive at Google who was personally really interested in preventive health. And I remember her $25,000 check clearing and being absolutely terrified because I was quite sure I was going to lose all her money, like quite. And to take someone else.

37:48Well, I mean, I just again, like I was a doctor and a solo founder with this medical practice and sort of this idea for something. And I really really had no experience fundraising. So it was really scary to take anyone's money even now for me when I think about raising money, $25,000 is a very tiny amount. But in that moment, $25,000 in Parsley's bank account that was from someone who was hoping I would turn that $25,000 into something bigger was really, really terrifying. And she was kind of this big deal lady. And so, you know, I think about her. And then also I went to my friends and my network with people who in it who were young venture capital lists themselves, like the kind of people who were actually kind of looking back, they were like me. They were early in their careers. They were in their early 30s and kind of proving themselves that their funds are with their own funds or somebody else's fund. And some of them, men and women were really helpful to me. Another woman, VC who was early in her career, you know, she had thyroid

38:51cancer, she had all sorts of health stuff. And we literally traded medical advice for venture capital advice. And she helped me with my first deck. And I think that when you're starting these things like that, you really don't what you're doing. Again, just don't be ashamed to ask. Because I just asked her so many questions. And I got so much feedback. And, you know, I just when and did it. And so and then you the problem with venture capital is it never ends either. So you raise one round and everyone tells you you're getting on a hamster wheel or a treadmill. And you don't believe that. You think that's everybody else, but that's not going to be me. I'm just going to raise this amount of money. I'll never raise more than a million. I'll never raise more than 10 million. I'll never raise 100 million. And here we are well over 100 million into parsley. And I could never have imagined that I would as a female solo founder raise over 100 million dollars in capital. But each round teaches you something. And then you learn how to raise the next round from there. And if you thought about it from the beginning, you would just never do it. You would,

39:55it's like childbirth. She would like, yeah. And if you think about it too hard, you're going to talk yourself out of it. So just don't think just do. Yeah. So I'm curious as to you went from a solo practitioner and running your own business and founding a parsley medicine with no one else's vote. And then you took money. How did that affect what you were doing day to day? And how did you feel about it? Got progressively more complicated. The later and later we got, I would say the early stage fundraises and venture capital and VCs that I was working with were pretty typical and that they're pretty hands off actually. Like they're not, they want the business to be successful, but they're not there, you know, marrying any. Yeah. And even when I raised our series A in 2018, which was a $10 million round, which I like could not believe. I was like this

40:55very well respected venture capital firm put $10 million into my business. I was like, Malone away. Honestly, you were all blown away. And we were all watching and rooting for you. And it's been amazing. It's been absolutely amazing to be a fly on your. Thank you. Thank you. It was I was like, I don't know what is going to happen from here. That was scary and exciting. I hired a real finance lead at that point. Like, you know, I had to really level up my game. And I would say that at that point, the whole work of building the company got next level harder. And next level really frankly outside of what I had any business doing in the sense that it became about identifying talent, hiring executives, managing people who have jobs that are very different than your job or the things that you're good at. So the things that I was good at, I could manage

41:57because I knew how to do that job. But somebody building software or a product leader or a finance leader, right? I didn't have an MBA. I had never built, you know, my own profit and loss spreadsheet beyond a very rudimentary one that I built when I was like conceiving of the company. And we didn't have AI. We didn't have clawed to go build you a beautiful spreadsheet. So, you know, you really were relying on the talent level and the integrity of the people you were hiring. And then I had to learn how to like manage people. And I'm sure you know this from being in medicine. Like medicine is not a good environment to learn how to be an executive or a people leader. Medicine is extremely hierarchical. There's a lot, there's a very built in culture of deference to it. There's frankly in many places a pretty unhealthy. Cultural or very paternalistic, very most militaristic, hierarchical things that actually work quite well in a hospital setting and are very necessary.

43:00I think in a hospital setting to keep the ship moving and the way that it needs to move. So there's a place for that. But that way of running a business or managing people is actually very unhelpful in startups and in the kind of business I then found myself in. And so if I look back and say like beyond the VCs and the board I then had and so forth in the early days, the board and the advisors and stuff were there to be supportive. But they weren't like themselves experts in medicine or functional medicine or healthcare even. So they weren't like telling me what to do. It was more that I was suddenly aware that I really didn't know what to do. That I had stepped into this whole another layer of need, let me say this again, I had stepped into territory where I really had no experience and I had to learn as I went and often when I say trial and error, I mean a lot of error. I hired wonderful people who were really bad at their jobs. I wasn't a good manager to them.

44:04I wasn't a good person. Right person wrong seat. Right person wrong seat. I hired people and wasn't a good manager to them. I wasn't a good coach. I knew how to triage and make decisions very quickly and I was a bold decision maker. I was a very good zero to one CEO and I was a pretty good one to ten CEO. But then as we got sort of past that, probably one of my biggest learning curves and the one I've candidly slid back down, met multiple times is how to become like an executive. And I don't mean an executive in like parsley is 120 people. It's not like we're Johnson and Johnson and it's like I'm the executive of some huge company. But it's very different to be leading 120 people than it is to be leading five or ten or even 20. Yes, completely. And I think some of the things that innately work in those smaller settings really stop working along the way. And it took me a while to figure that out. And I have evolved tremendously as a CEO, but it just took time.

45:07And I think along the way, you know, to your question about the investors and so forth, I eventually did get to a place where the capital market slowdown happened in terms of availability of venture capital. Consumer business businesses were reviled for a period of time and in health care specifically. And in everywhere for a while too, because cost of acquisition became so high across the board for things that had to do with like Facebook and Meta and all these things, I had nothing to do with parsley. Yeah. And I definitely as the years went on had a much more decisive hands on set of investors, people with in some cases a lot of health care background or a lot of health care investing background if they didn't have the actual background of being the people that ran the companies. And the combination thereof really got challenging to manage. I made decisions for the company that were in keeping with what they wanted us to do versus what

46:08I really thought. And I 100% sent the company sideways for a couple years in following what was needed and desired from the investors in the board more than listening to myself. And these were, you know, men who are a lot older than me, some of them were billionaires. They're very respected in health care. They're really smart. They're really caring. They wanted the company to be successful. It all came from a good place. They're not bad people in any way. But they didn't understand what this company was. Right. And I didn't listen to myself closely enough. And so I managed to sort of reroute us. It's like Google Maps. It's like, okay, you're taking a wrong turn. You're taking a wrong turn. You're getting farther away or in farther away. But Google's saying, go down this road. And you're like, it's getting really dark. There's nothing. I'm at the top of a mountain. I really think I'm supposed to be here. I had to like reroute hard. And

47:11luckily the companies in a great place now. But in my own compassion for myself and defensive myself and some of those decisions that I made, I also made some of them in an effort to keep the company alive. And I think as we all, especially those of us listening as mothers, who will do anything for our children and parsley has been my child, you know, I also headed in the direction I needed to because that's where the capital was. And that was what was going to keep the company going in a moment where the alternative was to die. And so there's, you know, all these learnings in that of listening into myself, sorry, listening to myself staying on my own course, not thinking that just because someone's older than me or richer than me or worked with lots of companies that they know better from my particular company. And also like mad props to myself and respect that in this time when it was really hard to raise money, I still was able to raise in that period, like around 40 million in aggregate to keep the company growing and like,

48:13alive literally even when we weren't growing. And I think that, you know, a lot of being a founder and building something, especially in healthcare, is just being able to weather the storm. Yeah. No, I could, which I know you're finding out for yourself right now. For sure. I am. And the other thing is, and I do want to talk about what you see your overall mission and parsley is overall mission and how you convinced insurance companies that that was I see parcel. Well, my personal mission is to help guide as many people to greater health as I possibly can. And parsley is one manifestation of that. And it's not the only temple of health that I will build, but it is one that I've built so far. And it's one living embodiment of a service that can help people achieve greater health and well-being through functional medicine and this kind of care.

49:17And I knew that this medicine had to live in the world because it was obvious to me that if we keep going down the path of conventional care, the costs are unsustainable. It's breaking all of our piggy banks when it comes to our insurance premiums. It's breaking our employers like Bloomberg just announced there's no longer going to cover health insurance. Right. We have an employer sponsored healthcare system, which is why a lot of people don't even have health insurance because they don't work for an employer steadily enough or big enough to pay for it. Right. We somehow in America decided that our healthcare would come through our employer, which is like so that we don't have to do it through the government, but it ends up being the government anyway. It's like kind of crazy. And then, you know, and then we have Medicare and Medicaid. But just if you look at sort of the trajectory of any of all of it for the United States, the burden of people living with chronic disease who are overutilizing our healthcare system is breaking our wallets whether you're the

50:17government or you're the employer or you're the person. It's unsustainable. And as a population, we're getting sicker and sicker and not better and better because again, our medical system is designed to keep us alive but not to help us thrive. And we needed a form of medicine to optimize health and not just prevent disease 20 years from now, but to turn the disease ship around and to help people get better. And that is functional medicine. And so really functional medicine should be calm the standard of primary care. That is what should happen. All-poise PCP should be trained in functional medicine, functional medicine should be supported by our healthcare system whether you're you know, on an exchange with Etna or you know Medicare, whatever you are. And the system should pay for the things that functional medicine does that it currently doesn't pay for like supplements and tests and certain things that fall a little bit outside of the standard. And if we did that, we'd have a dramatically healthier population and we'd save trillions of dollars. And so to answer your question about how did you convince the insurance companies, I knew that the only way

51:20that we would do that would be outcomes data that showed that not only were people healthier, which sadly enough are insurance companies actually don't care that much about. We don't. But they care if you, you person are using your medical services because now you cost me less. Yes. But only only in this year. Yes, within this year because next year you're going to be on somebody else's health plan because everybody switches. Yes. Yes, it's 18 months is actually the average. And so they have a very short attention span. They want things that save money this year. As a result, all of the things that are built out there to save money that are new technologies and interventions are sadly kind of weak because the biggest impact you have is sometimes two years out or three years out or four years out. And if all you're doing is trying to work it so that you can get some in-year cost savings, you often have a lot of what is referred to as solutions in that world, solutions that are much of a solution to anything, but they'll a little bit save some money

52:24right now. Oftentimes those quote solutions that get sold to these health insurance companies or these employers actually will cost more money like two years from now. But because they, you know, 500 bucks this year, everybody's like giving them a pat on the back. So it's all very short-sighted. But nonetheless, that's how the game has played. And I wasn't going to change that. So I knew that we had to get outcomes data to show that we reduced things like medication utilization and specialist utilization and that we got people better. And so we had enough data at after a few years to work with some independent firms that do these types of analyses and we're able to show that we drove really meaningful cost savings in a population of patients that really surprised the insurance people and the employer people because there's an assumption around functional medicine that everybody using functional medicine is really healthy that they're like, well, and they just want to be a little more well. And maybe they're just like some lady who wants to lose the last five

53:26pounds, which is actually very biased and, you know, pejorative towards women because it's another way of dismissing women's symptoms as superficial and unimportant. And because parts they was started in New York by a woman, there was this and had a beautiful brand because we wanted to feel good and pretty and attractive. People assumed that like we were for the worried well and that this was like a New York LA lady service or something. Yeah. Yeah. And so when, which would be fine if that's what it was, I love my New York and LA ladies, but the reality was when we showed them the data, they saw that the people using parsley were sick, that they had two, three or four chronic conditions, that they were using multiple medications, that they had diseases like autoimmune and infertility and heart disease and, you know, the list goes on and that they really needed this kind of care. And so when we were able to show that we were saving money and be doing it in a population that cost them money,

54:30then they were willing to talk to us. And how do you think that has positioned you in the general medical community? I mean, I don't know because I'm not, I'm not out there listening anymore to the voices, but I have our words like quacks still being used or our words like genius and innovator being used now, like how, how, how, how is, how's it going at your Columbia reunion? Haven't been to one of my medias going on. Yeah, I don't know. I stopped listening to, you know, I said to myself, like if I'm going to do this, I don't need their opinion to show me that this medicine is working to have all the people telling me, thank you for helping me get pregnant and have my babies and thank you for curing my autoimmune disease and my PCOS and treating my menopause and all these things. Like, I just don't, it doesn't matter to me truly. And I made a decision

55:33a long time ago not to listen. I think that in the current moment, you have a lot of both, right? You have a lot of, you know, and now that we're in this longevity wave, like you have a lot of people that are like, yeah, all these conventional docs who now want to be longevity docs, like my buddy from, you know, mass general who's an internist who's like, and no, I want to be a longevity doctor and he's like learning about food. And I'm like, great, come on over, like let's do it. That's awesome. Like, like bring them all on, bring all of the doctors like you, like into the fold. Let's go. And then there's people who are still skeptics and, you know, are always going to think that anything that's not what they're doing is quackery. And then quite frankly, there's people in the current administration who are doing quackery like things that are making all of us like, firstly look bad that's pissing me off. Because I'm like, stop it. You're, you're on, parsley and functional medicine and longevity and stuff are getting wrapped up and sort of swept up for some people in a, what is frankly a movement

56:40that's about politics, not health. And that's quite frustrating to me because, you know, we're not a political organization. We've been doing the same thing for over a decade. And there's a group of people like yourself, like me, who have been working to make America healthy. We cannot make America healthy again because it never was, but we can work to make America healthy. And there's a bunch of us like, I've been in this for 20 years in some facet, even from when I was like, you know, pre-med school. And certainly for 10 years since I've started the computer thesis. Yeah, even college. And so I think that, you know, that is just what I try to focus on and not worry about what anybody thinks. I get that. But do you ever go through any dark nights of the soul? Do you ever, do you ever let the outside voices like somehow say to you, wait, I've really stepped outside of the lines. Am I, am I on the right side of history? I mean, I think for you, it's so clear that you are.

57:44But would there ever those moments, were you ever afraid when you were taking that money that like, wow, this is, this is real now. Can I do this? Is, yeah, I mean, on the fundraising side, I had to many dark nights of the soul. I mean, there's many times that, personally, like almost like most venture back startups, you don't understand that most venture back startups like get the next tranche of capital in the bank, like weeks to days, sometimes months before they're there for their own patch out. Yeah, because the funding cycle kind of ended up working that way. Like no one's like raising a new tranche of capital, like two years before they're out of their current tranche. I mean, some companies occasionally are if they're actually rocket ships and people are throwing money at them. But mostly the point is to like use your capital to get to the next milestone and then raise more. So you need time to do that and you need to spend some of the money. So then you're almost out of it, which is, I mean, I've had nights of like, total like not sleeping,

58:46you know, pit of my stomach moments. I had a year where I was really at odds with my board, and that was probably the hardest year of my life in the business, where I had basically within a year to like flip over the board, get in new investors, fight off our one of our banks, and repivot the business from an enterprise focus back to consumer all in 12 months. And it was like, I mean, at that point, I was like, I'm done. It's over. I like don't care from here. Like, I can't believe I survived. It felt like being in a in some sort of accident and then like walking out into the sunlight and being like, did that happen? But except it was like a 12 month accident. It was like the feeling that like we were crashing for a year because so much executives leaving firing executives like it was just it felt chaotic and it was chaotic for the team. And we never let it be chaotic on the patient care side because we really protect that part of the business from

59:50the business business part. But it was it was really hard. And I feel like in the early years, maybe I had I remember being interviewed in the health tech world for some things, some doctors like in the comments like, you know, tearing down this kind of medicine and me. And that was really early on. And I remember just thinking like, cool, you're not my audience. And did it hurt? Did it hurt? Or was it scary? Yes. But at that point, like, there was enough of the world of functional medicine out there that I was like, this isn't going anywhere. So there's always going to be naysayers. And there's going to be those of us who know that this is the future. And are going to stand up for what we believe in, even if not everybody likes it. So I want to know when you're going through all of this and you're an entrepreneur and you're still you're a doctor and you're still seeing patients and you're an executive and you're all of these things, how are you taking care of you? And did your health take a hit anywhere along the way? I mean, my mental health

1:00:55definitely definitely definitely, you know, I think I think one of the things that has gotten me through these 10 years, I also had three kids during this time. So I had my first child in 2017 raised our series A in 2018. And I think that the things that have kept me going are really living the medicine. Like I eat the functional medicine foods. And if I eat a lot of sugar or processed stuff, I feel awful and I can't keep going. I do drink some alcohol, but like really moderate amounts and alcohol never became luckily something that I was overusing because for me, I can't sleep and I get depressed if I drink more than like twice a week and you know, a little bit. So, you know, really limiting that, getting good sleep, taking my supplements. I'm MTHFAR variant. So I need my methylated B vitamins. And if I don't take them, I get actually depressed. So like sticking with that. I always joke that the amount I inventoryed recently, like the amount of

1:01:57time, money and practitioners, I spend on various forms of self care, whether it's massage, acupuncture, I threw everything in there, right? Like my hair coloring, my my hair cut, my facialist, who I see a couple times a year if I'm breaking out, right? Like all of it, my spiritual guides that I work with my therapist, like, and I was like, shit, this is a shit ton of money and time. And I was like, wow, it really takes a lot. But those things are truly what keep me going, keep my energy up. I meditate every single morning. And if I don't meditate, it's 15 minutes and I might have a kid or two sitting on me, it might be loud. It might not be ideal, but I meditate every morning and handful of days that I don't do it. I those days, I'm totally off. Like I am not a good leader. I'm inpatient, I'm more reactive. It makes a huge difference for me. And so

1:02:58you know, people always ask me like, what's your morning routine? And like, kind of like, I feel like what they're really asking is like, do you practice what you preach? And I'm like, oh yeah, like I take the supplements, I eat this way, I meditate, I lift weights, I do yoga, I do Pilates, like I am doing the things that I tell my patients to do. And it's the only reason I'm still here. Yeah, I think that that's really important for people to know that we all have our non-negotiables. Right? And no, I am definitely guilty of working too much. Like if my, if I had a patient who worked as much as I worked, I would come down so hard on them. So I know that that I do bend some rules for me, but we all have our non-negotiables, right? So meditation is one of your non-negotiables. Do you have others? Getting a good night of sleep, like I've never been someone who pulls the all-nighter. And I work a lot

1:04:01too, but you know, I go to bed by 10, 30, I get eight hours of sleep most of the time. And I prioritize that. I don't go to the bed at the same time every night. My sleep schedule is someone erratic, which, you know, per my whoop and per the data is not great for longevity. So I need to work not just on sleep quality. I'm on whoops medical advisory boards, so I literally can't stop looking at mine. Oh my god. Yeah, all I get, all I think about when with the whoop and the r-ring and all of those is that that Jackson Brown song don't remind me of my failures. I have not forgotten them. That's a good point. I don't know. I don't look at it obsessively, but I do find some of the data useful and things like heart rate variability. It's been a good wake-up call, no pun intended, for the fact that I do have a bit of an erratic bedtime. Like listen, I live in New York, I have a social life, like some nights I'm going to bed at midnight, some nights I'm going to bed early, but I really do prioritize sleep and get a good amount of sleep. The food that I eat is a huge

1:05:04non-negotiable. I shop at the grocery store before I go to the airport, so I don't have to eat food on the plane or in the airport. I go to the whole foods when I land, if I'm going to be somewhere for more than like a day or even short-term and I stock my hotel room with water and healthy snacks and intermittent fast a lot, but I break the fast with protein. I take my supplements almost every day. I'm a skin care nut and so I do, you know, I'm that person like, you know, the person in college that like had too many beers and you're still like perfectly washing your face. But you're but you're still going to do all your stuff. I can't see myself in the mirror, but I'm going to still wash my makeup off. Like never went to bed with a full face of makeup, whatever. That all of this speaks to something of my personality, right? Not everybody is like, does these things, but and then I do put a lot into it takes a lot of energy for me to keep my mental health

1:06:06stable. Like I don't sleep if I do drink alcohol too frequently. If I don't take my supplements, if I'm not eating well, I'm gluten free mostly because I will get a little bit of eczema when I eat it and I also feel hungover. Like I feel the inflammation wave. Like it gives me a headache. And you know, so I'm on track with these things, not because I'm punishing myself and I feel like I have to be in control, but because just if I don't do them, I actually just don't feel good. And I want to feel good most of the time, you know? Yeah. I know my time with you is running out, so I have one more question. When your career is over, which I know is not anytime soon, but what do you hope medicine is doing differently because you were here? Really hope that functional medicine and evidence-based standardized form of functional medicine is truly the standard of care that these principles around identifying and treating the root cause,

1:07:12using nutrition and mental mindfulness-based stress reduction and mental health, bringing mental health together with physical health supplements where appropriate in-depth testing, personalization. But all these things that we say today are, you know, I wish medicine were like that. I wish health care were like that. I just hope that it is and I hope that I and also parsley. We are technically two separate things. Are both a part of seeing that become the reality, and not because I'm just like functional medicine is better. That's what we need for people to be a lot healthier. And beyond the medical system, because I've over these 10 years, I think I had grand visions of really changing the healthcare system and I wouldn't say I've totally given them up, but I'm sort of less interested in that now and I'm more interested in how to help people, just individuals, make the changes in their lives that functional medicine teaches, then enable them to improve their health span, avoid and reverse chronic disease and feel better

1:08:17every day. And if I do that through the things I'm doing and if parsley keeps doing that through the things that it does, and if I'm able to do that potentially in the future through other companies or projects that have that impact, I think that now interests me more than when I started when I was a little bit more like, you know, I'm going to change health care. And 10 years later, I'm like, I have a little bit and now I care, I just don't care. Or I do, but I can't just not be able to care, but listen, if your impact is going to be because you're doing your job, if you left said job to go influence medical education, then who's doing your job? That's the problem, right? People say to me, all day long, like, why don't you go and lobby and why don't you go to the medical schools and why don't you do this? Well, if I'm doing all that, then I'm not doing my job and I'm not helping the women and I'm not giving another, I'm not giving another option and I'm not giving another opportunity or another perspective. So, and those are really slow

1:09:23roads and I think what you and I share is a desire to have impact and the best thing about what you do and are doing and are building and what parsley does is, you know, I don't have to wait for impact. We have impact on thousands of people every single day and we are there for more of the lightbearers, right? We're sort of outdoing it and showing people what's possible and that is one role in the world and then other roles that are equally as valid but might just be suited more to somebody else are, you know, being translating what the lightbearers showed into education or into political progress in various ways. I'm too impatient for that kind of work, like, at least at this point, which is my personality, my ADHD is like too impatient to, you know, I like need to see the impact all the time and the thing that motivates me is like the patient's getting better, you know? Exactly. And also playing to your audience, right? So,

1:10:25there's a part of me right now that I'm like, you know what, if you don't believe in my mission and what I'm doing, that's fine. Right. Because I have millions of people who do. So, I'm going to talk to them and you don't have to listen to me. You can keep scrolling or read someone else's book or do whatever you want to do because that's no longer the fight that I want to fight. Spending energy there is something that I think I mostly have done a good job of not doing and I understand that not everyone's going to agree with me, not everyone's going to think that the way I'm doing it is right or that the work I'm doing is the most important and everybody thinks their thing is the most important thing and that's how we as humans are and that's cool. And I, you know, I wish everyone well and it's like, I also think about it this way, you know, we came up recently with the the debate for a while out there about the food dye thing. Like, is this the most important thing?

1:11:27And, you know, Peter Atia called it majoring in the miners to even care about food dyes, which was very like dismissive. Like, this is just not important, right? And then there's the people who are like up in arms and like the environmental working group, which is incredibly well respected, environmental group that does a ton of independent research on the impact of various chemicals in our environments and food and what they do with the human body, which is an amazing group. And, you know, they're lobbying for different in different states to, you know, get these things out of our food supply and schools and stuff. And so you've got people on all the different sides of it, right? Like, yeah, it's not great, but it's not that important. This is my life's work. And I just thought, like, listen, like, food dyes are not great. They're not good for you. They've got a lot of proven negative effects, especially in kids. I don't want my kids eating food dyes. Like, I can't have it cool for that. Do I think it's the most important public health thing that we have at the moment? No, but it takes a village. And so what we need when it comes to health, because health

1:12:29has so many variables and so many factors. And you need the food dye people working on their food dye mission and you need the heart disease people working on their heart disease mission. And you need the breast cancer prevention and imaging people like you working on that mission. And we're not going to solve this unless we have lots and lots of people who are obsessed with whatever the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning happens to be. For me, it's functional medicine and holistic healing. And let us all do that and celebrate each other for each working on the piece of this that matters to us rather than being like, we should all only focus on one thing, which is just not possible. And and maybe not dismiss each other so much. I mean, I remember I was at a party just a couple of weeks ago and someone said, you're a doctor, you should go talk to this guy. He just got his drug for MS approved. And I was like, oh, wow, congratulations. Do you know Terry Wolves? And he's like, no, I never heard of her. I'm like, wait, you have an MS drug and you never

1:13:34heard of Terry Wolves? And he said, no. And I told him Terry Wolves is whole story. And he's like, oh, yeah, well, she didn't have MS. I'm like, no, I'm really certain she did. No, she didn't have MS because you can't cure MS. I'm like, all right, well, I'm not saying she's cured. I'm just saying that, you know, she is living her life in it. Mostly she still has a little trigeminal neuralgia, but she is mostly living her life in an asymptomatic way. And she was in a zero gravity wheelchair. And he's like, no, impossible. So all that I wish is that, yes, we should all be the lamp lighters for our for our slice in it, right? For our piece of it. And let's not like extinguish each other's lamps. Yeah. I love that. Yes, we are all the lamp lighters for our slices. And yes, keeping all the lamps on is really important. I am fully aligned. I'm fully aligned. Yeah. And there's a lot of that

1:14:38in dismissiveness or sort of lack of curiosity in the culture of medicine. And that sort of in varied odds with being in startups. And so one of the things I love about startups and it really fit for me was like, you have to constantly be curious and asking questions and saying, well, if this doesn't work, what does? And it's just a different way of thinking. And I think that the culture of medicine doesn't really reward that way of thinking. So a lot of people who are in conventional medicine spend a long time there, you know, are sort of almost by force lose some of that curiosity, even if they naturally have it as people. And, you know, and then not always. So we'll just keep lighting our lamps and keep walking. So let's end by you telling people what what parsley offers now and how they can get in touch with you. Yeah. So visit us at parsleyhealth.com you can work with us. I should tell you, I think your website is phenomenal. And when we redid our website, I told my website designer because I know that yours is a very custom website.

1:15:44And I said, can you just make it look as much like parsley's does, but make mine pink? Great. Awesome. So just, I just want you to know the imitation of the finest form of flattery. Well, thank you. We are also constantly changing it. So keep looking at it because it's like in maybe testing permanently. And yeah, always, always be improving. But yes, you can find us at parsleyhealth.com. We, you can work with us really in two ways. You can sign up for one of our programs for care and you'll work with our doctors and our, our nutritionists and our nurses and you'll work with the team over time to optimize your health, diagnose you if that's what you need or treat you if that's what you need or all of the above. We usually do all of those things for the same for one person. And that's our complete care program. And then the other way to work with us if you're not ready for care is you can do labs and you can either do hour labs through quest or you can do great or you can bring us your labs from one of the labs companies out there. There

1:16:44are many and you can do a 30 minute visit with us where we'll, one of our docs will review your labs and tell you all about them and what they mean because we saw a lot of people doing these kind of functional labs today and then getting kind of stuck because they didn't know really what they meant or what to do with them even though they got like the little report that comes with them. And so those are two, the two ways you can really work with us and we're in network everywhere. Our lab review visit is not covered by insurance. Our complete care program is partially covered and then we do have a supplemental fee that you pay because again, we are not just your standard medical care. We are a lot more than that. But it's pretty reasonable and yeah, that's what we do. We work in 50 states. So you can work with us over video from anywhere and you can come in person in New York City and LA. Amazing. Well, I loved this time with you and I'm so grateful that you put it aside for me and for my community and what you've done and what you've built is truly astounding. And I know that the world and medicine will be a better place for having had you here.

1:17:48So keep going and we're going to keep watching and seeing what you are doing to change the world and to change medicine and to change health because after all that that's all of our goal. It's one thing to diagnose disease and and help to ease suffering. But what all of our goals are collective goals are to prevent suffering. Right? So that we can all live as long as possible as well as possible. And I know that you're out there doing it. So thank you. And same to you. And thank you all for joining us today. If you liked what you heard, then make sure you share it with someone who needs to hear it because I know you know someone who needs to hear it and also know that I will be back next week, same time, same place. It's Dr. Jen. Bye for now. So that's it for today's episode of Keeping a Breast with Dr. Jen. Wherever you are on your breast health journey, screening a new diagnosis, navigating life before, during, or after treatment,

1:18:54you don't have to figure it out alone. That's exactly what we built, perfection imaging and wellness go to perfectionimaging.com to find real answers and real support whatever stage you're in. Remember perfection is spelled with QT in the middle. If this conversation gave you something to think about, share it with a woman who needs to hear it and leave us a review. It helps more women find this show. I'm Dr. Jen. I'll see you next time.