Chip: Honestly, it’s just like a lot of dentists are attending the [inaudible] method, and they’re learning how to help people get cardiovascularly more healthy, too. I mean, there’s just such overlap. It’s just been so much fun to watch.
Danny: It’s great. That’s what we want to see is this interdisciplinary collaboration.
Chip: Absolutely. So why do dentists need to help empower their patients create health? Well, number one, there is level A evidence. Those of you who don’t know medical research or research very well, level A evidence is the most powerful evidence that supports a finding, and there is level A evidence that supports that [inaudible] oral disease and systemic disease. It’s been shown that oral disease cannot be adequately eradicated if a patient has diabetes or pre-diabetes. A friend of mine, he’s actually in my community, just had published in Penwell a beautiful summary article that shows that in order to adequately treat periodontal inflammation, you have to control their diabetes, also. And I’ve had many hygienists tell me that they can’t just – they can scrape a person’s teeth every single week, but if they don’t get their glucose sugar under control, they’re not going to be able to do their job adequately.
And as most people are aware, most type two diabetes is called by unhealthy lifestyles such as obesity and being sedentary, and that as I mentioned before, unfortunately, seventy-nine percent of physicians haven’t been trained adequately in obesity counseling and don’t have the time to do it, so what the dental practice typically does is send their patient back to the physician. The patient’s told to eat less and move more. They don’t successfully do it, and then nothing gets accomplished. So there’s a big need for you to get involved.
I’m going to show you now a video. It’s a video that shows you a heart attack. I’m going to kind of talk through it a little bit in terms of what we’re seeing. So this is a heart. The coronary arteries [inaudible] wrap around the outside of the heart, as you can see here, and they supply oxygen to the muscle of the heart. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to dive inside the artery, and we’re going to be a blood cell going through the tubes of the artery. This is a nice, healthy artery, healthy walls, everything flowing freely through a nice healthy artery. The cells in the wall are the muscle cells that control the blood pressure and [inaudible] lining.
So now we’re going to go to another artery. We’re going to start to see some disease. So as we traverse through, we’re going to see a stable plaque. Not all plaque is dangerous. You’ve got plenty of blood flowing through this tube, and there’s a plaque there, but there’s a nice, thick cap, and that cap is not going to cause a heart attack. That’s a healed plaque where people are going to be okay. Now we’re going to show a vulnerable plaque. Vulnerable plaques cause heart attacks. Vulnerable plaques are inflamed. They’re bubbling, a bubbly cauldron of liquid stuff that where the activated white blood cells will move toward the surface, thin out the cap of that plaque, eat its way through, pop a hole in the lining, and when that happens, the clotting [inaudible] kicks in to heal that injury, clots off the artery, that free-flowing artery immediately gets blocked off completely, and that’s a heart attack.
So yes, you in the dental profession do have the ability to prevent your patients from having a heart attack, and if I ever talk to people in private, I’ve got a story of my patient who I’m pretty convinced that his heart attacks at forty-four years old may have been related to his mouth. So yes, there is full reason for you to consider creating a third era dental practice just like I’ve created a third era medical practice, and I would say it’s necessary because most of the physicians aren’t doing it, and we don’t have the mindset.
So what is the value to you to do this? Why would a dentist want to do this? Well, number one, you’re going to have improved outcomes because as I said before, you can’t adequately treat gum inflammation if you’ve got obesity causing [inaudible] glucose, and I will say that I have absolutely seen inflammatory markers through the roof that plummet when a person starts flossing, doing mouthwash, and then just basically taking care of their mouth. Nothing else works, it does much better than a drug does. So you will have improved outcome, and it’s not just diabetes, insulin-resistant pre-diabetes will do it, too.
You’re going to get referrals from doing this completely separate from creating an oral systemic practice, you’re going to have a bunch of walking billboards out there. You’re going to have people who create health, first step being getting to a healthy weight, and their friends are going to say, “How did you do it?” “Oh, my dentist helped me get healthy.” Well, they’re going to bring people into your practice. What you’ll learn in a little bit is that what’ll end up happening to the dynamics are that your practice will start coaching clients who aren’t in your dental practice, and what’ll end up happening is they’ll be introduced to what you’re all about as a dental practice through the person coaching them to health, and they’ll be interested in your practice.
And imagine the reaction to a physician when their patient shows up thirty, forty pounds lighter, and they ask, “Oh, you’ve done a great job, Mr. Jones, how’d you do it?” “Oh, my dentist helped me get healthy.” The conversation will immediately begin at that point.
So I’m sure a lot of you are out there saying of the [inaudible] attendants out there are saying, “You know what, I love the concept, it’s a great idea, altruistically it sounds great, but I just don’t have the time to do that. I’m a busy person, and I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do that.” Well, you don’t have to have the health professional be the leader in the practice. Eighty percent of health coaches are not health professionals. Anybody who has been trained can do it, and as I recognize in my many conversations, there is a person in dental practices who wants to do more than just straighten teeth. I’m sure most or all of you hygienists out there want to make a difference. You want to have an impact, you don’t want to just scrape the person’s teeth. Everybody says so, and this is a perfect way that you can have it, and you’ve got a captive audience as you’re talking to them, and you can tell them that you can’t do your job unless they get healthy.
And just kind of an intro, there is a financial component to this, and if your practice is coaching a hundred clients, then typically, you’ll get about seven thousand dollars a month revenue to your practice, and I’m not sure how much it means to the dental population, but physicians love the fact that it’s not involving insurance, there’s no [inaudible] care. It is completely separate from that. It helps them kind of [inaudible] from drowning behind insurance companies.
So the program’s called Take Shape for Life. It’s a ten year old program. Most of you probably haven’t heard of it because at this point, there’s not been any advertising. It may not be the right thing for you, and if that’s the case, it’s perfectly fine. But if I’ve kind of stimulated a little bit of a spark, a little bit of a fire in you about the third era of medicine, if you think that you’ve got a third era mindset, then I will tell you in twenty-two years of medicine, this is the best tool I’ve ever found to help a person create health in their life, and not only that, you don’t have to do it out of the goodness of your own heart. You can actually get paid for the work that you do.
So what Take Shape for Life is a professional coaching program. What you would offer your patients, your clients, is a personal health coach, and [inaudible] program, it empowers anybody who’s motivated, anybody who wants to raise their hand and say, “I want to get healthy,” to get healthy and create health in their lives. I am not selling anything. I am not trying to convince anybody to do anything. I’m presenting the diamond, the precious jewel of a program that I have, and if they want to get healthy, this will work for them.
And it’s not a diet. You’ll hear the word [inaudible] used, but this is not a diet. Diets don’t work. Eighty-five percent of people who lose weight will gain it back in two years because they never learn how to keep it off. What Take Shape for Life is is a professional coaching program where it’s coaching people through the weight loss phase and teaches them how to maintain the weight they lose. And one of the fun parts of it is we’re a ten year old company, but a year ago in New England Journal of Medicine, there was published a wonderful article that showed that professional health coaching is effective.
What the study did was they took a group of people who were at a BMI average, body mass index average of thirty-six. So they were in class two obesity. And they had everybody got the learning program. Half of them walked through it on kind of a soft learning approach, and the other half were either given a remote health coach or they were given a group session such as Weight Watchers does, and what they found was that those who had the health coaching, and it was the equivalent, whether it was remote coaching like we do or the Weight Watchers group approach, is they were significantly more successful at weight loss over a two year period compared to the people who were given the soft learning program and did it on their own. So they proved what Take Shape for Life has been doing for ten years.
So Take Shape for Life is a program that was developed by this man, Dr. [inaudible] Anderson. Dr. Anderson was a critical care specialist who was working at the Cleveland Clinic, and he got sick and tired of ushering people into death in the ICU because of the lifestyles that got them there. So he said, “That’s it, I quit.”
He left the Cleveland Clinic, a very lucrative job there, moved his family to the west coast, and over a two year program, he wrote the coaching program and he wrote the learning program that’s now Take Shape for Life. He’s put together a fabulous business, great innovative management team, scientific advisory board, includes people from John Hopkins, [inaudible], Baylor, and he’s developed Take Shape for Life. Well, he recognized that it’s great to have a coach, it’s great to have a learning program, but people need a way to lose weight. Well, and going back to that New England journal study, what that study showed was that after two years, the successful group lost an average of ten pounds, and these are people who are probably an average of fifty, sixty pounds overweight, lost an average of ten pounds.
So yes, they lost weight, but not much. So about the time that he developed the program, it was being proven through research that the meal replacement programs were fabulous in helping people lose weight. They were very effective at getting them to lose the weight, but they were diets, and I said before, eighty-five percent of the people would regain the weight they lost because they never learned how to keep it off. So the diets didn’t work, so what he did is he partnered with medifast, he did his due diligence, he did the research, and I’ve kind of looked at it with him, and he absolutely picked the best company out there. Where medifast, it’s an industry leader, they’ve been proven [inaudible] for thirty years. It’s the only meal replacement program that has the data to show it’s not just effective and fast, but it’s also safe. It’s got studies from NIH and Hopkins that prove it’s safe.
So what he did is he partnered with medifast as the weight loss part of his program, put it together with the coaching and learning system that he had developed, and that was the birth of Take Shape for Life. So what it is is a physician led company, it’s not led by the food industry. The leadership, it’s all physician led, and it’s based on the concept of helping people create optimal health through the use of a health coach, the learning system, and the weight loss phase.
