Robert Whitfield MD argues that nutrition is foundational to surgical care and that functional and allopathic clinicians serve patients better through collaboration than conflict. He credits working alongside functional medicine practitioners and nutritionists with improving his practice.
So at what point did you. Was it. Were you always maybe more functionally based or was there a point where you said, man, there's this diet. This whole diet lifestyle thing really is an important thing to address.
I think it goes back to how I was trying to. But they were very rooted in just nutrition was the foundation of surgical care, and it still is. So every surgeon gets taught nutrition. It's just gotten better and better and better and. And more interesting to me. So I think the important thing for anybody listening is you got to remain curious about what you're doing. And, you know, I've. I work a lot of hours, but it's not really work because it's. I have a great team, I have a ton of great patients. And that's, you know, kept me interested. I honestly, when I went to private practice solo, I officed with a functional medicine practitioner and just learned a ton from them and functional nutritionist. So I think, you know, it's the way things should be. They don't have to be. There doesn't need to be division amongst anybody. It's just better understanding will help the patients so.
Well, I think that's great. When I was writing my book, the Thyroid Debacle, with my friend Dr. Kelly Halderman, initially both of us had come from medical training and come from medical fields, and we each had our own individual reasons for getting into me into chiropractic care and then into functional medicine, and her into. Into naturopathic medicine and functional medicine. But I think sometimes, you know, we hear a lot of anger sometimes in the functional medicine community, kind of directed at the allopathic community, me. Me included. And at some point as we were writing the book, somebody said to me, this sounds angry. And I'm like, you know what? It's probably. It's the wrong tone. And, you know, medical physicians are doing. They have a. They have a job, they have a training, and they're doing one, a process. But from a functional medicine standpoint, we've got a kind of a different job. And what we need to do is not be adversarial. I agree.
