Dr. Terry Wahls discusses her therapeutic lifestyle model that uses diet and lifestyle changes to treat serious illness. She shares how she implemented this approach at the VA in Iowa, moving away from drug-based treatment.
So, you've taken this insight that you had from your own healing.
Yes.
And you've done an extraordinary thing, which is you've created a model that you use to treat patients and to train other physicians and providers and to do research in this space. And you were at the VA in Iowa and had done amazing work with people who had very little resources, not a ton of money, couldn't do a ton of testing.
Yeah.
And people think functional medicine is always all about testing, it's all about supplements, but you really were able to show that it really is primarily food and lifestyle and just a few basic things. Very basic.
Very basic.
Make a huge difference. So tell us about what you learned in that process.
So I had my personal transformation and then I started talking about food and exposures. I changed how I practice medicine in my Tahoma Clinic. I'm really focused in on diet and lifestyle and I have to deal with physician complaints because I'm not practicing like my colleagues. So I had to meet with my chief of staff, go over what I was doing and why, bring down my papers, and get some coaching on how to document in the medical record so I could pass peer review and make sure everybody was comfortable with what I was doing. Happy. So we got that.
God forbid you're telling people to eat better.
Yeah, so I got that down. And then, because I was having such great results, the chief of medicine, came in and told me he was pulling me out of primary care and would I open up a clinic where I could practice the way I wanted to practice. And I said, no, I won't do that. And here's why I'm refusing. You need to get endorsement by the chief of staff and the director of the hospital because we just want to be sure that they know what I'm gonna do and that they approve of it.
They're behind it, yeah.
And so I thought that was probably gonna be the end of it. Two weeks later he came back and he said, I have the endorsements. We're good. That's so great. So we got the endorsements going and then we decided that we'd call it the Therapeutic Lifestyle Clinic. So it was very clear to my referring physicians and to the patients that this was all about diet and lifestyle, that I'm not prescribing drugs.
And diet and lifestyle as treatment, not just- As treatment. Prevention. Therapeutic.
It was therapeutic. And you could come, you had to be referred in by a physician. Could be for a mental health problem, medical problem. So you saw people from all sorts of issues. I met with primary care and the subspecialty clinics and said, give me your most ill people who are willing to use a therapeutic diet and lifestyle. I'm using no drugs. It's just gonna be diet and lifestyle. We did this through a series of group classes. The first class was, here's my story, here's the concepts of the therapeutic lifestyle we talked about, functional medicine, integrative medicine, diet, lifestyle, detox, mitochondria, all of that stuff. And then I invited people to either just go back to their doc and say, this is too hard, or I'll work gradually on my diet and then meet with the dieticians, or if they would commit to being gluten free, 100%, lots of vegetables for 100 days, they could come work with me. We'd have a group intake where I'd meet with them for two weeks as a group to sort of do their timeline of their health experiences. And then they would meet with the dietician for two hours who would have a cooking class and help them reimagine breakfast and lunch and reimagine the relationship with food.
Very practical.
And then we would see them once a week for skills class. As many people as could fit in the room could come get the skills classes. and we'd have a support group of 6 to 22 people at a time that we'd see every other month.
