EP066: Fireside Chat with Dr. Aron Choi on Transitioning to an online practice

Welcome to the Perfect Practice podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel is a functional medicine and success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

Hi everyone, this is Sachin Patel and welcome to this very special interview. I'm very privileged and honored Today to interview Dr. Aaron Choi. Aaron is a great friend of mine and a great colleague doing some amazing things in the world. He. He's a naturopathic practitioner and functional medicine doctor who loves helping people with simple and highly, highly effective strategies which empower them to be their own best practitioner. So Aaron, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Sachin, and thanks for being a great mentor in this journey.

It's my absolute pleasure. It's always great to showcase and highlight people like yourself who are doing awesome work in the world. And I look forward to this opportunity to learn a little bit more about yourself and your backstory and give listeners a perspective on more about what you do and why you do what you do so that they can decide if working together with you, which I think is the highest form of elevation that they can take in their health journey, is right for them. And also if it's the right timing, the right fit, and if you're the right connection that you're going to be making with them. So I'm excited to learn about all of these things and to showcase some of the amazing work that you're up to.

Likewise. Let's do it.

All right, so let's start with your backstory. What has you doing what you're doing every day now, what got you here?

I mean, that's. I sometimes look back and think of the journey. It's been a lot of twists and turns. I never thought I would be a doctor, let alone a naturopathic doctor. And you mentioned timing. And I think it's A lot of life is about timing. And before I went to naturopathic medical school, I was doing online marketing, had a job commuting every day, back and forth, 30 miles a day. And life was just on autopilot, it seemed like, until a few things happened. I got laid off in 2007, 2008, twice. That was a wake up call that I wanted to do something more meaningful. And I'd already been reading the book the Four Hour Workweek with Tim Ferriss, looking at ways to escape my job. I was just too scared. But around that same time, my grandmother was in the hospital. She had had multiple heart attacks, strokes, and the doctors gave her like two months to live. And it was one of those situations where I think a lot of people go through. You feel helpless. If you're not in the healthcare industry, you're not healthcare professional. It's hard to understand what's actually going on. You just know someone I care about is in the hospital. And I feel helpless. I felt helpless. My mom was a pharmacist. She felt helpless. And what the wake up call was was when she was on all these medications, she was on acid blocker. Now I know what that is, a proton pump inhibitor for like acid reflux. She was on the cholesterol medication and she was there at Thanksgiving and she wasn't functioning. She was essentially a zombie. She was sitting there, she began to, like, salivate out the side of her mouth. She couldn't hold herself up. I thought, there's got to be a better way to improve the quality of life, not just look at her labs and prescribe a medication to her. And my mom's a pharmacist, like retail pharmacist, front lines of pharmaceutical medicine. Went to UCSF and she'd always said, you don't want to take medications if you don't have to. And that was like a wake up call that, okay, we have the system of medicine where we're prescribing medications, but not actually addressing the root cause. And at that moment I was like, I want to find out the root cause of why people get sick and how people can be healthy long term, not just for myself, but my family. And then you start learning these things and you realize there's a lot of people suffering with the same story. And so I want it to be a change in, in how health is approached, not just from a symptomatic disease point of view, but how can we be proactive? How can we help people thrive? No one wants to wait till they're sick. And then at least I don't want to wait till I'm sick to do something about it. So that was like the timing, all these pieces came together and that was like the opening to go study naturopathic medicine. And, you know, that was 10 years ago. It's hard to hard to imagine it's been that long.

Well, here you are. And thankfully you took this journey because you've helped many, many people along the way. I know you started working off with clients one on one, and now you've realized that there's certain things that everybody needs to be doing and people aren't doing these things. And it's not until they do these things that they're going to start seeing some pretty profound results, which is what you're producing for clients now. So tell me, in the 10 years since you graduated, after following this passion and following your heart and being now able to serve your family and your community, what have you Learned in those 10 years has brought you to where you are now?

Another great question. I look and see the evolution of how I think about health. So I remember before going to school, I read a book by Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the forefathers of functional medicine. And his book was called the Ultra Mind Solution. And he talked about a lot about diet. And I thought, okay, diet is where it needs to. That's the answer. If we fix people's diets, well, then they're going to get healthier. And of course, diet's an important part of health. But I learned a framework in naturopathic medicine called the determinants of Health. What are the different pieces of our health, our environment? It includes, are you getting enough air, water, sleep? What are your genetics? What is your medical history? All these pieces contribute to health. And diet is just one of those eight pillars. And so I have learned and realized how much more there is to health disease prevention than just fixing someone's diet. And so it's, it's this understanding that nature is so complex and elegant and there's more to it than just giving someone a keto diet or following the, the autoimmune paleo diet, the whatever it might be. That's just one piece of it. And I think that's what I realized where people get stuck if it doesn't work. A lot of people do these things. They do the whole 30 and they, they're still confused. They're still figuring out, why am I inflamed, why haven't I lost weight, why do I feel like crap? And so it's that understanding that there's more to it than we might realize.

So what would you say is the biggest aha moment that your clients have? So when they get on a conversation with you, you're, I'm sure, shattering their paradigms, kind of opening them up to a new Perspective. And this question might be difficult to answer because it might be different things for different people, but is there kind of a general comment or statement that you make or perspective that you have that really gives people that eye opening that they need to take action?

Absolutely. I've seen kind of aha moments in my patients, and that's what I like to see when I explain how all the pieces maybe fit together. What I'm finding is fear happens when someone doesn't really understand how things fit together. And my role in a visit is to create an explanation, some type of reasoning where it all makes sense. And from that understanding that, oh.

This.

Is why I haven't been able to lose weight, or this is why I have digestive issues. They see that they have more control over their destiny than having a doctor diagnose them with a label, because often it seems like it stops if the doctor is like, here's your label, here's. You have your. You have gerd, you have depression, but there's nothing proactive that they are empowered to do. So I think it really comes down to being empowered that we can do a lot more for our health, no matter how unwell we feel. And I think it's that sense of empowerment that people walk away with skills, a new mindset, more hope to actually influence their health destiny and not just be resigned to a label for the rest of their life. So I think empowerment kind of come is the word that comes from mind.

Okay, I love it. And what are some of the results that people can expect? Like when. Like, not even what they can expect, but what are some unexpected results that people get when they start working with you?

So especially with my. The metabolic reset program I've been doing with patients, initially, the motivation is, okay, I know I have to lose some weight, lose some, improve my body composition. I have to eat better. Those are kind of the surface level things that kind of bring them into the program. They're like, okay, I want to take better care of myself. But I'll give you a specific example of a patient. We'll call her Kathy. And Kathy had been dealing with leg pain for a decade. Like, they couldn't explain it. So she was on a pain medication for a decade. Gabapentin specifically. After 12 years, the pain medication worked to control the symptoms. But every time she would try to reduce the dose, her pain would come back in full force. That pain medication was a little wall holding up trying to stop a tsunami. It wasn't till we had a chance to talk, and she said, well, My doctors diagnosed me with a B12 deficiency, and they're like, they can't understand why. Well, I looked up. There's a resource that I like to use to look at side effects, like nutrient deficiencies caused by medications. And B12 was, like, one of the first things that gabapentin depletes. So making that connection with her, she was like, oh, I mean, and she did want to improve the way she. Like, she wanted to lose some pounds, she wanted to eat healthier. But from doing the metabolic reset, looking at the entirety of her health, she started taking better care of herself. She started eating whole foods. She started removing things from her environment, like not drinking out of plastic water bottles. So improving her environment so much that she was able to, within four to five months, walk again. Like, she wasn't able to really walk.

So this is.

It goes way beyond weight loss. It goes way beyond looking good in your clothes. We like that. That's great. But she also experienced, like, she had some skin issues that went away, like eczema that went away. She's able to reduce her pain medications now to a point where she's not experiencing those symptoms. But she had, I think the biggest aha for her was like, oh, I have to. As long as I continue to take care of myself, it doesn't stop. So she realized this was, you know, what we call an infinite game. There's no end. It's not like a. There's no end score. There's not like a basketball game where, you know, there's four quarters and it stops. Health is an infinite game where you are always in it until you're not in it, you know?

Right. I love this.

Sounds like the aha for her.

Yeah, that's a great. That's a great book from Simon Sinek, and it's perfect because that's exactly what lifestyle medicine is, is an infinite game. And when you can get people to see that and understand that, then they keep playing. Right. They don't just stop once the symptoms go away. And, you know, it also kind of reminds me of Tony Robbins book Awaken the Giant Within. You know, you're kind of awakening those giant little cells inside each and every one of us that have this infinite cosmic wisdom wrapped up inside all the little nooks and crannies of the cells and the organelles and all the receptors and this, like, magical soup of life that takes place in your body, and you're. You're calling it into action. Right? Which is exactly what it's designed to do. So there's probably like tons of case studies that you could share with people who having transformations, you know, similar to this or, you know, different transformations that are just as profound. You know, some people may not be able to walk physically, but some people may be able to physically walk, but they may not be taking the action that's necessary. Right. Sometimes we take for granted some of the things that we have at our disposal, and health is one of those things. So it's great to see you awakening that inside of people and inspiring them and motivating them and doing it in such a different way. Your process is so unique and so different than what they would traditionally expect. And in fact, your process is even unique to the naturopathic profession because you work with people in a very unique way. So why don't we talk a little bit more about that in terms of how this is different than perhaps seeing another naturopathic doctor or colleague of yours would be.

Right. I'm a big proponent of doing what I would tell someone else to do. So I've been through this process myself and. Well, maybe I'll start with, like, what naturopathic philosophy is. And ultimately it comes down to if you create the conditions for health, you know, all the conditions, diseases go away and health thrives. I mean, from a very basic, like, from a very, I guess if I ever were to say, use one sentence to describe naturopathic medicine is like using nature to nature's wisdom and tapping into that so we can thrive. I believe that we are programmed to be healthy, not to be sick. And it's just creating the right soil, the environment, nurturing it, so that the right plants and things grow in our garden of health. And so what is different about this process is from that framework, we have a therapeutic order. So if you're not familiar with therapeutic order, it's. We work from least invasive to most invasive first. And if we think of it, James Masklossy pointed out that before, we think of it as like a pyramid where at the bottom is our foundations of health, you know, diet, lifestyle. And it goes up to the top where it's like surgery, medications at the top, but it's more like a concentric circle where at the center of it is our foundations for health. For example, doing something like a metabolic reset, resetting your hormones, resetting, how your body responds to your environment, detoxifying. And then it makes all those things on the outside, even supplements, even the surgery and medications, either less important or totally unnecessary. And so that's the point of view I look at doing a program like this, how can we get to the root cause of what's causing issues? And it makes everything else easier or even unnecessary. And what I've really learned also from going through the program myself is that everyone responds a little differently. There's no, it's not a cookie cutter. I've had patients who are doing keto for a decade or Atkins for a decade, and they struggled a lot. And one patient even said doing a high protein, high fat diet may have made her hormone problem even worse. And she wishes that she had done something different sooner. And I think it's really that individualization to the process that makes this unique. We have to look at it as a self experiment to a certain degree because everything's going to work a little different for everyone else. So my question whenever someone joins a program is what's important for you? Like, here's a framework, but how can we make it fit for your story, your circumstances and your lifestyle? So I think that's really how I like to approach medicine is like individualization as much as possible.

Yeah, and you bring up a good point because that's going to require experimentation which to a certain degree requires self awareness. Right. So we've got to learn to teach people how to become a little bit more self aware of how things affect them. Because yes, you can run all kinds of labs on people, but that's not always the most practical or affordable way. So self awareness and kind of that self actualization where people are now becoming more in tune with how things make them feel or even using things. I know you're a big fan of like an aura ring or you know, some sort of device that allows us to track, you know, how we're being impacted. I had interesting sleep study on myself being in different time zones and pushing my body to varying degrees this past few days. So, you know, I was able to self correct and decide, you know, what type of exercise was best for me this day and what will be good for me tomorrow, or how I need to modify what I'm doing. So there's lots of great tools that are available to us and having that real time information and empowering people with that is very, very important. And I love how you're doing that, incorporating that with your practice and your services. I guess the other thing which I brought up was lab testing. And I know that you have the capability of running whatever labs a client wants. I'd love to hear your perspective on that because sometimes I know this has happened to me. I'm sure it's happened to you. People come in and they want every lab test under the sun. And they don't really understand how lab testing plays a role in their care. They just think the more the better. So I'd love your perspective on that for those of us that are listening in.

Yeah, I mean, like you said, lab testing can be especially the functional lab testing that we use isn't recognized by insurance companies and not typically covered. But it provides us the tools that we need to understand what's going on, like under the hood in someone's biochemistry and their body. So I look at lab testing as a way I only want to run a lab test if it's going to change something, a recommendation or an action. And you know, if someone wants to run it all just to see, just out of curiosity, that's fine. But these labs can be a few hundred dollars US per lab. So you do three labs or so, you know, you're at $1,000. And they're very useful in cases where I'm trying to understand what the root cause of someone's issue is. But I think for a lot of people, let's say you're relatively healthy, you have maybe a little bit low energy, you want to get in better shape. Oftentimes you can do some self experimentation and do a program where you learn the self care strategies. You learn a few strategies on how to eat in a way that's right for you, sleep in a way that's right for you. And then often if you feel great, why do lab testing? And so I think there's different levels of intervention. I think of an example back to my previous. My primary care physician when I was 18 or 20 or so, I went in for my annual. He spent 15, 20 minutes looking at me and talking and doing his physical exam. He's like, you're healthy, don't come back in five years. I was like, don't come back in five years until I'm unhealthy. So that clicked for me as someone who was always health conscious, who wants to take care of himself, it's like there's got to be something between now and the next five years that I can do in order to one, maintain my health and also optimize my health. And so I think with labs I'm always looking at what's the goal? Because we can do a lot to optimize someone's health if they're relatively in good shape and just want to do some optimization. But then, you know, there's also the value in labs when we need to do more detective work, we need to dig deeper and we need to get a little bit more complicated. But it's not my goal to start with the most complex thing first.

Right. Keep it simple, right? That's, I think that's the direction that all of healthcare needs to go in, is how do we keep this as simple as possible, which makes it more accessible to people. And, you know, one of the things that I love about your programs is that they're very accessible. You're providing top notch care and very deep insights to people that they'd have to spend years or see so many different doctors to be able to get. And they may not even get that. But the fact that you focused, you know, at least 80% of your services on helping the client become their own best practitioner, I really admire that because that is very much in alignment with how our philosophy is as well. So it's great to see more practitioners adopting this philosophy so that the patients in your community can get the care that they need. And really, I know deep down in your heart, Aaron, your goal is probably to figure out how to keep people out of your office, keep your community healthy and thriving. And then when people do need you, you're helping them go to a whole new level instead of trying to dig them out of their own grave. I think that's one of the frustrating things as functional medicine practitioners is that we oftentimes end up working with some of the unhealthiest people. And I only wish they knew some of the things that you have to offer them much earlier in their journey because they'd probably be better off. And you know, going back to the point of lab testing sometimes, you know, you can tell me if you found this to be the case as well as sometimes people will off, you know, put off making the lifestyle changes until they get their lab results in, thinking that the labs are going to, you know, exempt them from having to do the lifestyle stuff. Right. And what are your thoughts on that? Because I'm sure that comes up often.

It's a bit of a conundrum. I mean, I've read a lot about like human psychology and because I'm trying to understand myself, because I know I'm not immune to these interesting ways of thinking that we think are logical. I think when it comes to lifestyle and once someone understands how powerful lifestyle is and that it's actually not as hard to maintain, it takes a little bit to get going, but it actually makes life easier. So I'm a very analytical person. So once I made that calculation in my head that if I do what I need to do every day, it makes life easier and more affordable down the line. For example, once someone develops a chronic autoimmune disease, like some of these medications are like 3,000, $4,000 a month. Like, okay, would I rather go to the go do a form of exercise I enjoy for 30 minutes a day, Would I rather eat well every day or would I rather pay $3,000 a month? Later my dad had, you know, had some plaquing of his arteries and he needed a few stents. And I was like, I'm just curious how much did this cost to do those procedures? And I think it cost the medical system $130,000, you know, to have a stent placed in his arteries. And he had to pay a few thousand, no, five, ten thousand out of pocket. And it didn't even solve the problem. He was still experiencing, you know, like tingling in his chest and it didn't get to the root of what was actually going on. And so if we think of like the cost, it's not really a cost. When you invest in yourself, it's an investment, it's not an expense. You're investing in your quality of life. You're investing in reducing the risk of something worse happening down the line. And I think once people, once you can see the two paths, it's a pretty easy choice which one you want to choose. So I try to paint the picture like that and try to give people that aha moment. So it's actually way more affordable and easier to live a healthy lifestyle.

Wow. So if you think about it, you could have a fully loaded, brand new like Tesla Model P100D like a few tiny little stents put in your heart and it costs the same. Isn't that insane?

It's insane. I guess for, you know, I didn't, I think and when with insurance it we it all the costs are like hidden from everyone. Doctors don't know how much a visit is. Patients don't know how much their doctor's time is worth a medication. They we think it should be 5 or $10 or doctors visit should be $20. I mean my brother went to his primary care and I was also curious like how much did they bill insurance for that 15 minute visit to go look at your throat. He had some strep throat. I'm like oh, $600. Oh, okay. And it's like, okay, what did they tell you? Like, well, you probably need to take this aleve for the fever and, and that's it.

Oh, my God.

It's like the cost is there, we're paying the price. We're just not aware of it. And in what ways. I think that's my aha moment, that this is actually. It's just kind of, like, hard to believe how the system works.

I mean, I guess there's a reason why the costs are hidden. And, you know, if we're in this kind of opposite world that sometimes you and I find ourselves in, where we're just doing things the exact opposite, where we have full transparency in terms of our pricing and what things cost, the other thing that to be transparent about, it's always more healthcare is always more affordable the more the patient takes responsibility. So in our current healthcare model, a lot of the duties are delegated to the practitioner, and you just kind of go in and say, you know, okay, fix me or tell me what's wrong with me. But in the newer model of healthcare that you're trying to create, it's more about a patient asking, what can I do to help myself? And the cost of that is significantly less financially because the patient's putting their best foot forward in their own healing journey. And so as we're all here trying to create an affordable, more practical system, that's an important distinction. And I love that you do that. You empower people so that in the long run, it saves them. Even in the short run, it saves them a significant amount of money.

Right. And my motivations, because this is what worked for me personally, right. If I think of what I am providing when I work with someone, I literally went from not being a doctor to being a doctor to learn how to take care of myself. I had to go back and take prereqs. I went through medical school. I did additional training, continuing education. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to learn that kind of put together a system that would work for a human being. You know, part of it was selfish, like, I want to take care of myself, I want to take care of my family. And then I see friends or clients, and I want the same thing for them. I don't want them to have to go to medical school to learn how to take care of themselves. That's a hard route to go. So if I can accelerate someone's journey, reduce the time wasted trying to figure it out. Like, the patients I encounter have been through years, decades of trying stuff and not having any answers and solving some of these things in a few months, it's like. And it's not. I'm not. It's not my genius, it's just understanding what I understand about nature. And once I see it line up, it's like, whoa, this is way better than being stuck in the fog forever.

Yeah. It kind of gives you a newfound respect for the body. It gives you newfound respect for what the patient is capable of accomplishing and how any patient at any given moment can choose to work with you and rewrite their entire life story. Because health is not just your wealth. Health is everything. I want to kind of wrap up here and leave our audience or leave whoever is watching this with a few thoughts. One that ultimately, as Aaron said, health is the patient's responsibility. You've got to work with somebody who's just like Aaron, who's going to help you see that. Right. You've got to have a practitioner that kind of believes in you, not just in themselves, on your healing journey. And you know what makes this whole process different, working with Erin is, is that it's all about empowerment of the patient. It's all about enlightenment, empowerment, and self awareness that the patient claims and really reclaims. Because at one point I feel like we had this self awareness, but then we delegated it away to somebody else. And it allows you to make decisions in real time. If you know how your body works, you can make real time decisions. If you don't know how your body works, then you're making reactive decisions and sometimes you're reacting to something 20 years too late. Right. Some of the decisions that we make have, you know, several decade, you know, progression that takes place before symptomology or issues show up. And I know, you know, Aaron, that it's never too late to work with you. The earlier the better. Right. Because you can help people really transform their perspective and their outcomes dramatically. Tell us a little bit more about how people can get in contact with you, how they can get ahold of you, and who's a good fit to work with you. Because that's an important question as well.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I found that not everyone is. Maybe the ironic thing about health is we don't value it until it's gone. We don't value it until we have to go through a lot of struggle to find the answers. But I want to say that when it. I want to work with people who want to help themselves and want that coaching to get to that next level. It's really a partnership. Not your typical eminence based medicine where the doctor tells you what to do. I will guide, I can provide suggestions and insight. But the new paradigm medicine is really a lot of ownership over our own health and actions. And I'm there to guide someone. So I think if someone is ready to be proactive about their health, willing to kind of go outside their comfort zone and try different things and self experiment and those are who I work with best, then this, this approach works with best. And if you want to get in touch with me, the best way is go on my website. Aaron choi.com a r o n s 1 a c h o I.com I also have a Facebook page where I'm sharing posts and thoughts and different opportunities to interact. Dr. Aaron Choi on Facebook and those are two of the best ways to get in touch.

Yeah, I love your Facebook feed. It's always filled with great questions and engagement and makes you think a little bit differently or a lot differently depending on where you are in the journey. And it's a very inviting space for people to ask questions and post their remarks and share their stories. So thank you, Aaron. I appreciate you, appreciate the work that you're doing and I hope this gives people a great spotlight on how you can help them and your mission to really serve people with love and compassion. It really shines through. So keep it up and let's keep working together and change as many lives as we can, brother.

Thanks Ashley. Appreciate you too.