Today I am going to discuss something called a meet and greet, and it's something I started at my office years ago almost when I really first started in practice. I started doing meet and greets for prospective patients. There's a reason I'm telling you all this, and so I had one recently that took a turn that was interesting enough that I thought I'd share it. I'm not going to go into details about this particular prospective patient, but I think I'll still be able to give you the gist of what went on and why. It's interesting. I'm not sure if this video is more for the practitioners that follow me or more for the patients that follow me, but maybe it'll be of use to everybody. So let me share this. So anyway, meet and greet. It's about a 10 minute phone call that patients can have directly with me.

(00:53)
There's no charge for it. When I say patients perspective, patients can have with me, there's no charge for it, and they get a chance to tell me what their situation is, why they would be thinking about coming to see someone like me, maybe who referred them or what they were told. And then I have an opportunity to explain to them in that kind of a situation how I normally approach a case like that. Many times these people are brand new to functional medicine. They don't understand root cause medicine. They're frustrated with what they've been told. They don't understand why they're not getting answers. And so if I can lay out a game plan where I basically say, look, if you're coming to me with this kind of an issue, let's say it's an autoimmune problem. I need to figure out where the inflammation is coming from and these are the different options and these are the kinds of tests that we might do based on your situation.

(01:49)
And then if we can figure out where that root cause is coming from, where that kind of inflammation is screwing up your immune system, if we can find a way to get rid of that, then we can hopefully stop that stimulus that makes your immune system do weird things and the autoimmunity can calm down. Right now, I haven't prescribed them anything. I haven't treated them. I haven't told them that they need to go take something. I didn't create a doctor patient relationship, but what I did is I kind of opened up the roadmap and said, look, generally here's where we'd be going, and there are several options for how to get there. I don't know which one would be best for you, but this is the general path that we take through a problem. Like this is the generic version of it. And then obviously it would be customized to you based on your needs, your history, your current situation, all that stuff that I don't know yet, right?

(02:47)
I only know the little bit that they told me. They know they've got 10 minutes, they keep it pretty quick. That's what a meet and greet is. So in this case, I had a meet and greet with a mother talking about her child, and this mother works at another doctor's office and was referred to me for her child. And so she wanted to have a talk about whether I was the right person to see her child, would I be able to do anything to help her child? So we got on the phone, she explained the situation, and I kind of said at this point, probably not, but here's why and what I did in our minds as practitioners, we generally have an algorithm. Think about a flow chart where you ask a question and it's a yes no answer. If it's yes, you go here.

(03:37)
If it's no, you go there and you ask another question. If it's yes, go here. If it's no, you go there. It's a little oversimplified, but that's an algorithm. And so I kind of said, look, in your child's situation, here's the skeleton of that algorithm, and there are two or three places where we don't have an answer for that question. So we don't know where that part of the algorithm is going to lead us. So you're kind of calling me too early. If you brought your child to me, we would be doing testing to try to fill in these blanks. This is simple testing that. I mean, think of it like getting an x-ray and a blood test, right? Simple stuff. If you go back to her doctor and say, look, can we get these next tests? Your insurance should cover it. The doctor knows how to do it.

(04:30)
It's not rocket science at this point. If we get that information, we can fill in these blanks on the algorithm and our choices of what's going on narrow down dramatically. Now we're down to one or two things. Now I can give you an answer right? At that point, I can give you an answer, unlikely how I would proceed. If it's this, we need to figure out these things. If it's this, we need to handle these that I can give you, but we're too early in the process because we haven't filled in all the blanks on the algorithm. That was the gist of the meet and greet phone call. And sometimes it's, Hey, yeah, we deal with it all the time. Bring them in. Simple stuff. Here we go. Other times the answer is, look, I don't know if I'm the right guy right now because there's missing stuff that could easily be handled by the person you're already seeing.

(05:22)
So at the end of that, not to belabor that, but at the end of that discussion, she had a couple of comments that made me want to do a video like this. The first, and this is, I'm not sharing this for the reason you think I'm, the first thing she said was something to the effect of, you've already done me more good than all the other doctors I've seen. Okay, I'll take the compliment, thank you. But it wasn't because I did anything great. I didn't tell her what to do for her child. I didn't tell her how to treat her child. I didn't answer the big question, how do I fix her? But I laid out the algorithm for her. I let her know how these decisions are made and showed her where there was information missing. Now, there's a good chance the doctor she's already seeing is using a very similar algorithm, some things in his or her head that looks like this algorithm, but they didn't share it with her.

(06:20)
If, for example, you see a doctor and they say, okay, take this medication and then call me back and let me know whether or not it works. Have a nice day. They only have insurance. Pays them to spend six to 10 minutes with you and that's it. They got to get onto the next person so they don't have time to explain the thought process behind all this. Take this medication, get back to me, let me know they're on to the next patient. You take the medication, it doesn't work. You're like, okay, I'm going to go find another doctor. What you didn't know is that was box one in the algorithm. If the medication did work, you go here. If it doesn't work, you go here. Right? They never explained to you that there's a step two, three, and four to this process. They just said, take this medication. Lemme know.

(07:06)
That's a big problem in a lot of doctor's offices. If the patient doesn't understand at least a skeletonized view of what that algorithm looks like, they don't know where they are in the process. They don't know if you have another step. They don't know if this is just diagnostic or not. I had a patient where the doctor told her, go home and take some Benadryl and see how you feel. And she did and it completely alleviated the problem, but she was all sleepy, whatever. So she didn't go back. I said, well, it was probably a box in the algorithm. If Benadryl makes you feel better, this is something allergic. Now let's see if we can find a better way to approach it. That doesn't leave you sleepy like Benadryl, but if you never go back for the next step, or in her case if you didn't know there was a next step, you're kind of lost in the process. So I'm going to give her doctor the benefit of the doubt and say that he or she was aware of this algorithm. They just didn't explain it to the patient.

(08:07)
So I don't think she said that I did her more good than anybody else because I'm smarter or better. I took the time to explain to her what the algorithm looks like and where the missing pieces were. Once she gets those answers, she might still choose to call me back and say, okay, here's what we found out. Now that we know this, how would you approach a case like my child's or she may get a simple enough answer that she doesn't need to talk to me and that's fine. But that meet and greet clarified things for her to the point where she's now ready to set in motion her plan of action to finish out that algorithm and see what needs to happen. Okay, maybe I'm a part of that, maybe I'm not. So the other comment she made was, I knew this was going to go well when I called your office and somebody answered the phone.

(09:13)
I understand what she's saying, but are we really setting the bar so low these days that when you call a doctor's office, if a person answers the phone, that's a win. I get it. Yeah, we probably are right? I get approached periodically by companies that have AI services that answer the phone. We've all been through these menus. Do you want an appointment? Do you need this? Do you need that? Go to our website. You can handle most of your things there. Everybody hates 'em. Everybody hates them. But they're pushing that in medicine, especially in a multi-doctor clinic. The front desk is busy, whatever. So I understand what she's saying. When a person answered the phone and she can interact with her, ask a few questions, and she got a meet and greet set up, she already knew that this was going to be a different experience and I'll take the compliment.

(10:09)
We have resisted going automated and will continue to resist going automated as much as possible because I think that human interaction is very important, but it was nice to have that appreciated. So that was her experience with a meet and greet. Now, something I want to say probably more to the practitioners, but why do most offices not provide a service like this? There are a couple of reasons. Liability is one of them. It is very easy to accidentally create a doctor-patient relationship. When you're talking to someone who's not a patient yet and they're asking about their condition and you're giving them an answer, any malpractice attorney would cringe at the fact that I do meet and greets. It's too risky. It's too easy to give advice that creates that doctor patient relationship. So I have to be very careful to speak generically. Someone calls up and says, Hey, I got diagnosed with lupus.

(11:13)
What do I do? I can't say, oh yeah, a lot of people go on an elimination diet and everything gets better, and okay, I've given them advice on what to do. But if they say, Hey, I have an autoimmune issue. I just got diagnosed. How do you handle this? And I explain from a functional medicine perspective where autoimmune diseases come from and that there are a bunch of options for things that could have triggered this to happen and that there are testing options to try to figure out which of these things trigger their issue. And if we are able to navigate that successfully, whatever tricked their body into doing this, if it stops tricking it, hopefully the body calms down and stops doing it at least until it gets tricked. Again, I haven't given them any treatment advice. I haven't told them what to do, but I've laid out the paradigm that would allow a root cause practitioner to make a difference.

(12:15)
And so hopefully you can understand the nuance, the difference between a doctor giving you advice and a doctor explaining how autoimmune diseases work from a functional perspective and how we might approach a patient like that differently than their medical doctor. That's what the meet and greet is for. And so sometimes patients will say, okay, so which test do I need? I don't know that yet. You're not a patient. I haven't been through your stuff. You're getting ahead of us. I'm simply explaining to you what that algorithm looks like. If you were to come to an office like mine, that's the algorithm we would likely be working you through. Every patient's journey through that algorithm is a little bit different because of information they already have or information they're missing or whatever. But that's the basic algorithm. That's what I'm able to give them in the meet and greet.

(13:06)
And a lot of doctors will not go anywhere near that because they're worried about creating a doctor-patient relationship. I'm worried about it too, but I think the benefits outweigh the risks, if I could speak today. So that's one issue. Another is time. They think that everybody is going to be blowing them up for free advice and that they're not going to have time to see patients. Honestly, I might do one or two meet and greets a week, 10 minutes a couple of times a week. Let's look at it from a marketing perspective or that perspective patient or the mom of the prospective patient that I spoke to the other day. She's not going to bring her child in right now, not ready for that. She has work to do first. She may never bring her child in, but if she hears someone in her sphere talking about, oh, someone said I had a spina functional medicine doctor, or I've been listening to this functional medicine doctor on a podcast.

(14:03)
I wish we had one here. What do you think her response is going to be? Her response is going to be, oh my gosh, I know this guy. He got on the phone with me, his office answered the phone. There was a person there. He talked to me. He didn't even charge me any money and he helped me a lot. That's what she's probably going to say, that 10 minutes that I spent with her. She could multiply that 50 times to other people that she talks to or interacts with, and those people could say, oh, I had a friend who talked to this guy. Oh, what was his name? Why wouldn't I do that?

(14:41)
Now if it got to a point where I was being called on to do 10 of these every day, we would have to limit this, right? But right now it's a couple a week, three or four in a busy week, one a day, something like that. It's not a whole lot. And some people call up and they're clear. I know I need to see him make an appointment. Great. Other people want to ask, well, does he do this? How does he do that? What is it like? That's when the front desk knows, okay, this is a meet and greet. Let's get this person to talk directly to him and figure out if this is something that they want to do. Sometimes yes, sometimes it's no, but it's always a good experience. I've never had someone leave a meet and greet and give me feedback like, well, that was a waste of time.

(15:28)
It's always, Hey, I know this isn't going to work out between you and me. I'm not the right patient for you, or you're not the right guy for me, or it's not the right time for this or whatever. But I really appreciate you getting on the phone with me and you've taught me a lot and I understand functional medicine way better than I did. So to me, if more of us did this, I think we would be displaying the attitude of our industry better from a functional medicine or root cause perspective. A lot of it is about building relationships with patients and bringing the patient in. As a participant, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm going to explain to you what likely needs to happen and you and I will figure out a way to get it done, but you're a part of this.

(16:12)
You're a functional component of this process. It's not authoritarian. And what better way to set that expectation upfront than to do something like a meet and greet where I get to bring them in and open this up and show them what the process looks like, and then they get to decide whether or not to partake in that or become a part of it. That's why I think it's important to do things like meet and greets. I would rather have them talk to me and say, I'm not sure you're my guy. Maybe they don't like the way I talk. Maybe they don't like my approach to things. Maybe they wanted a female, maybe they wanted someone that's more authoritarian or whatever. It doesn't matter to me, whatever it is, if I'm not the guy, I would rather them know that before they come to my office and rack up a two or three or four or $500 bill and have to pay it for nothing, for something they weren't satisfied with.

(17:12)
If they know in 10 minutes on the phone with me that I don't like this dude, fine, tell me you don't like me. I'll give you the name of other practitioners that do similar work. Tell me what you don't like. I'll tell you who doesn't behave like that. I don't mind. This is about getting them to the right practitioner or the right place. So I wish more doctors did it. I understand why they don't, but it's something I feel strongly about. It's something I do, and in this case, it was just a great example of when one works out really well and it got me a to point out that doctor's offices are getting bad enough that we're setting the bar at whether or not a human being answers the phone. Let me know what your experiences have been like. If you've had a meet and greet with me, make a comment. Let me know if I'm on track with this. Was it something that was meaningful to you or did you feel like it was a waste of time? I'd be curious to know. Alright, otherwise have a.