Welcome to Confidence to Thrive, the podcast helping growing practitioners and healthcare entrepreneurs navigate the challenges and risks of regulation while building brands that matter.

Every episode, we tackle a different issue facing healthcare practitioners or entrepreneurs, or we interview a guest who is working on the leading edge of private healthcare, building something that matters in their sector or profession.

On today's episode, Christopher Cloke Browne, director at Owlicity, speaks to Dr. Indra, president of the British College of Functional Medicine and leading UK expert in functional medicine.

Dr. Indra has pioneered the development of a new model of functional medicine practice developed from experiencing her own frustration within the NHS.

Among the topics discussed are the practical difficulties of launching a regulated clinic business and how she built a collaborative multidisciplinary team that puts the patient first.

Let's join Christopher and Dr. Indra.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: I'll dive in with the first question and see where we go. When Roger and I visited you in Leeds, I think we got some of the start of your story. But what is your business and what was your journey and where are you now?

DR INDRA: Okay, so I'm an NHS GP who has transitioned into the private sector, and I use a functional medicine model to support my patients. The journey started probably about 11 or 12 years ago, just realising that the way I wanted to practise medicine didn't quite align with the way I was practising medicine within the NHS setting.

I felt like there were a number of patients that I was seeing, and we just never really figured out what was going on with them. It was a constant case of seeing somebody, trying something new, them coming back, trying something else. And I think there were a couple of patients that were quite pivotal for me, that made me start to think, "There must be a different way of doing this."

One patient that really stands out was a patient I used to see for diabetes clinics in general practice. He really stood out because he came in for his diabetic check, and the numbers weren't great, and I was like, "Right, this is the next medication I'm going to give you. This medication has a potential risk of giving you thrush." So I was giving him one medication to treat this, and then I was giving him another medication to potentially treat a side effect. And something inside me just said to him, "What does diabetes even mean to you?"

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And he said, "Nothing."

So he had no connection with his illness, but he came every year, diligently, having his check-ups, and he was just taking more and more tablets. And I was just a bit—

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah, and makes you a very early adopter, I think. It's a story I hear quite commonly now from NHS GPs, but probably not 10 or 12 years ago.

DR INDRA: No, I think they just— I don't know, I was just kind of, "Oh, this is a bit—" I don't know for sure this is the right thing. And I went through my own kind of burnout, I guess, is the way that we would define it now, and I just realised I needed to leave and find a new way. I learned about functional medicine, and I'm sure everybody that you've spoken to about functional medicine, it completely blows your mind. You're like, "This makes sense. This is how we should be seeing the whole person." And I don't know where it got lost in all our training.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: It's odd, isn't it? It's something that Roger and I talk about when we got more involved with some alternative primary care. We came in through Dr. Julian Kenyon, who I think was a complete pioneer, and by chance, his clinic was in the village, yeah, so that's how you do it.

DR INDRA: Yeah. That's how you do it.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah. He connected with it, and everybody thought he was just a little bit crazy and weird.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And so did we, to be blunt. Yeah. And then actually, as we started to work with him and see what he did, you started to see actually you got some absolutely incredible results. Yeah. And he really cared about the patients. In his case, he was dealing with fairly late stage cancers and all sorts of stuff, and from what we can see, he genuinely gave people probably years, in some cases, of additional high-quality life. Yeah. And then through him we were introduced to more and more practitioners. And again you sort of approach it all a little bit from the, "Oh, you know, this is all people looking for herbs in the woods." A little bit like Asterix or something like that.

DR INDRA: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: You do get that feeling sometimes.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah. And then you actually start to talk to people and engage with them and go to some of these conferences, and you just go, "Wow." Just the level of knowledge and sophistication is mind-blowing. Yeah. It is so much more scientific than conventional medicine. And you end up in a place that says, "Why isn't this the standard?"

DR INDRA: Yes, absolutely. So that's where I came across it. And you do go into it with a level of scepticism, because the first exposure I had towards it was an Australian organisation which my friend was part of, and I was being a bit of a snob that it wasn't run by doctors, so I was like, "Hmm, is this real? What is this kind of thing?" And then I found the Institute of Functional Medicine.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: You found the IFM (Institute of Functional Medicine), and that sort of took you down the route. Yes. Yes. You had your own scepticism, found the IFM, and—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And I think when you start to see the science behind it, you can't really deny it. But even science has its pros and cons, yeah?

DR INDRA: Yeah. And you begin to— I probably never really analysed literature and trials and all of that, as much as I do now. Yeah. Just to really understand, because you just accept it. If NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) says so, it's fine, and you just get on with it.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: That's what somebody was saying to me — almost medical training is training to look for this, tick these boxes, do that, and there's no going deeper than that. And functional medicine goes right the way to— It's just mind-blowing, as I say. Yeah. You know, I sit in these conferences and think, "Wow, you know?"

DR INDRA: Yeah. Absolutely. And what people say is, "Is there evidence for that information? You know, is there evidence that that gene, if that SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) is working, does it actually do all of this? Yeah. I'm not sure that we've got double blind crossover trials, but this is the biology, so let's look at the biology, understand what it is, and if it does support people feeling better—"

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes.

DR INDRA: I use that phrase evidence-informed medicine as opposed to evidence-based medicine.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes. And actually, where we look at it is in terms of getting comfortable to provide indemnity, and that means that we have to be comfortable that we can defend what you are doing, basically. Yes. Then for us, it's about looking at more than just the clinical trials area. You look at, as you say, there's the science, there's the biochemistry, there's people who've been trying it and doing all sorts of things for years, and there's all sorts of data. Yeah. You know, there's a sort of variety of factors. And if you can actually find— Normally, you know, we prefer say three or four, but we can find evidence from different areas that all point in the same direction, we get quite comfortable that actually that's probably quite a sensible thing to do.

DR INDRA: Yeah. And we're always, I think, as functional medicine, well, and me especially, most of our patients have fallen off the edge of the NHS. They haven't found anything or a treatment or whatever that's making them feel good in their lives at the moment. So we're very careful. We're not curing anybody, we're not doing anything. But if we can improve life— then that's what we really want to do, whatever that is. Whether that's from sitting to standing, or lying to sitting, whatever it is. It's that movement that matters to the patient. And what we're always doing, I mean, I'm doing it literally every day, I've got hours of evidence to work through. Every patient needs that out-of-the-box thinking. And it needs that literature search to go, "Well, why is that happening this way for this patient? How is it all interrelated?"

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And that's the fun part of what we do.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes. Yes. I guess it's also the difficult part in many ways, and difficult one in terms of the work that you need to put in to do it. And then actually interesting, you have literally set up Dr. Indra, so you've literally put your name above the door. Yeah. And, as a functional medicine practice, and then, it'll be interesting to go through that, as I understand from our conversations, it's not an easy thing to do. Yeah. Setting up a private GP is in some ways relatively standard. Everybody knows what a private GP is. There's a cost. Yeah. But I think setting up a functional medicine practice is harder, isn't it?

DR INDRA: Yeah, absolutely, and I think for me, I set it up, but after that conference, I was like, something within me just said, "I need to do this work." I'm gonna try within the NHS, which I did. I started using basic principles within it, but you just realise that you just haven't got that capacity to dive into the deepness that you want to be able to dive into. So I just decided straight away that I needed to find a way to practise this, and running a business was never in my frame of any concept. There was no concept of that at all. And literally it's been, for me, a journey from taking my computer, renting a room, and kind of going 10 years ago, "How do I do a business? Like, what does this even look like? You know, how do you set up HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs), and register your company, and ICO (Information Commissioner's Office), and all of these things, where there's no tick sheet or crib sheet anywhere. This is how you set up a business. You just have to learn as you go along."

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah, and I guess especially with a clinical business is, no business is straightforward, but you know—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: With a corner shop you can go to Costco and buy a big crate of baked beans and put them on the shelves. It's kind of— You know, I guess you've got health and safety. I'm probably belittling it, but—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: With you, you have the GMC (General Medical Council) to worry about, especially as you're doing a slightly alternative practice. You have to worry about CQC (Care Quality Commission). You have all this personal data, medical data, so you've got the ICO. You need all your IT systems. I think it is interesting, isn't it? I think people do underestimate, as a healthcare professional, the amount of work and knowledge there is to establish a business.

DR INDRA: It's absolutely been fun. I've really enjoyed it, because I've always kept my curiosity as to, like, how this is all about how do I provide the patient the better service? Yeah. That's always been at the back of my mind. So if I find it hard to decide how to pay somebody, I'm not gonna use that system. Yeah. Because it's not gonna be easy for the patient to do that. Yeah. You know? It's always about improving the patient care, the patient flow. Because I know what it's like for the patients on the NHS, and then because of the kind of patients that we are dealing with, who have been chronically ill forever, who've probably got brain fog, who are very frustrated, super anxious, they don't want another layer of issues.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And as you said, people do underestimate how much things cost. And the time that goes in behind the scenes to getting the patient to sit in front of you and have your 30-minute, 90-minute, 60-minute consultation, and then afterwards to actually follow the patient up. Yes.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: I think that's probably the great big unseen from the patient's perspective, isn't it? The 30 minutes is effectively for you just a data gathering. And then at the end of that 30 minutes, you have this whole heap of new data.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Everybody's familiar with the old GP medicine, so that 30 minutes will be a checkbox, you know? Are their pupils dilated? Is their skin grey? You know, whatever it is. You know, I've got these four out of six, so therefore I give them this pill, and that's what the expectation of patients is. And for you it's no, I mean, some of these blood tests can go into hundreds of markers.

DR INDRA: Yes. Absolutely.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: So you just have data everywhere. Uh, and it must be a case of, you know, the first couple of hours must be just trying to piece the data together and say, "This is what it looks like."

DR INDRA: Yeah, I think as you start, initially it was like that. Initially, I probably would spend an hour and a half to two hours before the patient came to us just looking at the notes, looking at the questionnaires that they have put together, and then thinking, "Oh, my God, what is that? How does that connect with this?" Doing some research and looking at supplementation, looking at medications and everything else. And then after you, as soon as you see the patient, you have another load of data that comes in based on their experience of the situation, their actual connection with how they live their lives and things like that. All that comes out in a functional medicine consultation. Then you're just like, "Okay, now how do I put all of this together?" So I could spend anything from an hour to two hours, so one patient would probably take me about five hours. Yeah. So you can't really see more than like two or three patients a day— Yeah— because it's too much data. But as you become more experienced, you realise you're still doing that NHS scan, are they okay? Are they safe? There isn't any red flags that I need to quickly make sure and just deal with that before I go deeper. So you're always still doing that at the back of your mind. And then I think you learn how to pick out the bits that are relevant, and you learn how to put things together. So it's got a little bit quicker over the years. I would hope so after 10 years.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Uh, indeed, yeah. So I guess you start to spot patterns and— Yeah, yeah. And, uh, yes. Yeah. So really, I think within all that, what do you see is the biggest challenge to you in your business and market right now? Where do you see functional medicine?

DR INDRA: Yeah. So I think there's a couple of challenges. Like, if you think about the people that are in the industry on my side of the industry, there's a challenge for the patient in terms of accessibility, in terms of knowing the experience and the validity of the qualification of our practitioners and our doctors.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: I think patients have a bit of a challenge with that. And the challenge of the data for the patients. They're overwhelmed themselves with a lot of data, and it's knowing how to support them with that. So there's a big challenge from that side. Challenge for the doctors, I see that quite a lot with being part of the British College of Functional Medicine. Challenge to know how to train, challenge to know how to keep safe, challenge to know about insurance and building a business and all of that. Yeah. If you ever come across a new doctor who's come into this world, they're asking exactly the same questions that I asked 10 years ago. Yeah. Luckily, there is a pool of us who have done this, but still the pool is very small.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And I think challenge for the industry as a whole, like, as an integrative health industry, is rising ourselves above the parapet— Seeing ourselves as being a valid part of somebody's health journey and having the data to back up what we're doing, and also the collaborativeness for all of us to work together. Because I know, and we haven't really spoke about the team, but my team is very integrative. Even though my name's across the door, that is more about the ethos that we have and how I approach the world and how I approach my patients, but it is about collaboration. There's no way I can see a patient and do everything that the patient needs. You need to have the rest of the team around the patient.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: I think, and I'd be really interested in your views on this, certainly from our side, providing the insurance, providing the indemnity. As you know, sort of how indemnity works, as you get bigger multidisciplinary teams, you get a sort of we call it an economy of scale, but to us it's slightly an economy of risk, because—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: To us it's exactly that. We really like the integrative approach, and I think it's one of the sort of frontiers here, I think, is how doctors and let's say nutritionists are gonna work together. Yeah. Because the nutritionists have the scientific knowledge.

DR INDRA: Yes.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And the doctors have the disease management, patient care— Yeah.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Knowledge. And then interestingly, part of what I enjoy about working in this sector is I learn every day. So I've learned a major difference between a dietician and a nutritionist is the dietician is clinical, so they're HCPC (Health and Care Professions Council) registered and have treatment and diagnostic rights on certain mainly—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Metabolic diseases. Yeah. But interestingly, functional medicine mainly seems to use nutritionists. Yes. Looking through our sort client base, when I found that out, I looked through all our clients and said, "Oh, who's, who's got what?" And one of them—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Had a dietician who calls themselves a nutritionist. Yeah. So I'd be interested in, your view as somebody who runs a practice as to how you get the importance of those different components and how you get it all to work together.

DR INDRA: Yeah, so I think it's developed quite organically, as with the need. I mean, I realised very, very early on I could not be the only person supporting this patient. It was not cost-effective for the patient, it wasn't cost-effective for me, and a lot of these patients need that coaching support. So we needed to bring in somebody that would be able to do that. So our nutritional therapist came on board who had a coaching background as well. And I'm not 100 per cent clear, I mean, you might be able to clarify the dietician, nutritional therapist, but the therapy bit is what nutritionists do better than dieticians, or it's a different focus on their work.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: So it's about understanding the biochemistry and how nutrition can support the biochemistry to improve.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes, yes. A big difference I think that is the difference. You see— Yeah. I think the dietician is, so my understanding of this is just from a little bit of research and some comments that a friend of mine made. I think if you look at nutritionist training, it is far more biochemistry, and dietician is more sort of classical, clinical.

DR INDRA: Clinical.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: So sort of, you can look at it, and again, I'm probably insulting people by saying it's like nursing, but it's more an ancillary healthcare kind of training. Yeah. So it's about spotting symptoms and diagnosing from that. It's more classical medicine, whereas the nutritionists have that, as you say, that detailed biochemical knowledge and how food interacts—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: With that.

DR INDRA: Yeah, and food as medicine is the key there. I needed to bring that person in, because even though I have had the training as to understand how I can use food as medicine— that is such a big portion of what we do that I don't think I would ever have the expertise of a good nutritional therapist. So I brought in a nutritional therapist to support that, which was really valuable because then she could see the medical stuff and she can't deal with, because she can't diagnose. I can support the pieces that they couldn't support. So that was how we ended up with developing that side of the team. Then it became very clear that we did definitely need to have a coach to support the next space. Because again, the nutritional therapist gave all the plans and everything, then it's about implementation of the change, so we had to bring in health coaches. That was a little bit harder to sell in the UK just because people didn't quite understand why, well, if you tell me to do it, I'll do it, but we all know that nobody ever does it.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: Exactly. So the accountability factor, the understanding why the change isn't happening, that was all really relevant. But that's why we brought in the coaches into our team. Then we met up with our pharmacist and a psychotherapist who we did have on our team, and still do have on our team, and it became very evident that we needed that extra bit of support for our patients, realising because we started looking after quite a lot of patients with a mental health background.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: It became very evident that we needed that extra bit of support for our patients.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: It's interesting, isn't it? And, I think that's one of the big emerging topics is there is quite a close association between mental health and metabolic health. One of our sort of significant clients were the leading bariatric surgery business, but there's all sorts of bariatric surgery happening these days. But the founders were bariatric surgeons, but they always viewed obesity as a disease. Yeah. So right back in the sort of early, mid-2000s, they were talking on doing TV shows about how obesity is actually a disease and there are all sorts of factors about it, and it's not just people with no self-control.

DR INDRA: No. Yeah, and I think the combination of mental health and physical health— We now know that there's a link. There's no denying that link. So the coaches were able to manage to a level, but we then started to see more patients who needed that extra bit of support. Yeah. Even though a lot of them have mental health support outside our clinic, it's just having people with that support. Then the next part of it was realising that we needed to have consultants in our team. We needed to bring in the NHS consultants with their improved, with their increased knowledge, who have a functional medicine background, to support the GPs that were doing the work.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Okay.

DR INDRA: So I think we're quite unique because we have consultants and GPs, pharmacists, and nutritional therapists around a table seeing this human being that we're all treating. And it's amazing. Everybody's on the same level. Nobody's higher, lower, or anything. There's no hierarchy, because we all have a level of responsibility for that patient.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And the patients that have been through the system and have seen the team and have followed our pathways really value that, because they realise that each person is seeing a different side to them. And I kind of have the analogy of the blind men feeling the elephant. Yeah. You might have seen that. So one person feels a tail, one person feels a foot, one feels the trunk. They all are going to say, "This is the elephant." Yeah. So for me what is really important, is that I see one aspect of it, and that's what the patient feels they need to show me as a medic. Yeah. And then our psychiatrist might see an aspect of the patient they think, "Oh, that's my mental health side."

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And then nutritional therapist said, "Oh, this is the food." And then when we put it all together, we really start, not even see the whole of it, but we start to see the 360 of the patient.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah, yeah. No, as you describe it sounds amazing. But that must be a very difficult thing to put together and pull off, I would imagine.

DR INDRA: It is, and we've been through a number of different iterations of the pathway, and we've now found that actually our allied health, we now call them integrative health specialists, because they have so many different roles. They can be coaches. They can be whatever. But they have so many different roles that they are the integrative health specialists, so they can look at everything, and they're the ones that hold the space for the patient. They're the ones that know the whole story. Okay. They're the ones that support the patient through the journey, and the doctors and the nutritional therapists and the specialists drop into the journey— as needed.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: And that's not dissimilar from a classic NHS model with a GP and specialist. It's just slightly different people in different roles.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: It's not dissimilar from a classic NHS model with a GP and specialist. It's just slightly different people in different roles.

DR INDRA: Yeah, yeah, it's different roles, but the thing that's different is that they have one person who is their support person all the way through— Yeah. Each pathway.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And that's— And— That's a coach, is it? Or—

DR INDRA: It's coach-based.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: But we call them integrative health specialist.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Okay. Yeah.

DR INDRA: Because our coach at the moment, he's also a pharmacist. He's also a coach, and he's also got Ayurvedic training, and our previous coach was a psychotherapist as well as a coach. And the coach that we're bringing in there is a coach, but she's also a practice nurse. You know, I think in healthcare, most of us are some form of coach.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes. I think ultimately, isn't it? Yes, yes. And that's the interesting part, isn't it? And the comment's often made and very true at the end of the day— somebody can't fix you. The only person who can fix your health is ultimately you. You have to do something about it.

DR INDRA: Yeah, and it's about the connection, isn't it? Because if the patient doesn't connect, or the human being doesn't connect with what you're saying, and they don't feel heard, and they don't get that, "Oh, that's the issue here," once you have that, the rest of it is easy.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes.

DR INDRA: But it's helping the person explore and feel safe enough to explore what they need to do. And when we've had one of our patients who has been supported by one of our nurses, and they have gone from constantly seeing us in their bed and switching the video on, to now getting out, going for a drive, seeing us at their desk, and it's just taken that support— to do that.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: But the stories are mind-blowing. This is the thing. And we've seen, you know, reports of, you know, even in just in the cases we see, which is only a tiny fraction of what everybody does. We see people in weeks going from completely bed-bound to out and about and enjoying the day. And the thing that really I find amazing is this ability to reverse dementia, basically.

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: And when we were at Integrative and Personalised Medicine this lovely American lady came and told Roger and I about how she was a pioneering patient and the doctor had reversed her dementia, and she was walking across America to raise awareness and celebrate it and so on, which was brilliant and lovely and amazing— she was 83 or whatever she was, and so on. And that's amazing then talking to one of your best-known colleagues. She says, "Oh, yeah, well, you know," what she hasn't realised that this is about 3,000 more— Yeah.— Will have been done now. And it's like yeah, okay. Yeah. But that's just incredible, that. And I guess that's an interesting thing, isn't it? It's how basic it is, because the whole pharmaceutical industry's desperately trying to produce medications for this and all sorts of stuff and God knows how much money's being spent, but no doubt huge amounts and so on. And then over here there's these people just doing it every day. Yeah. It's an incredibly powerful area and you do wonder how the whole focus got lost along the way.

DR INDRA: It's about, I think for me, it's about that ownership. We gave away a lot of our power to the healthcare system. We told them, "Fix us." Yes. And now we're realising we have to fix ourselves. In the end of the day, the patient still had to take the tablet. Yeah. Because that's what was it. But they found that pretty simple, pretty straightforward, "Take the tablet, we'll fix you." Yes. I think that's the narrative that's been there for a long time. Instead of, for me, the way I look at my patients, I look at myself as a guide. You're telling me this, this kind of makes sense to this biochemistry. This is what I probably think is going on. These are the testings that kind of point to this is the abnormality. This is the research that says this works for this, so let's try it and see. But there is a deeper part of healing that we've forgotten, which is the source.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah. Yeah.

DR INDRA: Yeah. You know? That person who's managed to reverse their dementia needed to have a deeper knowing that they were gonna get better.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes. Yes, the mental aspect is huge in many ways. Yeah.

DR INDRA: Yeah. And— Because if that isn't there—

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: You tend to find you can chuck as many supplements, you can chuck as many things at them, but they will stay—

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah.

DR INDRA: At the same level.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Is that something you struggle with with new patients maybe? And I, I think you're right, there is this, you know, the expectation with healthcare now is I go to the doctor, they see me for 10 minutes, they give me a magic pill and I'm cured. And that's not the way your practice works.

DR INDRA: No, and I think that's why we are kind of self-selecting. People will self-select to come to us. And the way we make sure that they're aware that it is very much personal responsibility. We will guide, we will support, we will educate, we will give you all the information that we possibly can, and advise you on which supplement and which medication might be useful for you. In the end, you're gonna have to do the work. Yeah. You're gonna have to be ready to do the work. And I think that's where that kind of perception piece is where things tend to go a little bit wrong. Yeah. What's wrong is that they perceive that this is what should be happening, and we perceive something completely different. Yeah. And that's been a massive learning curve for us, is just really making sure people understand where we're coming from, and we fully understand where they're coming from.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah. So I can summarise, and I would say from what we see at the moment, that is one of the biggest challenges for functional medicine is that education as to this is the journey we're going on a journey. It's almost we're doctors and nutritionists and all the rest, but we're still heading out into the unknown. We're going to go and explore and find out what your problems are. That's it. We're kind of better at guessing where to go next than the next person, but we're— Yeah.— There's still an element of that. Yeah. So it's sort of more of a journey or an adventure into your health, if you like— Yes.— In this area. So we see that as the biggest challenge, so maybe we can finish on— and some people have interpreted this as financial, which it isn't. This is just generally as to what do you see as the biggest opportunity in what you're doing?

DR INDRA: Biggest opportunity is— Let's put it this way. If we can all be working in this way, and we can collate the data that we have got, we can start showing that there is a different way to work, and it's not a different way that is obsolete to conventional medicine. I think it needs to be collaborative with conventional medicine. So I think the biggest opportunity in what we're doing is really the possibility of gaining and gathering more data, if you see what I mean. You know? If we can showcase, you've heard all of these stories. Imagine if you collated all these stories together.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes.

DR INDRA: And you had, like for me, I don't have the time to write up the case histories of all the people that I have supported and have got better and are out there. Yes, we've got a few videos of people giving us testimonials of how they're feeling better. But I think we can then at least give people choice, and that's another opportunity for our industry, is to actually give people choice. Do your conventional medicine, make sure everything is as optimal as it can be from their perspective. Make sure we're not dealing with any end of life kind of issues that curcumin isn't gonna support that. You're gonna need to make sure— that maybe you need steroids or maybe you need antibiotics and things like that. And then use us as a health optimisation, you know? To actually— And I think for us, the other potential for us is dealing with the wave of chronic disease that we're sitting in. Yeah. That is the biggest opportunity— Yeah.— because if we can take that load away from the NHS in some way, the NHS is brilliant acute care. Yeah. It is the best in the world, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else if I had any kind of acute problem. But for chronic care, we're mixing it up. Yeah. We need to have a different system, and the approach that functional medicine takes, or the integrative health approach, is perfect. Perfect for chronic care.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yes. And I love this idea of health span rather than lifespan, so—

DR INDRA: Yeah.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: If you got riddled with chronic disease, you might live 10 years, but are you going to enjoy it? Yeah. We absolutely see that. And we wish you every success in—

DR INDRA: Thank you.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: In building what is from our visit, an extremely impressive practice.

DR INDRA: Thank you so much, Chris. It's been really lovely to have a conversation about how we're doing and what the potential is for this industry.

CHRISTOPHER CLOKE BROWNE: Yeah. Thank you.

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