This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni’s Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Dr. Jason Deitch shares on the issues plaguing our health care system and why we need to create our own wellness teams.
Dr. Deitch is the co-author of the best-selling book “Discover Wellness: How Staying Healthy Can Make You Rich.” Dr. Deitch is also the founder of Discover Wellness Center and the Chief Wellness Officer of the Master’s Circle and WellCall, Inc.
Kevin: So let’s give a brief introduction about what you do and then I want to talk about some of the issues that are plaguing our healthcare because I think that’s really important to get into.
Dr. Deitch: OK. You know Kevin, I was a practicing doctor, my training is in chiropractic, for approximately ten years in the Oakland, California area, East Bay, San Francisco area. It was an extraordinary experience, I must tell you. I say that because if you’re on the front lines and you’re working with people as a healthcare provider, especially in the realm of natural health and healing and wellness, you get to see miracles happen every single day. It is a blessing. It is a beautiful thing. We had a family wellness practice. We took care of everything from newborn babies to seniors and everybody in between. It was really a wonderful experience.
But I did always have in the back of my mind, I don’t know if you’d call it a pessimistic or optimistic or whatever type of attitude you want to look at it as, but I always knew as much as I was able to really touch people and help them and improve their quality of life. I kept seeing and thinking about focusing on how many millions of people in the world right now, especially in America, who are uninsured, who are over-dependent on things like dangerous medications and the real issues that came up for me, and really the inspiration for writing this book, “Discover Wellness: How Staying Healthy Can Make You Rich” was really looking at the economics of people getting sick today. I probably don’t have to spend much time convincing people that America is severely threatened, economically as well as on a lot of other different levels, very simply by the fact that our nation spends a majority of its resources, studies say between 70 and sometimes 90 percent, of our resources paying for lifestyle-related, preventable conditions. Care that in essence is being spent on conditions there are essentially preventable. That’s good news and bad news. The good news is preventable and that we can do something about it.
So my co-author, Dr. Bob Hoffman, and myself got together. We realized this was a bigger mission and purpose than being in day-to-day practice and we decided to really try to create a movement around helping people become inspired to really do the things that they probably know they should be doing anyway and aren’t. It is not a revolutionary science. It’s not some brand new radical technique. It is really, hopefully, motivating people to really take action on the common sense things they know they should be doing. The reality is you can go bankrupt by not doing these things, in every sense of the word, and you can in fact become rich by doing these things. It’s really up to you to do so.
Kevin: What are some of the common sense things that most people who are on a healthy path seem to be missing.
Dr. Deitch: One of them is to create your own wellness team. What I mean by that is that as a healthcare provider, and if that’s most of the people who are listening today, I’m going to suggest that we’re all somewhat guilty of defining wellness or healthcare by what we do. We tend to explain it through our eyes, primarily through the things that we do and perhaps profit from. The reality is that people often times need a whole entourage so to speak, or a team of wellness professionals. What we write about in the book is sort of an evolutionary model.
It is a model reflective of medical model that most people are aware of. We make the analogy that most people don’t wake up one day and go, “You know, I don’t feel well, I’m in some pain. Should I go to my neurologist, my orthopedist, my psychologist, my personal trainer? Let me think for a second. Maybe I’ll ask my neighbor what they did.” They really have been conditioned and accustomed to saying, “I’m going to go to the doctor,” and they expect the doctor’s role to be to analyze their condition, analyze their goals and to make recommendations for the products they should be taking, in the medical world that’s mostly drugs or some sort of surgery, and what, if any, referrals may be necessary, what specialists may be necessary to help that person accomplish their goals.
We believe that there’s a real strong opportunity. In fact we believe that the future of wellness almost depends on us taking this opportunity to sort of emulate that same sort of model, to help create some clarity and to provide greater service to communities by doctors positioning themselves as wellness doctors and making the effort to create a wellness team or a wellness network or a group of wellness specialists within a community that can work together as a team for the betterment of the people that they’re working for. Where they understand how each person has a role on the team. There’s doctors and specialists, like in the medical model. And really have a respect for what each person does as opposed to — again, I’ve experienced it in my practice. It happened on more occasions than I would like to think. Somebody would come to see me as a chiropractor, they’d go to a massage therapist and the massage
therapist would say something along the lines of, “You don’t need that chiropractic stuff. You’ve got a tight muscle. Let me just help you.” I just think it’s not right or appropriate for the patient, nor is it right for other healthcare professionals all the way around.
We really invite people to have a healthier discussion amongst the wellness community, as professionals, to learn how to work together as a team. But more importantly, until we start teaching people in our communities how to become better clients and better patients and better consumers of our services, we’re going to continue to be a fragmented profession. And worse off, people aren’t really going to get the benefits of what we have to offer as a unified team of wellness professionals.
Kevin: Wow. What are you doing personally to make this kind of united organization? I know for a fact, being in the natural health industry, that there is no united front at all. What are some of the guidelines that you think would be required in order for this to actually become even more mainstream, even more of a natural approach, the first thing that comes to someone’s mind?
Dr. Deitch: It’s a multi-prong approach. The first think you asked is, “What are we doing?” Well, you know that I’m the Chief Wellness Officer or the nation’s largest leadership training and coaching firm for wellness professionals. It’s called “The Master’s Circle.” One of the things we do, we just in fact created a quite innovative, online training program that gives healthcare providers of all disciplines, the ability to go through a five-module online training course from the comfort of their home or office or any computer that has access to the Internet, that allows them to go through five specific modules that take them through what I think of as the transformation from a traditional-type of a healthcare provider, which is really focused on treating symptoms and then letting people go on their way, into one that really works as part of one of these unified teams. It’s really, I think, kind of an awareness and people becoming comfortable and having a sense of who they can trust within this process. Everybody’s obviously making sure that they get taken care of and nobody wants to be taken advantage of. But I do believe that most people that are attracted to the wellness industry specifically, really have a higher purpose. They have a higher mission. And there has yet to emerge a leader.
That’s what we do. We work on training leaders to be able to reach out into their community, to reach out to other types of providers and have whether it’s a meeting or a conversation or a walk or lunch or some sort of connection, it’s all communication. It’s all a matter of those unique individuals basically starting conversations with others to say, “Look, enough is enough already. I don’t know about you but I think we’ve got a major problem and quite honestly the problem’s not that I don’t have enough new business or I don’t have enough new patients. The problem is that there is a surge of people who are experiencing stress in our communities these days that need more help more than ever. Quite honestly, I can’t handle all of that myself. I know that there are people that walk into my office that not only need my care, but probably need your care too. So I’m creating a network, a unified front within our community, that I would like to talk to you about seeing if you’d like to be a part of. Now here are the conditions: we are focused on serving people based on their needs not just ours and we have a professional code amongst us that we understand that we’re not here to take people away from their primary provider or from each other. We all agree and have a respect and understanding for what each other does and we don’t really interfere with that doctor-patient relationship. We have a trust and an appreciation that we’re all here for the betterment of a person, a betterment of a patient, and their families I might add. And there is a code or agreement that we’re really trying to do the right thing for the right reasons to make the world a better place.” As altruistic as that sounds, I will make the argument that it’s also good business and not just good business but it’s really what’s in the best interest of people.
Kevin: That’s an amazing point and I’m glad that you mentioned that.