Clinical Psychologist Adopts Business Model to Transition from Insurance to Functional Medicine

Hi, my name is Dawn McFarland and I live in St. Louis, Missouri and I'm a clinical psychologist. I believe that there's more and more a split between the maintenance of people who are going to stay ill and the necessary help for people in acute care. And then the paradigm where people are going to get better through functional medicine, non-insurance based, things like that. I still take insurance because I'm in an area where, for some people, that's financially necessary to treat the population where I happen to live. But I also am moving more and more towards people where their goals for a higher level of health are not compatible with insurance model. So I've done about 15 years of independent work on figuring out functional medicine and I first started it in order to recover my children from autism. So, that's how I was introduced to functional medicine. 'Cause I could see that if I stayed with the model that I had been trained on, with psychology they were going to stay sick. That's how I started off in functional medicine. So it took me about seven years to recover my children. I've got pre and post testing that they're no longer on the autism spectrum. But it took a lot, so $60,000 later they're not on the spectrum. From what I've learned helping my children a lot of that, I've integrated into my practice. But what I was missing was the business model. If I'm going to branch out from insurance and treat people to actually get them healthier, I need to be able to do that working in a different model than what I've been taught. I need more of a structure. So there's really nice structure that's provided about setting up the business, how to upscale it. Theres so many people I think who want to be healthier and don't have a provider to do that. So I feel gathering all the information is easy part for me but to do the business is something I really don't know much about outside of the formula that really is oppressive to people. The environment is so sweet. The people are very supportive. I was surprised by how generous everybody is to offer suggestions, to listen to your story. They're very compassionate. it's hopeful. And I'm trying to come out of a model where there's so much despair. So to see so many people who are hopeful and so many stories about them helping people successfully and that it's doable. So to come here is starting to help me formulate how that's done. It was a wonderful experience. It's very positive, very uplifting, they provide you the formula to be successful and also a trajectory on how to do that. It's nice that there's people who have figured this out already. So it makes me feel a little more comfortable about trying it because if somebody else has done it why should I reinvent the wheel if they figured it out? So I think it's a really good thing I did.