Episode 93: Health Latch Circle With James Thomas DDS MS

Hi and welcome to episode 93 of the Untethered podcast. Today we have Dr. Thomas joining us. Dr. Thomas received his Doctor of Dental Surgery from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He discovered his love for working with young patients while volunteering at a special needs camp in Bay Cliff, Michigan and decided to focus on preventing oral health problems in the youngest population. He completed his Master's in Pediatric Dentistry from the University of Michigan in 2005. After relocating to Seattle in 2006 with his family, Dr. Thomas practiced as an associate in Lakewood and Mount Vernon before opening his own practice, Everyone by One in Bellevue and later a second practice in Linwood in a business office in Centralia. He sold the entire business in April 2016 and ordered a found Health Latch after treating thousands of children, some of whom struggled with breastfeeding due to tongue and lip tie. He has a unique understanding of the issue, seeing firsthand how stressful it can be for families. He has created a specialty practice dedicated to changing the lives of these babies and their families. He's an advisor to Rhinogram, a software HIPAA compliant messaging application that he believes is going to be a game changer and advocate for patient centered healthcare communications. He's developing a community based software platform called Health Latch Circle to share the message of hope and love driven through the Health Latch educational brand. Through oral tether education and professional collaboration, Dr. Thomas believes this community will inspire others to learn how they can be defiantly joyful. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and or medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host Hallie Balkan. I'm a certified orofacial myologist, feeding specialist and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, tethered oral tissue and airway space. I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to get this information out to the masses. Let's get started. Well Dr. Thomas, I want to thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast today. I'm really excited just to chat with you and learn all about the Health Latch Circle, so thank you for being here.

Thanks Haley. I appreciate it. I appreciate everything you're doing as well. I know you're working really hard, so.

Let'S just jump right on in and Talk about how health circle came to be. What is the origin story and what prompted this?

Yeah, so I went to the University of Michigan, graduated in 2005, and just kind of had a change of heart, family wise. Just wanted to get out of the tundra of the Michigan weather and move to Seattle. Quickly. Sought out certain mentors that I knew would help me in terms of systems, processes, efficiencies. I knew I was always good with messaging. What most of your viewers will get out of me today probably has a lot to do with messaging, brand, mission, vision, mantra, and how a brand can actually transform an outcome or make it better. And that's a little bit of my origin story. Started the first practice in 2007 out here in Seattle, and it was called, just like most other dental practices, Northwest Pediatric Dentistry. I'm a pediatric dentist by trade, and I just, I knew we would do okay in pediatric dentistry. I didn't know it was to come based on what I was seeing. But we grew by just doing, treating customers well, keeping kids clean, welcoming everyone. And I kind of came to an epiphany with my wife, actually. She's in brand, and we speak a lot of brand over coffee and dinner tables. And she basically said, you know, the goal of a pediatric dentist is to get a child to the dentist by age 1 or first tooth, basically. And you're doing a lot of stuff in terms of general health instead of just focusing on teeth and cavities. And we see everyone, we see everyone who walks in the door, every insurance plan, Medicaid, everybody. So we kind of talked about calling it Everyone by one. And so we rebranded the offices and called it everyone by one. And we were seeing up to about age 14, zero to 14. But we mostly accepted kids at about age one, right. And that was what the academy kind of drilled into us. Get kids to a dentist by each one. But when we rebranded with no marketing, I'm not a really big marketing guy. I'm more about authentic communication and just transformation through just good deeds. But what we didn't know was the brand. Every one by one. The pediatrician started to say in their well visits, have you had your every one by one visit? And it was almost like a list, right? As moms and dads went in, like, what do I have to do for my young child? And it was like, what is every one by one? What does that mean? And when they came to what was a website, they got educated about anticipatory guidance or guiding their child through oral health and general health. And the babies Started to come. We went from seeing. I had an amazing team. I know the numbers are crazy, but we saw about 80 to 100 kids a day, right? But we went from seeing about two infants a day to seeing about 10, 12, 15, 20. We had to kind of change some systems based around the fact that we had babies with no teeth coming in. But that's really Hailey, where I started seeing, hearing the mastitis, clogged duct infection, problems at the breast, and started tracking some things in the office because we were keeping kids really clean. You know, what were their symptoms? You know, open mouth posture, how they breathe, their neck, their back, their height, you know, just behavioral things that were going on with the kids. And I really started to see symptoms that were just kind of cyclic in the practice. Didn't matter if their genetic background, you know, Microsoft, Boeing, all the big companies out here in Seattle bring people from all over the world. So this was kind of a little project from all over the world. But they all had kind of the same symptoms, right? Snoring, early snoring, lip posture, all the problems that we hear about in the airway. There was a percentage of the kids, a small percentage, but it was hard to deny that were not potty trained past the age of 5, 6, 7 years old. It really got me curious. I'm skipping forward in the story, but it was like, can the problems at the breast be the exact same problems that are at toddlerhood in teens and tweens and eventually what would be adults? And I know you're laughing because it's like we've all had that light bulb moment, right, in all of our careers where it just kind of clicks. And now I enjoy every day, you know, making that click for young families. So when that clicked for me, I was actually kind of devastated, honestly. I went through a period of time of. Of how many kids kind of went through my hands. And I love being humble about it because that's how we get to courage is vulnerability. And I love telling the story about how much I missed. You know, primary care is missing a lot right now. We know that. But we have to support them, right? I'm a big believer in supporting primary care. I think where we've gone a little bit off track in terms of oral health is we're kind of like blaming people. Like, how do you not know this? How did you not catch this tongue tie? It's tied all the way to the tip, right? But. Right. You're. Your eyes won't see what your mind doesn't believe and know Right. You'll look right past it, just like I was in my early career. But when I made that decision to, like, really take on the babies, we started in that pediatric practice making things for prenatal moms, like before they even had the baby. And it got so consuming that I was like, I'm going to let go of pediatric dentistry. What, you know, the drill, the fill, the cleanings, and just see if I can open a brand around babies. And so we did. I sold all the practices and took about a year off kind of formulating what that that mission would be, what that brand would be. And we came up with the term Health Latch. And Health Latch was latching onto the breast. That was the original play. Kind of taken off of Charity Water, if you know what Charity Water is, which is an amazing organization that raises money in Africa. And it was like, we are going to do charity by. And give water. Right? We are going to give health by latching on. But the neat thing, Hailey, and that is what I love about brand, is that even though you have this master plan, and I know that the brand was good and I knew we were going to do good things and we were going to speak of the transformations that were happening in our office every day. But what really happened is I not only took the time to educate the families about breastfeeding and latch and tongue and position and all that kind of stuff, but I shared with every single family through a lot of technology I have in the office, with videos and encrypted text to share the whole picture of what we want for them. Right. Tongue up, lips sealed, posture back. Right. That is kind of what we talk about, right? Because if we. We have lips sealed, we're obviously breathing through the nose. So I always add posture so that the shoulders are back. And Sharon Moore actually taught me from her book Sleepwreck Kids and all the amazing things she does. But. But anyway, so we built health latch 2017. I was getting notes that I was kind of a freak right onto something here.

If I'm getting these kind of messages, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you're client, I always say if you're climbing to the top and you're getting closer to the answer, all the haters come, right? All the haters come. So. So you just gotta, you know, I encourage people that are in your audience that are just running into milestones that are just. They look like brick walls, right. And people are hating your process and hating what you're doing. I encourage them just to push to get over that because it all starts at that. And so we honestly were given away the procedure in the early days in order to make stories of transformation. I wouldn't release a baby. So basically, Health Latch is a clinic for zero to three months, and that's it. And that's really sticking to your messaging. That's sticking to your brand, no matter what people say. You know, I can't believe you started a clinic that only sees babies 0 to 3 months. How could you do, you know, how could you only do that? Right? Well, I will tell you. And I know I have to do a lot more teaching. With everything we figured out here, that is enough. I mean, there is so much in zero to three months that if you actually nail that, if you actually get that right, and you educate for the future, you will change the life of that family. And the hardest thing for us is when we educate so much on that baby, they look right to the sibling and they are like, holy cow, we missed a ton on the sibling and possibly oral tether and possibly snoring and all that kind of stuff. So we helped them in the process of finding other individuals to help them. But so we continued on. I figured out that my message was dead in the water if I did not use technology. And so I turned off the phone. I have no phone. I run an entire office off encrypted text and video. And so before, when families contacted me, they're now texting me from pediatrician's office and from the midwife and all the doulas and the ob gyns. And everybody always talks about, like, why people aren't listening. You have to speak their language. You have to have the right message. You have to make it easy and convenient for them to learn from you. And that wasn't me walking around a pediatrician's office with donuts and saying, let's have a lunch and learn. Especially with COVID especially with the pandemic. It's all got to happen in an efficient way. So I built the systems so families truly get fully educated. We capture their entire story before they even come in the door. And as soon as they hit the door, we go right to work. And so the foundation of the Health Latch clinic here is it's not tongue tie. Well, I'll tell you that it's yes, I do an amazing tongue tie procedure with a CO2 laser, but it's plagiocephaly, torticollis, GI issues, mom and baby, oral dysfunction, vagus nerve and oral restriction. That's the pillars of what we do. Because 50% of babies are going to be born with plagiocephaly. If we already have misshapen head, we already have an airway issue, because everything shifts in the mid face. The chiropractors can feel it. They just don't know what they're looking at. The craniosacral providers maybe are definitely helping that process. Health Latch is now off the ground, fast forwarding through all the pains and all the headaches, but we've now had. We've been referred a baby from 17, 50 different professionals. And when I say different, I mean massage therapists that we've educated, I mean cardiologists, people that deal with asthma. You know, they're hearing the message of health batch. So it's great. And so the problem was that I am a small crew. Here it is, myself and a naturopath. I work with an amazing naturopath that is actually fully deaf. She can feel things on these babies that no one can because of that sensitivity. She is pt, Craniosacral Functional Medicine naturopath. If you want to have a really good baby clinic, I always say, you got to find a deaf naturopath. Dr. Gormley is amazing, but we basically have become known as a triage clinic. Like, if you have a problem with your baby, come see healthwatch. So when all that happened and all that success and all those pains to get it to this point, people started contacting me, right, from all over. I'm sure you're experiencing that, Hayley. You've done good things. People are contacting you that you'll never see, right? Would you agree with that?

Yeah, absolutely.

What do you do with people that you would never see? You help them, right? And so you just want them to get on the right track and find the right providers. So originally, I built some chatbots in order to do that, to educate people that I would never see from all over the world. But the neat thing about the chatbots, that it actually showed me on the back end, all the analytics, what questions they were asking, what struggles they were having, it just became known that I have really grown the message of health apps through our values, which is radically kind, fiercely patient, disruptively brave, and defiantly joyful. In order to get past the darts that were coming at me in the early days, I was just truly, radically, kind of. And I was fiercely patient when the insurance companies weren't covering anything that we were billing and the Health Hutch Circle, which I'll talk about briefly, is the disruptively brave point that I knew was coming and if we were to solve this problem and get people to the right providers, we will be what we will be defiantly joyful. Right. So that is really how value mission brand works, and that's hierarchy. I know most people don't ever get to that point in their business, but. But what do you think about brand, Haley?

I mean, you're speaking my language. So this is the kind of thing that occasionally, and I've more recently, like back in November, December, started to infuse some discussion around business into this podcast. Because I actually, you know, and that's one of the things, if I listen to everybody out there, I never would have done what I did. I infused business from day one. I had a pediatric feeding course that I infused business into. I gave them a business training that I presented live in Chicago two years ago to a bunch of, you know, myofunctional therapist. And I rerecorded it, made it a shorter training, and gave it to them for free because I knew there were some business owners in there and I knew that they needed to get their message out and so I just wanted them to have that. And then when I created my membership, we also had four pillars of the membership. And one of the pillars is, you know, niche down to up your income. You have to figure out exactly what you did. You created this super sub niche within a niche, which is just amazing. People are afraid to do that because they go, how are you going to find enough patients to, to treat within, you know, well, when you become the expert, look what happens. Things just blow up all by the, you know, yes, you have to do work to get there and you have to get your message out. But you are, you're clear. Your brand is what it is. You're very clear in your messaging. You know exactly who you're serving, how you're serving them, why you're serving them, and what you stand for. You have your pillars outlined. You went through the four, you know, pillars that are really your mission. And it was the hierarchy. Everything kind of led to the next. And so that's where I've started to talk a lot more with these business owners and in their messaging and in there. Let's get clear on who we're talking to. What is it you do? And I'm not talking about the 75 things you do. What is the one thing that you want to be known for that you want to drill down and that you want to brand yourself around? Because you can offer 75 things and you're going to be running around like A chicken with your head cut off, because you're never going to be known for anything. So, you know, that's one of the more recent messages. On the flip side, I have been a little bit of a disruptor in the speech pathology and myofunctional therapy communities because I've been putting out these thought reversals and that, you know, people say, myo is not a business. You can't make money in a helping profession. You know, all these different narratives that are out. You can't call yourself an expert or a specialist. You haven't been doing this long enough. And I'm over here going, well, what do you identify as? You have to have your identity in place before you can ever step into that role. Right? You have to understand that, yes, we are here to help people, and that is our mission. But you have to make money. You still have to put food on your table, and it's okay to make a lot of money doing this if that's what this leads to. And that's one of your goals, you know, and so just creating a different narrative, like, yes, Mayo is a business for me, it became a niche within my niche in my local private practice and now even in my online business and who I'm teaching. And without that, if I hadn't niched down and gotten extremely clear on my message and what I stand for and who I want to teach and who I want to treat and who my team, you know, is serving, where would we be? We wouldn't be here. Right? And so that's where it all comes back to the branding of how do you want to position yourself? What do you want to stand for? What is your mission? What is your, you know, everything that you've been talking about? So, you know, and I loved. There were two things that you said that jumped out at me, too, in your conversation before that you don't. You don't answer phone calls. I was just talking to one of the mentors in my program today who was out sick and her team was out, and she answered the phones, and she shouldn't have answered the phones because, you know, she got a parent who got her stuck on the phone for, like, 30 minutes, and it was just not a good call. And I said, well, what would have happened if you didn't return the call? Well, we have to. It was 2pm I can't let it go till the next day. Why not? Who says it can't go to the next day? Or why don't you have a different something in place in cases you know, so it was just an interesting conversation I had just had earlier today. And I said, people don't get us on the phone when they call. We don't have a direct answering service. You leave a voicemail, which tells you to text us or email us, and so you can still call, but very rarely do we ever call somebody back. So I was like, oh, my gosh, that's really interesting to hear that you have a similar setup, because we, again, we want to find out from you what is your concern and figure out before you come in here. You need to fill out our intake. We need the backstory, we need to know the history. We need to know exactly what's walking in. If we can serve you right. We want to make sure that it's a good fit for everybody. And energetically, we don't always just take everybody who comes our way either. It's got to be fit for the team. So we'll refer you out. So, you know, and how do we do that? Well, the phone call is not for me. For me, it's. I don't get on the phone with anybody. It's my admin, right. She's doing everything if we do make a call. But yeah, we operate from text and email. And half the time I will say, hey, did you see those calls that came through? And she'll say, oh, they already emailed me. No big deal. And then we can start that educational process and help get everything set up that way. So I loved that because, again, I think that's very different than most of what most of the industry does. And I think that people are going to hear that and they're going to go, how are you doing that? How is that successful? And then the other thing that you had mentioned, too, was just allowing yourself to be vulnerable and admit that, hey, there are a lot of patients who came through me, through my practice in the past that if only I knew then what I know now. And, you know, for me, it was like, I can't harp on that. I can't get stuck on that. I can recognize it and get vulnerable with it and allow myself to share that with other people like you are. Because I think some people just get stuck there and they go, I can't help anybody else. Look at all the people. I failed. Well, no, we need to. There's a bigger mission here, and we need to get out there and start, you know, sharing that mission so that we can get in front of the right people now, use the knowledge that we have now. And like you said, you then see the parent looking at the infant turn to the sibling, and then after that they turn to themselves in my practice and they go, oh my gosh, I have this. I think my husband has this too. So it's through that evolution of education that we were able to help the patients and hopefully past patients will circle back and we can direct them where they need to go if we're not the right person for them now. But I thought that was a very vulnerable and valid discussion to really highlight because I know a lot of our practitioners that listen to this podcast struggle with that.

It's come up and it comes. I mean, some people kind of poo poo and like that business is like this money making machine, right? And no, for me, brand is like systems, right? Systems, processes. And really like my initial video that I send out to new families that have just had a baby is about seven minutes long. Well, it's, it's kind of purposely seven minutes long because the average person on YouTube can watch like what, 30 seconds before they click on the next one. But it's chock full of information. But what it says at the heart of it is, it's like, this is what we do well. This is what we're good at. This is the process of how we take you through it. These are the outcomes. We've seen consistently over 6,000 babies now, which is amazing to me. And if you want this, this is the place to come. But if this doesn't match you, that's okay. We'll even help you possibly find other providers. You know, we're that radically kind, but it just. Clear is kind, right? Clear is kind, which is its own brand. Right. If you're, you're like over the top clear, that's where the messaging starts to get clear. So, yeah, no, the phone is. And I have a course coming out because I know I need to teach this. This is the one part that's just kind of a thorn in my side of like, how do I communicate? And everybody wants to know, how do you communicate without a phone and without video course coming out eventually. You know, there's a thousand things on our plate, right? You just got to kind of pick and choose. Right now it's just making babies to happen throughout the clinic. But, but yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's been a great path. I believe it's the pains in our life that teach us the big lessons. Right. So I've had a lot of, I've had a lot of ups. And we're talking about them on Zoom, but there's been a lot of downs to get to this point as well. And. But we're having fun now. And. And really, the Health Latch Circle is the evolution. You know, I threw the brand at it. You know, most people will be like, well, why you call it the Health Latch Circle? If you know that's your brand for your clinic, let's name it something else. But, like, I cannot say enough. I can't write better values than I have for Health Latch. Like, radically kind, fiercely patient, disruptively brave, and defiantly joyful. And now where we've gone to the next level, because I know this potentially is a global platform. Because I'm getting Zoom calls from Global now. It's really messed up my schedule for sure. I am a 4am guy now to catch Australia and all these other countries that are contacting me. Super curious about the circle. What's it about? Wow, this is really neat and packaged and branded. But where I say the next level is, I felt like there had to be kind of principles, laws, and values. And the principles for me we wrote are really special to me. I mean, because it's kind of a little emotional for me. And I talk about intuition, awareness, and advocacy. And those three principles could be turned so many different ways. It can be turned to a professional, it could be turned to a mom. And what I mean by that is like, a mom is known to have intuition towards her baby, right? And the major thing I see from zero to three months is there's a lot of misinformation, as you know about this, right? That it's a fad, that it's a trend, that it's, you know, your baby's growing, they're fine. And we talk a lot about passively fed babies versus actively fed babies. We talk about growing versus thriving. Those are two different things. We can compensate and make babies grow, and they're really not thriving. They have reflux and they have other problems. And a lot of. Unfortunately, moms and dads at an early stage are too nervous to tell a provider that they know there's a problem. Like, you know, and that's where I go back to intuition, right? And we're just. We spend a lot of time helping families understand that they should trust that intuition. Like, that's literally a gift from God. It's en. Listen to those little whispers. And then we talk about awareness, right? Awareness isn't about the health circle, isn't about asking, you know, or giving all the right answers. Right? Like, Facebook has got problems, right? Would you agree Facebook is great. It was original for connection, all that kind of stuff. But, like, I see on my end where families are so overwhelmed with the amount of information they're getting from multiple different sources, and they can't actually figure out what the right answer is. Like, it's great. It's great. I have access to everything, but I just need you to tell me right now what is the right answer? The exact right answer. So I talk about awareness because it's not all about getting the right answers. It's about asking the right questions. And then the last one is advocacy. I'm really passionate about that. I struggled with that a little bit because I am radically kind and fiercely patient. And when we talk about advocacy, it could be kind of swing towards the negative a little bit, because I just want people to know that the system that we're in, even the system that we're communicating in between good providers, kind of broken. We talk about collaboration all the time. But until someone, like, builds a tool that people can actually. Good people can actually collaborate on around a patient from multiple different offices, that's when it's going to start to flow a little easier. But until then, the only thing that makes a baby better is its parents. They have to be an advocate for their child. They have to take the notes from one parent, one provider, and take them to the other provider to make sure that it gets there. They have to be researchers, obviously, learners. They have to read books like Sleepwreck Kids. They have to read books like Breath that Just Came out so they can get a big picture of what. What their plan is for the growth and development of their own child. So those are some of the principles we wrote in the Health Last Circle. And it's evolving, to be honest with you. You know, talking about vetting providers and getting the right providers on the circle and make, you know, it's definitely grassroots kind of thing that we're building. The one thing I want the audience to know is that I built it well. I feel like I'm the guy from Jurassic park and I might be dating myself a little bit when I talk about Jurassic park, but it's like he walked people around Jurassic park and he constantly told people he spared no expense. I spared no expense. I built Jurassic Park. Well, I've just, you know, this project has gotten pretty pricey, and I'm kind of funding it until membership comes and all that kind of stuff. But I just want people to know, like, I built it really well. I built it. It's a solid platform. It's Like a theater. Like, I built the whole entire structure. It's all trackable. It's all run through platforms like HubSpot, which aren't expensive in order to kind of group people imagine someday there's providers from all over the world. Well, I could take a segment of the population, whether it be a professional speech and language pathologist, and I could say, well, I want the speech and, you know, someone contacts me and they want to share a case study. Right. I could say, let's take the speech and language pathologists from the D.C. area and send them all an email with a zoom link that there's a meeting and Haley's gonna run it, you know, so. And it's just parents being able to, for the first time, be an advocate and say, these were my providers that I used to help my baby or my toddler or my teen or my tween or my adult. And here Facebook is the circle that I built and it's all shareable inside the health circle. So I just really feel like we need some sort of tool like this. And so, so I built it. It's been a two year project. I launched it in August. Our goal was to have 50 members by the end of 2020, which we did. And I'm hoping to have somewhere around 500, if not more, by the end of 2021. We've made a partnership with Kajabi. We built what I call pillar trees inside the help that circle, which are the main tree trunks, which are early childhood cavities, oral dysfunction, oral restriction and airway. Those are the four trunks. And then we just have the ability to grow it. If you can imagine those trunks having branches on it and then le it and then they all start to communicate with each other. Because we know that early childhood cavities is part of oral dysfunction, is part of tongue tie, as part of airway. So, yeah, that's kind of where I'm heading and where I'm going. Let's talk babies now. What do you want to know about the babies? Everybody wants to know what I know about the babies.

Yeah, I mean, so I. Well, first of all, I love all of that. And what I will say before we hop into the babies is it's interesting to hear your pillars for your practice as well, or the three pillars that you mentioned with intuition, awareness and advocacy. Because that's where people have said to me, how have you built this private practice with 22 therapists traveling all over the D.C. maryland, Virginia area, treating all these patients without spending a dollar on marketing or Advertising on Google or Facebook or whatever. I don't even market on Facebook. Honestly, people just find us. And really it's because of the mission that I set out with and without even knowing it, without even having had the training. Six years ago, when I launched my private practice, I basically said, this is a boutique practice. We don't cut corners. We treat your child as if it was our child. We want to find the best answers, but we also want to get to the root of the problem. We don't want to slap a band aid on it and just make things okay for now. We want to figure out what is causing this from the get go and pull together the team to treat your child so that they can thrive, not just survive, right? And so that was part of the mission. But also I have always said from day one, even before I was a mom with kids, I launched my practice and got pregnant six months later, five months later, but you know, I wasn't a mom yet. And I said, but these moms, they know more about their child than we will ever know as a practitioner. They are the gate holders to their children and they know we need to help them advocate. We need to teach them what questions to ask. We need to promote them as the primary person on the primary team member who is running the ship here. You know, instead of defaulting to the person with the title after their name or the letters, you know, I'm like, that's Alphabet soup. Yes, we've gone through training. I'm not downplaying that. But you are the professional when it comes to your child. And so when we started to give these parents the permission to advocate for their children, to give them the questions that they needed to be asking different providers when they go around and they do their due diligence and just, you know, allowing them to follow their intuition, follow that mama gut. I'm telling you, it's, that's what word of mouth. We have built a, you know, huge practice off of word of mouth referrals and area providers because we crafted that team, we honed our skills, we trusted our parents to lead us and we worked together with them as an equally driving person on the ship. We weren't the ones telling them, no, you have to do X, Y and Z. We really included them as part of that therapeutic team and plan and mission and carrying it all out. And I think that's what really has set us apart from other area practitioners because there is a speech pathologist. Every time you turn around any, you know, in a five mile radius around me, there's probably 30 plus practices and half of them take insurance and we don't. So why is it that we've been so successful? Well, this is why. This is one of, you know, we had this mission from the get go. On the flip side, you know, we also have certain practitioners that specialize in certain things and I don't believe in waiting lists. So if we can't serve you, if I don't have a practitioner that is a good fit for you, whether it's clinically or personality wise, we're going to refer you out to the right person for you, it's not, you know, so yes, I'm in business to make money. Yes, this is a business, it's not a hobby. But I'm never going to take somebody on just because you come and you call me and you want me to take you on. It needs to be an energetically, a good fit and we need to make sure that we can truly serve you and that we can work together as a team. And so again, you know, because that was how I set up my practice from day one, I think that, that, you know, that sounds very similar in a lot of the pillars that you operate from. You know, we are very clear in who we serve, why we serve them, how we serve them and what that team is going to look like. But I love that you've taken on the mission to create this because I can't tell you how many people have asked me to do this over the past couple years. They're like, so when are you going to generate like a real big list where people can go and just search for all the practitioners? Because I get DMs five times a day asking like, who in my area do you know who does X? And I'm like.

And I'm honestly really gentle with the salesy part of the health that circle. But I don't play on Facebook at all. It's just not my thing. And I'll tell you a little story. It's like when I ran the health ad circle through a focus group, which is a good thing to do. You build these things and you spend time and energy and finances on them, but you're kind of drinking the Kool aid. You're like, this is going to work because I made it and you know.

I'm so smart and don't believe in it.

That's right, you got to believe in it. You know, you're starting it from scratch. But I ran it through a focus group and long story short, you know, you Tell the moderator what it's about. And then he goes in the room and this is all over zoom now because of COVID And basically, you tell him what the hell that circle is about. He tells the audience, and then they play with it, and then they give you your feedback, Right? Well, you pay some good dollars to do this. And they did it. And long story short, the moderator, everything I told him, he basically butchered. He's like, oh, there's something about tongue tie. I don't really get it. Dr. About airway. And I don't know, he built this thing that's kind of like hotels.com or something. You know, it was really bad. But then. And so I'm on the screen going like, no, you know, no, don't happen. But anyways. But anyways, they start playing with it and they start getting it right? So I was like, great. You know, it's simple enough that if someone doesn't explain it to them, they can understand it. So that was good. And I've realized that to make things on the Internet, to make them clunky, it's really cheap. But to make them simple, it's really complex and kind of expensive, to be honest with you. But long story short, there's a woman in the room, and she's like, I understand the tongue tie issue, and I'm getting this platform. And she goes, but the thing is, they should apply this to everything. And I was like, where's she going? And she starts to cry in a focus group, and she's basically said her daughter has severe OCD and it took her 12 years to find the right psychologists and providers that were the right people to actually start to make some headway. And she goes, back in the day, if I could have had a website that I went to that I just put in my zip code, and I basically instantly got the accredited people that could actually help my daughter. It wouldn't have taken me 12 years to make it happen. So that's where the emotional part of it gets tugged in, right? You're now helping people by organizing data, right? Organizing data sets, which are people and providers that are good all over the area. But no, don't get me wrong. I am super frustrated when I'm on Facebook and it just says over and over again, like, providers are okay with that, that they're just like, hey, do you know a provider in Wales? Do you know a provider in Kentucky? You know, it just drives me nuts because all I do is I just post something that it's like cut and paste from NASA. Hey, there's this solution that we're trying to get people to understand that if everybody would just get on the same page, we could just send them to. They could get educated. Because a big part of the health circle is education. Like, I know a major pain point in a lot of these dental practices is, okay, they've gone to a billion hours of CE now, Right. Especially during COVID Right. And they come back to their offices and they've got a team that's maybe a little rigid, and they're used to doing crowns and bridges and fillings and stuff. And now they've got to be a leader. Right. They've got to say, aha, I figured out something, and we're going in a totally different direction. When families come in, we have to explain to them these concepts about airway. Well, my hope is someday that it could be a resource that the person could get fully educated so when they come to the clinical care centers, it's not like this aha moment. It's not like a salesy kind of pitch like we're going to sell you this process of helping you help yourself with airway. So it's education on top of communication. I truly do think I'm going to be building some leadership skill classes inside the health hat circle because I think we need to build good leaders within our circles. But, no, it is exciting. The one thing I will tell you is that is just really cool for me with the health circle is when we build brick and mortars, like offices, if we have an idea we might be knocking down a wall, we might be changing things. It might take three years before a lot of money, and we might see three years before we see if that actually worked. Well with something like this, it's so nimble that we can, like, throw something at the wall and within a day or two, we can see if it worked. And so we're not taking years to help airway progress. I think if we don't do something like this, I will tell all your viewers, I think in three decades, there's people on something better than zoom talking about the same exact problem. It could be caries or cavities all over again. I mean, we've known about cavities forever, right? But we still have cavities rampant all over the kids and all over the country. So if we actually want to do something, we have to start to think at it from a different perspective. We have to be smart about it. We have to stop working hard and work smarter.

So got you here. When I Get you there. Right. You know, it's like shift in our thinking, even those of us in this space. And so, I mean, I love it. I love it. I think this. I'm really excited to see what this evolves into because I feel like you've got. You're very clear on what it is now, but I'm sure because you're very open to that feedback and, you know, talking to the people who are in the circle, it sounds like it'll just continue to evolve into what it needs to be to meet the needs of the practitioners and the patients and make sure that everyone's getting educated and that they have access to these providers. That sounds like a big mission here.

Yeah. And I clearly wanted people to know that. I don't see it as my voice. I see it as the voice of the members of the health at Circle. You know, the amount like, even Richard Baxter came on, he's a member and I was able to use his content, and then it pushes right back to him. So when people come find that they can find him in Alabama, you know, the connection points are starting to happen. Like, a big win for us is Meggy Graham got contacted by an outside person through the Health Labs Circle to her office that said, I need help. I understand these concepts better now. So the more we add to it, just the smoother that's going to get. And I'm asking people basically to let me be their promoter. I mean, I know brand, mission, vision, mantra that gets lost in healthcare all the time. And I know that well, and it will stay on point and based on those principles, laws and values. So I'm excited.

I love what you said too, about. And we'll talk about the babies in a second for a few minutes. I know you have to go soon, but this is bigger than you. And that's what a lot of people I think who are not entrepreneurs and who are not in the business world, and even a lot of entrepreneurs don't recognize when you step into a business, you are not serving you, you are creating to serve others. And so for me, that's also why I've had so much exponential success, both in my private practice, because I set out to serve my community and in the online space, I set out to serve the SLPs and OTs who wanted to become pediatric feeding therapists. And then beyond that, I set out to serve the myofunctional therapists who were taking courses, and they were just confused and they needed ongoing education and support in a community where it was safe to ask questions and to bring their cases and to discuss on a level where they felt like they had more than one set of eyeballs looking at these cases so they could truly go back and serve their patients. And, you know, when you announce stepping into a mastermind, where I'm helping private practice owners grow what they're doing so, again, they can serve more people. And what I realized was I can keep doing what I'm doing and serve the small set of people in my community, or I can go out and help other private practice owners and other SLPs and OTs and RDHs and dentists and everybody step into their own. And by that, I can exponentially reach so many more people. And so this is not about me. This is way bigger than me. And, you know, and so when you said that, I'm like, this is why you will be successful, right? This is why you are successful. It's because you have a mission and a vision that is a lot grander than just you individually. You're here on this earth to serve a much larger purpose. And so I know. I think that gets lost when a lot of entrepreneurs have conversations, but I'm hearing a lot of this come through you and, you know, market the heck out of it because people will see, like, the pure, you know, intent behind it. And so, you know, you're welcome to promote it on my podcast and, you know, promote it all over the place, because I think it really. People need to know about this.

Yeah. And the biggest. The biggest thing I will tell you that is happening over and over, unfortunately, is as physicians, in order to learn, right? We went through all these grueling programs that got us to where we are today. And. But we basically take concepts that are really small and we make them more complex in order to learn about them, whether it be the cell, right? And learning all the parts of the cell and the DNA, right? We tear it apart. And what generally happens is we understand it on this concept of very specialized, and then we try to project that on the general public. Like, let me tell you everything I know, right? Well, the problem is what we need, and that's what I feel like my talents are in, is we take complex things and we make them very simple, right? And that's where the messaging gets good, right? That's where intuition, awareness, and advocacy. What does that mean? Well, what does that mean to you? You know, and let me kind of dive in what it means to us. And if that resonates with you, then off we go. And these are the learning sources. So that is really what we are trying to do with the health circle is take complex things and make them very simple. So babies, what do you want to know? What do you want to know babies? There is a lot to know.

But yeah, I know and you really, let's focus on the 0 to 3 right month population because that is where you focus. So I know for me if I can get a baby in here between zero to three months and we can get them on the right track feeding wise and we can connect them with the right providers body work, if they need a release, we prep them for that, we set them up to make sure they get optimal results. It actually looks very different in those first three months than it does beyond three months of age. Because now I've got certain patterns we have to break. Therapy becomes sometimes more involved. Maybe there's more practitioners needed. So you're really. I also love this mission and I feel like I keep saying that, but I'm really excited. I love what you're doing because with educating and honing in that, that window of birth to three, I mean that's, that's where we need to catch them. That's where we need to catch them to put them on track going forward. So I just would love to hear your perspective on that. And you know, I know, we know you told a little, a little bit about why, you know, that's, that's where you decided to focus. But yeah, just share with us like your insights on that population. Sure, sure.

For me a little bit has to do with that. Passively versus active feeder, right? Your active feeder is the kid, the child. Your active feeder grows a good face, right? Because they're using their muscles properly. They're actively draining the breast that eventually grows into a child that can accept food pretty easily without gagging and choking and all the problems you deal with down the line. Right. Your passively fed baby is the opposite. Right? You're passively fed baby and here's kind of a trend to kind of put it in perspective. And when I say these things, I want to disclaim. I'm not a lactation consultant and I'm generalizing things and trying to make them very simple. But for instance, like if the lactation consultant world would change their messaging to just passively versus active feeders, guess what would happen? The moms would come back for multiple times of before and after weighted feeds. Because I tell parents every day, like that lactation appointment is so important in multiple them in a row. So you can see the sequence of is your Baby turning from passive to active, right? Because the hormonal, I'll tell you, the fate, unfortunately, of many breastfeeding mothers, okay? And it's actually hard for me to see because I can really help on a limited basis, but I can't help worldwide, right? But let's just make a couple assumptions. Mom's breast milk is flowing, right? That's adequate. And she's born blessed with that supply because we know a lot of mothers based on different situations and medical histories, they struggle with that. And so that lactation consultant is really important. But let's assume that the supply is really good. Well, the hormonal supply from the brain, from the hormones after birth will carry the milk till seven, eight, nine weeks, right? And then there's an actual baton handoff to the baby and the baby's got to drain the breast and pull the milk, all right? So, so if you stick with me, those babies that are feeding off mom's letdown, that have a significant tongue tie, that basically are just passive eaters, right? Moms oversupply will carry them. But in the thing that's so emotionally hard for me is that those moms are, which they should be, are told that they're amazing breastfeeders. You're a champion breastfeeder mom. But where we get emergency texts is 7, 8, 9 weeks. And why is that? Because mom's basically carrying baby, right? And then the hormone starts to slow down, baby sleeping longer because they're satisfied and not having to work. Those babies don't like to work if they don't have to. And then they start to all of a sudden have these symptoms of like, colic and irritability. And mom's all of a sudden saying that she's getting a little bit of mastitis and these other problems because things aren't draining. So if so, the major thing I try, I'm trying to get across to the medical colleagues, our dental colleagues, is just because the baby's growing, right? Doesn't mean they're thriving, right? And so you got to really listen to that story. That story is really important. That is why we captured it before. And then that goes back to that intuition, awareness and advocacy, right? Because if people are aware of those trends, right? Because if the baby is an active feeder on those before and after weighted feeds with multiple times with the lactation consultant, then we can feel pretty comfortable that the baby's going to carry that milk supply in that breastfeeding situation can go as long as mom wants to, goal wise, right? So everybody comes into health latch with different goals. Some are just on the bottle, some are on the breast, some are a combination of both. Some are certain ways because they can't feed and we help them through that process. But hopefully that gives you some perspective on what I see with the babies. Like for me clinically it's pretty easy for me to pick up on the babies, what's going on, full lip listers, all the things we talk about, smacking chompy, destroying mom's nipples, that's the easy stuff. You know, my procedure probably takes me about 30 to 60 seconds to do lip tongue, buffalo ties if that's what's needed and then they go right back to feed. But I like to under promise and over deliver with all these families. I like to give them plans that are reasonable. I like to surround them with really talented speech and language pathologists and occupational therapists and that lactation, we do all that to use technology to connect them with the right people that are responsive to do that. But it's just unfortunately the current state is like if your baby's tracking on a curve, they're totally fine. And I understand the curve and circumference of head and all that kind of stuff, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're thriving. So a lot of the babies, because I hope that there's a day where talented people like myself and others can, can be inside the medical community, maybe be on the ward of where the babies are being born. How easy would it be for me to stop in each individual room and just do a quick exam and say hey mom, on day six, I'd love to see you at the office or here's a good provider, Please work with lactation first. Please work with craniosacral, get all those things aligned. Because even everybody talks about retreatments and that's what's kind of giving it a bad name, tongue tie. I will tell you a 5 to 15 day old baby has less retreatments than a 2 to 3 month old baby. And the reason is because of the saliva. So the saliva and most people aren't thinking on this level, but the saliva has enzymes in order to heal. So if a baby has been restricted to two months and people denied it and now there's lots of problems. The baby usually has reflux and now the body's compensation has produced a lot of saliva. It's drooling out of their mouth, it's coming out of their mouth to decrease the amount of acid. Well, because they have more saliva, there's going to Be a bigger chance of that reattaching or scarring because the mouth can heal even faster than a five day old baby that doesn't have any saliva. So those are just a few of many, many trends that we're seeing on the babies. Obviously solving the bigger picture. Items like plagiocephaly and torticollis all with cranial sacral. And just getting everybody educated is a huge part I'd say out of my time spent with parents, no doubt. The ratio is 95% education and 5% treatment.

This was for my kids. I released my daughter at 24 months and I released my other daughter at 5 days old night and day. I mean I wasn't still breastfeeding at 24 months. We had a very painful 13 month breastfeeding journey because I was stubborn. Sorry to hear you that I was like, you know, this is what we're doing. But I was also told that was normal at the time. So you know, here we are. That's why I'm very, I'm a big fierce advocate myself on this, on this because of everything that you're saying. And we see that same pattern around the three to four month mark where they, the swallow reflex changes too. And it goes from baby just has this automatic, you know, feeding, feeding, feeding to oh hey, baby's now got some more control. Uh oh, baby's got control, baby can't feed properly. We got a big problem here. And now they're four months old, five months old. And you know, it does become, you know, we can still treat them and we do, but it's more complex than those early feeders that you're talking about. And so that whole passive versus active from day one, I love that because traditionally we talk about those early, those early months as passive feeding because it's more automatic versus active feeding at 4 plus months or so because it's now baby's, you know, got babies in control, babies driving the ship here. So you know, I like even switching that lingo around especially when talking to parents because we do, we need to keep it simple and we all need to be on the same page with our messaging and what we're talking about because it's very confusing between one provider to the next. So again I think this mission is.

Let me just briefly talk about how Brand can negatively affect something. And so like, and I'm very, I go on thin ice when I talk about these things as a, you know, a male talking about breastfeeding. But I feel like I've learned so much. I Always feel like I'm just a medium and the babies are teaching me every day. I'm honored to be doing what I'm doing. But just the fact that breastfeeding is branded as natural. Right. It scars a lot of moms because there's not a lot of moms that come into health latch and they're just like, this is great. Breastfeeding so easy. It's trick a challenge, it's a fight, it's a work, it's an understanding. I get that it's branded as natural. Right. It's natural for the baby. Right. And we know breast milk is one of the best things for the baby in the whole world. There's so much we actually don't know about it. We barely know anything about breast milk. But I'm saying, like, when it's branded as natural, like the average family just has a baby and they're like, I'm just supposed to put to the breast and it's automatically supposed to happen. And it doesn't. It doesn't. So that's why those lactation consultants are so important at what they do. So. But yeah. Wonderful conversation with you. I think I could talk to you for hours.

Absolutely. Well, I appreciate it. This has been amazing. Jt, thank you so much for joining me. Are there any last things you want to add? I know, like, we could keep going. No.

I mean, just the part where we. We can't. There's a lot in our professions and I love our profession, but, like, there's a lot in our profession where there's a lot of people okay with still doing the same things today that they were doing yesterday. When we hear things like if there's, if there's stuff in Airway, like, you know, that's not the way we do it. This is the way we do it. This is the way we've been doing it for years. I will tell you, we know very, very little about Airway. We know very little about our treatments today. Our treatments five years from now will probably be so much more advanced. So we can't keep doing the same things the same way. We've got to be more savvy about it. We've got to get the messaging down. And that's what I'm trying to do at the Health Lab Circle.

I love it. I love it. Well, we will make sure that we are linked, be linked to it on the website, on the show notes, all the things so they can find the Health lab circle. But healthlifecircle.com is that the best place for them to find you.

Yep. Healthacircle.com and honestly, I'm super available. People are hitting me through Instagram, which is great. I'm not the best Instagrammer. I think my 15 year old can do it better than I can. But yeah, people are, you know, and I've got a little Zoom calendar that I send to people if they want to just chat about it. And I give a lot of my time just to kind of getting the word out and just helping people with systems. And that's really what you're looking at, what you're doing, which I commend you for. What I do very well is systems based processes to be able to really help people and create a mission and fulfill that mission. And that's what we got to get people doing okay, 100%.

Thank you again so much. This has been fantastic.

All right, take care.

You too. Bye Bye. Thanks for listening to this podcast. If you want to hear more of these Myo Tots, Airway and Feeding related episodes, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or pledge a small amount on patreon.com the untetheredpodcast if you found value, others you know in this space will too. So be sure to share this episode on your social media platforms and join us over on Facebook, on my Facebook page @halliebulcanbiz, on Instagram Alibulcin. And you can head over to theuntetheredpodcast.com to grab a copy of the show Notes where you can also subscribe to be kept up to date on the latest podcast episodes.