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In this episode, Barbara, LeNae and Trip discuss:
- How integrative medicine can help you reverse your biological age
- Why you need to trust your own decisions and focus on what you love doing
- How habits and diets affect your overall quality of life
Key Takeaways:
“Do those things that you love doing. Just showing up in the places where you’re comfortable in and honor who you are and the care that you provide is the best tip, I can give you.” – LeNae Goolsby.
Connect with LeNae and Trip Goolsby:
Website: https://www.yourinfinitehealth.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/infinite-health-integrative-medicine-center
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/your.infinite.health/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCorwmbLZZGGFOe4rW6OdeNQ
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InfiniteHealthIMC
Connect with Barbara Hales:
Twitter: @DrBarbaraHales
Facebook: facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist
Business Website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com
Email: halesgangb@aol,com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheMedicalStrategist
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales
Books:
Content Copy Made Easy
14 Tactics to Triple Sales
Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist
TRANSCRIPTION (134)
Dr. Barbara Hales: Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors.
I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. Today, we have with us LeNae and Trip Goolsby, who are doctors and the founders of Infinite Health Integrative Medicine Center, a precision medicine practice with a niche focus on health optimization, age reversal, and regenerative medicine. LeNae and Dr. Goolsby are also best-selling authors and speakers.
They have been featured in various magazine publications such as mindbodygreen.com, psychcentral.com, entrepreneur.com, and many others as well as having been guests on a variety of national and international podcasts.
LeNae and Dr. Goolsby have also published several books, including Think & Live Longer, which is also their proprietary mind-body connection coaching program. Think & Live Longer, in connection with their progressive peer-reviewed and evidence-based medical modalities, was instrumental in helping thousands of women and men transform, not just their health, but also their lives.
LeNae and Dr. Goolsby empower people across the globe to reclaim their health power to create and attain their personalized, successful health image. Welcome to the show.
LeNae Goolsby: Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Just for clarification, I am not an MD, I am a displaced JD. I just want to make sure everybody knows that it is Dr. Goolsby over here, Trip Goolsby that is the MD.
Traditional to Integrative
Dr. Barbara Hales: You certainly cover a lot of areas that are really desired by most people out there. How did you convert Dr. Goolsby from being a traditional medical practitioner to what you’re currently doing?
LeNae Goolsby: She’s asking what prompted you to get out of providing reactive cancer care into integrative medicine and you have the story for that?
Trip Goolsby: 17 and a half years ago, LeNae and I had our first child together and that was conceptually on the eve of my 50th birthday. At that point in time, I was practicing medical oncology and I said, “I’m 50 years old, what am I doing here? I’m procreating, and I need to be able to keep up.” So, at that point in time, I started looking at all the good science on aging and optimization of health and started integrating that into my oncology practice. Ultimately, there came a moment when we made a decision together to transition into just doing integrative medicine.
At that moment, I became extremely interested in stem cell therapies and regenerative medicine and a number of things that actually helped use the body’s own systems to actually repair the damage, so to speak. We’ve integrated that into a very comprehensive program. So that’s kind of how it started.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I’ll let you in with a little secret and that is the father of my children started at 50 as well. I can say with personal experience that fathers who started 50 make the best fathers. They have more time for their children and more understanding than someone who is in their 30s, stressed out trying to make it financially and trying to figure life out.
LeNae Goolsby: There are pros to being an older, wiser parent.
Transaction Types
Dr. Barbara Hales: Is your practice concierge or do you accept insurance?
LeNae Goolsby: So we operate on what we call a hybrid model of reimbursement. So if somebody has insurance that we accept, we’re happy to bill it on their behalf for their physician interactions, we do have a membership subscription on top of whatever they may owe for their deductible and coinsurance. For those who may have a high deductible or be self-insured, as we say, we do have what we call a “private pay plan”.
Insurance isn’t really designed to keep anybody healthy. It just isn’t designed that way. A lot of the services that we provide that enhance health and expand life are not covered by insurance anyway. So a lot of the products that we use natural products for the bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, peptide therapies, stem cell therapies, those are not going to be covered by insurance.
We try to accommodate wherever somebody is. But if somebody is completely dependent, and expecting that their insurance to cover the services, they’re going to be very disappointed.
Trip Goolsby: Depending on the demographic, some of the hormonal therapies are covered. But as LeNae was saying, the vast majority of these bleeding edge and well-studied modalities are not covered by insurance.
Supplements
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you sell the supplements and herbs that you recommend, or do you just tell people what they should do and let them find it themselves?
LeNae Goolsby: Both! We have a line of certain supplements that are pharmaceutical grade that we recommend. Sometimes there are some over-the-counter things that they can get on their own.
The Program Classes
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you have classes in your office that people can attend to learn more about self-care?
LeNae Goolsby: The way that we approach our health optimization program, is what we call the “Four Pillars” approach to health optimization, and it’s a coaching kind of relationship that we develop with all of our patients. When somebody comes to us for whatever their malady may be, we are going to look at their nutritional habits, their physical fitness habits, and whether or not they’re on what we call BHRT—Bioidentical Hormone Replacement Therapy.
Then all of that is tied with our proprietary mind-body connection coaching program, which is the Think & Live Longer program. Every patient who comes to us is going to be immediately directed to start shifting the way that they think, because generally when you go to the doctor, you’re acutely aware of what it is you don’t want, but many people have not yet conceptualized what their happy end result is. From right out of the gate, we’re getting people to start thinking about that happy end result.
A lot of the physician-to-patient interaction is spent shifting the mindset so that the patient is thinking in a way that supports what their goals are. Right now, it’s heavy one-on-one. In addition to that, we do have a monthly kind of group coaching program to go through the principles of thinking live longer, which is free for our current patient base, and then is available for a nominal fee to those who are not yet our patient partners.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Are these classes virtual or online?
LeNae Goolsby: Yes. Right now we’re doing them monthly and they are virtual on Zoom. So if somebody wants to participate, we send them the link before the show starts.
Meditation
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you recommend meditation each week or for a certain length of time? How is your mind connection with your mind body?
LeNae Goolsby: Absolutely! Meditation is a component of care, especially for people who are in high-stress situations, anxiety, and depression. We particularly like to recommend binaural beats to help shift that brainwave.
Trip Goolsby: Any of the mindful physical techniques or yoga. Those things are well received by many of our patients. We encourage that as a physical modality also. If they’re anxious or in high-stress situations, have problems with sleep, and have insomnia, we find a great response with the brainwave entrainment treatments. Those are really accessible without any financial investment, and they work really well.
LeNae Goolsby: Yeah, there’s a plethora of library options for those on YouTube.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So you just recommend your patients go on YouTube to check out the various options?
LeNae Goolsby: Yeah, whatever resonates with them.
Trip Goolsby: Yeah, because some people like the sound of waves, some people like chirping birds.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What type of meditation do you do?
LeNae Goolsby: In the office, I like to put it on 528Hz. It’s calming, the DNA reparative, and it’s more of a soothing sound. So a low instrumental, I try to keep that playing in the front desk area for sure.
Trip Goolsby: Generally, later on in the day or in the evening, I’ll do a Delta Brainwave Entrainment, and focus on my happy end result.
Dr. Barbara Hales: That, theoretically, sounds great. But how do you overcome the care of teenagers and then go back to that mindful state?
LeNae Goolsby: You know, you got to do what you got to do. To be the parent that you need to be. It’s really just a choice. I don’t know how to answer that because my kids are just so amazing.
Trip Goolsby: I find tasers work very well also.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you have your children use meditation as well?
LeNae Goolsby: We try, we encourage it, trying to make it mandatory, we’re probably not very successful but we just make sure that they stay in a state of positivity, being very mindful of what their goals are, how they’re going to be contributing adults, and facilitating what their soul is wanting them to do.
Because, for us, our kids are very different. I mean, I’ve got one that you know, he’s on a musical career track, he’s 200%, creative. And then the youngest one was able to do fairly complex math complicated computations in his head when he was four and six years old. So he’s very logical and practical and academic-minded. For us, just making sure that we appreciate their uniqueness, and work with them individually so that they can fly in the direction that they are here to fly in, I think is the most important thing that we try to do.
Having the Proper Diet
Dr. Barbara Hales: Do you recommend having a vegetarian diet or with some fish maybe thrown in? Or do you advise avoiding meat? What do you tell your patients?
Trip Goolsby: Well, the uniform cause of the disease is inflammation, and there are certain pathways that create oxidative damage and chemical moieties in the blood and in the cells that are adversarial to their best outcomes. And right now, I think statistically looking at well-rounded diets. The Mediterranean Diet is one that’s probably getting in the world theater the best outcomes for longevity but here in Louisiana, we have a challenge with it. A very high carbohydrate load and those are the formation of advanced glycation end products and those things that make it difficult for the proteins and enzymes in us to do their jobs. And that causes errors and errors resulting in potential mutations and inflammation inside the cell, which can then subsequently go on into inflammation in the body.
Anything that’s based on the patient’s physical being and what their lifestyle habits are, and their lifestyle decisions have been, whatever their physical outcome is, when I see them the first time, we look for them to create this image of ideal health for themselves, which I guide and let patients know, the best outcomes that we have right now with our knowledge base. And then I manipulate their food intake, and their nutritional intake to fit that outcome. I always tell my patients when they come in, I say we get a food log for two weeks. I tell them to eat, drink, and be merry, you have two weeks, when you come back, you belong to me.
First-time Patient Experience
Dr. Barbara Hales: What I’d like to do is to walk in the steps of someone coming to your office for the first time, because I imagine that you have a protocol that you approach each patient when they come in, typically. So after the patient has filled out their self-history and their prior medical history, what happens next?
LeNae Goolsby: Initial consultation is generally about a 45-minute consultation with Trip here, and he’s going to go through that paperwork. As I told you before, he’s going to get them to start thinking about what it is they want. As I said, out the gate, that’s like the first question, what do you want? What does that look like, then we have an exercise that he’s going to use with them, to help them to get really clear on what their successful health image looks like.
After that initial consultation, we have a very comprehensive laboratory panel. In traditional medicine, they’re taking nominal information, and they’re looking to see if you fit what’s normal on the bell curve, we have a very comprehensive panel, and we have a very strict parameter for what we’re looking to see in those values. Because we know through epigenetics that we can reverse the disease in the aging process. We don’t want our patients normal; we want them optimal, and we know how to help them get there.
So at that second appointment, after they’ve had those labs, they’re going to come back, it’s going to be about another 45-minute appointment with him. He’s going to go okay, this is your history, this is your goal, this is the information that’s coming up in the labs. Then he’s going to tailor those four pillars to help that patient, get from where they are to where they want to go. Depending on how you know where they are in their thought process if they’re already eating well, eating in a way that serves them, if they’re already acclimated to some exercise.
That person will be tended to differently than somebody who’s been abusing their body for the past 40, or 50 years and must be redone. I don’t want to say reprogram, but a new awareness has to be opened up new neural pathways need to be created right for that person. So generally, depending on where they are and what their goals are, they’ll either come back and have 20-minute visits twice a month, or if they’ve kind of “graduated” to where they want to go, then they can get on kind of a maintenance mech regimen, which is about a monthly visit with him. And because most people over 30 are going to need hormone replacement therapy, we do require labs to be taken at least four times a year. So that’s kind of the debrief on what to expect.
Trip Goolsby: I think that the first visit really critically is transforming the thought process into one that creates an affirmation of what they desire. Say somebody comes in with back pain, just for example, but it was one of the challenges of the back pain, I asked him what they want and he says, I don’t want back pain anymore. What they’re doing there is they’re actually focusing; they continue to focus on the problem. So they’re fighting the problem. They’re not visualizing and thinking, “Jeez it’d really be nice if instead of having discomfort, when I try to pick up a 30-pound grocery bag, or a bag of dog food, I could carry a hundred-pound bag across the yard, perfectly capable of doing those 10 times should I desire.”
That image of them being able to do that, and I had this very example with a farmer that I took care of who had back issues I treated in multiple different ways and it resolved his pain. He couldn’t even go up one or two steps, without having significant pain, his wife had to take him and pull him off the couch, to get him to be able to move around. So, his first step was “I didn’t want to have back pain anymore. “As I transitioned his thought process, he said, “I guess it’d be nice to take the feed for the cows and be able to take all those feeds, 100, 150-pound bags of grain or whatever they’re using in approximately three or four months.” He was in that position, and he was actually doing those activities, free of pain.
But the thing about focusing on what you don’t want leave that within your focus and leaving that within your focus always drives you to think about it so it never leaves you so if you’re thinking that you’re vibrantly active and physically fit, then that image draws your body and creates a physiologic response in your body to drive you in that direction. It’s an amazing thing when people start affirming what they want. Those types of things are the amazing drivers of the physiology in your body that helps you get there and make you feel really good at the same time.
Community Fairs and Getting Known
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, that story was really impressive. Do you participate in community health fairs to get the word out about your practice?
LeNae Goolsby: Hey, we operate on a very lean human resource budget. So no, we do not have done those in the past. The ROI hasn’t really been sustainable.
Dr. Barbara Hales: So what is it that you do to promote yourself so that patients are aware of your practice? You provide a very valuable service and assure a very wanted service. But in order for people to come, they have to actually know that you have a practice there.
LeNae Goolsby: We have tried several things over the past 20 years of being in practice. And what we have found specifically since we shifted into integrative medicine is it’s not uncommon for our patient referrals to outpace any other marketing efforts that we may be running at the same time. Because when people feel as good as they do, and other people notice, I think we had somebody in the other a new patient in the other day, who was at the gym and couldn’t believe how this other guy looked and had noticed the transformation. And when they started talking, that guy is like, oh, you got to go see Dr. Goolsby. So patient referrals have always been number one. But number two to that is website SEO. Most people, if they’re not coming in off of a patient referral, they’re coming in off of a website search. In addition to that, and to try to help the SEO, we do press releases, we’re doing podcasting. We’re going to be launching our own podcast in about two months. We do email and social media marketing.
Dr. Barbara Hales: What platform do you find most helpful?
LeNae Goolsby: Hmm, well, SEO of the website is the most helpful. So make sure that the keywords that we want to be known for, are what our web patients are looking for. I will admit, I’ve always been a bit of a snob when it comes to the definition of integrative medicine, medicine versus holistic medicine. I’ve had to let go of that because of mass understanding.
Trip Goolsby: She did the Leadership program at Duke University.
LeNae Goolsby: I did. It’s ingrained in me what the proper definition of integrative medicine versus functional medicine versus holistic medicine is. But I’ve had to let that go.
The Difference Between Different Kinds of Medicine
Dr. Barbara Hales: No, I’m glad that you brought that out. Because most people have no clue as to what the difference is. It’s very confusing now with the doctor saying, now I’m functional, or now I’m integrative, or now I’m holistic, and people are saying like, well, is that the same thing? What’s the difference? Most have no clue. So in your mind, what is the difference?
LeNae Goolsby: Integrative medicine is a proactive approach to care that places the patient in partnership with their physician, and addresses their health concerns, evaluating and considering all components that affect our health. That could be your work environment, your home environment, your mental state, your emotional state, or your physical state, all of these nuanced variables impact our health. Then we address those.
What sets infinite health apart is that it specifically has a protocol of looking at the best of the best in traditional approaches and integrates the best in peer-reviewed and evidence-based complementary therapies. So integrative medicine allows for writing prescriptions if prescriptions are appropriate. But we were actually really successful at getting people off of sub-prescriptions. So the goal is to get away from the pharmaceuticals, but we’re not fully against pharmaceuticals if you will. I think in a lot of people’s minds, holistic medicine, specifically is no pharmaceuticals at all. I’m not even really sure what functional medicine is, maybe you know.
Trip Goolsby: The CDC came out a couple of months ago and said that 93% of our health is derived from our lifestyle and the things that we engage in our lives. So that being said, that means that 7% there are basic genetically inherited diseases that you can’t do much if anything about, but the rest of it, we have a genome that is imparted to us by our parents. If we act upon it in the same fashion that our parents did, then we’re going to get the same things more or less. By acting on it in a different way, and this is changing the thinking process, We can’t possibly hope to change the things that have occurred by one way of thinking by continuing that same modality of thinking.
So if you understand that that thinking process needs to change so that you can obtain a better outcome, then you’re already on board to make your health significantly better over the course of your lifetime. Thinking about the medications that we have that are in common use and as an oncologist, I probably use more pharmaceuticals than 15 or 20 interns over the course of their entire career.
In seeing that and understanding that we’re, very often in many cases, camouflaging the basic cause of disease to the benefit of the symptom of the disease, then what happens is that we’re true—I began to believe a number of years ago—just serving our patients. We’re not helping them correct what’s causing the issue in the first place and so if 93% of our health is determined by how we’re living our lives and what we’re taking in and what we’re exposing ourselves to, then some change there is going to actually help people get better outcomes and that’s the foundation of the program that we put together and we’ve actually helped people like LeNae was saying, there’s a genetic test that can be done to see how much of your DNA has been closed down over the course of time.
And fortunately, true biological age can actually be reversed. It’s the same birthday every year, right? But that biological age can actually be reversed. I have patients with a 20-year reverse age reversal almost by changing the environment that their cells are living in.
Online Content Creation
Dr. Barbara Hales: So have you become active on TikTok yet?
LeNae Goolsby: You know, I have not. Doing videos is uncomfortable place for me. I’m trying to get better at it. That’s interesting that you would ask that because I know that a lot of people in health care have been but there’s some backlash about people in health care, presenting themselves in a flippant manner, you know, dancing and compromising HIPAA rules and things of that nature. And I’m just not there.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Well, I don’t think that doing a dance is against HIPAA. So you may want to start practicing your moves.
LeNae Goolsby: Yeah, I think I might have to outsource that.
Tips on Attracting Patients
Dr. Barbara Hales: What one tip can you give our listeners today in terms of attracting patients to their practice?
LeNae Goolsby: I have wasted a lot of money hiring people who hold themselves out as medical marketing guru. And I’ve allowed people to do marketing approaches that did not fit into what I perceived our brand to be and what we wanted to be known for. And I think in medical practice, sometimes you think you’re really good at being the healthcare provider that you are, you do everything you can to serve your patient, you don’t learn how to do marketing in medical school. And so you feel like you’re not adequate at it. You’re not doing the best things that you can do.
And so you’re trusting people outside of you. I’ve had to learn very expensive lessons that marketing gurus and people who alleged to be hyper-wealthy, aren’t necessarily going to be able to get you hyper-wealthy or get you patients. And if you put into play those systems, those marketing tools that actually honor and serve you, and that you’re comfortable with, and you can present authentically. Those are the ones that you need to focus on.
If you know you don’t like to talk down to TikTok because you’re not going to be successful at it. If you enjoy writing, you want a blog, do that because that’s what you love to do. It’s kind of what we do for our patients who maybe don’t like exercising. If you don’t like to run, don’t run. You’re not going to do it. You’re going to hate it. You’re not going to be successful. Same as if you’re in the healthcare industry and you’re marketing.
Do those things that you love doing. Want to go dance on TikTok? Do it. Want to write a blog? Do it. I think just showing up in the places where you’re comfortable and that honor who you are and the care that you provide is going to be the best tip I could provide for you.
The podcast and Final Word
Dr. Barbara Hales: What is the title of your new podcast coming out?
LeNae Goolsby: Well, thank you for asking. There was some deliberation about that. And we’re going to call it Your Infinite Health.
Dr. Barbara Hales: Sounds like a good name. Thank you very much for being with us today on the show. It’s been a very informative episode. And this has been another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors with your host, Dr. Barbara Hales. ‘Til next time!
