Amplify Yourself & Your Practice

Dr. Chad Woolner is the CEO at Simplified Functional Medicine, CEO at Applied Functional Neurology, and Owner/CEO at Align Integrated Medical. Dr. Woolner has been studying functional medicine strategies ever since his wife was diagnosed with a major health issue and struggled with severe health difficulties. In helping his wife, Dr. Woolner developed a unique approach to helping not only his wife, but thousands of patients across the US find health through simple but powerful strategies.

Episode Highlights

1:14 – Car accident turned lives work. “I got into chiropractic through a car accident many years ago. I was originally in school, planning to be a dentist because I had a good friend who was a great mentor and dentist. I was shadowing him and getting prepped for the DAT exam when my wife and I were out on a date and got rear-ended. She sustained some pretty significant whiplash injuries and had never been to a chiropractor before. I had had very little experience, and we weren't sure what we were in for, but the experience we had with this chiropractor was phenomenal. Ultimately, one thing led to another, and I decided I wanted to become a chiropractor. I went to school there at University of Western States, graduating in December of 2008, and about a year later, I started Align Chiropractic. In 2017, we integrated our clinic, now Align Integrated Medical, and we've been plowing forward ever since then.”

5:28 - Chiropractic to Integrated.  “The irony is, people think that, philosophically, going from chiropractic to integrated would make one less philosophically straight, so to speak. Kind of the mixer side, yet I found it had more of the opposite intended effect for me. I found that the more we integrated, the more I came to really love the chiropractic philosophy of vitalistic model. Using this integrated model really allowed us to take the umbrella of vitalistic chiropractic model and weave that into literally everything we do here at our clinic. Our philosophy looks and feels here very much like a chiropractic philosophy and clinic. But to answer your question, it was just a recognition that there was more we could do and provide better solutions for our patients. That's really what motivated it.”

11:18 – A team-dependent, systems-driven, long-lasting process. “We have a program that we just launched in January, Applied Functional Neurology. In essence, it provides all of the things that practitioners would need to successfully incorporate or implement a brain health program into their practice. This stems from one of our other programs that we started years ago called Simplified Functional Medicine, which is essentially the same thing, but for chronic health issues. We saw that model was working for those, so we decided to launch our brain health program, The Brain Restore Program. We found that there are holes in this process. There are a lot of phenomenal clinical education programs, platforms and courses that are out there to teach practitioners pretty much anything they would ever want to know from clinical and academic standpoints. But the one thing we find is, practitioners go through all of this training but don't know the first thing about integrating and incorporating it into a practice. What does that look like? What do we do in terms of the process? How do we educate that patient? How do we even get the patients in the door in the first place? How do we market and set the pricing model? Some practitioners have the stick-to-itiveness and the determination, which is very few by the way, and it's not because other doctors physically can't do those things - they're pulled in so many different directions and don’t have the time. Again, a lot of glaring and gaping holes in this process, so we've tied all of the necessary components together. We provide all of the clinical training, business systems, and marketing systems. It is a systems-driven and team-dependent process. It's straight from the trenches of what we've developed in our practice and practices all across the country. These are proven frameworks. It solves a lot of problems because now, it's not just that you have the clinical acumen, but you also have all of the systems that can be immediately plugged in in rapid order. We recognize these problems are epidemic. The solution needs to be fast, both from a standpoint of the patients and the providers. If these are not fast solutions, providers will lose steam very, very quickly. They can only have so much faith in a program that will show fruit a year, two years, three years down the road, right? It's got to be quick.”

17:00 – The legitimacy of chiropractic in the neurology field.  “A few reasons - if chiropractors are doing personal injury in their practices, which I would argue probably 80-90% do, seven out of 10 of their patients are going to statistically have some form of a mild traumatic brain injury. There was a study that was published in the Journal of Pain in 2023 that approximated 30% of those 7 out of 10 aren't getting diagnosed correctly, so a significant amount of those are being missed. The reason why is because when they go to the ER, which is a typical starting point for people who've been in a car accident, brain injuries aren't necessarily going to show on CT or MRI, right? A lot of these are going to fly below the radar. The way we look at all these health issues is you can either ignore them, refer them, or help them. We suggest that the best option is to help them and provide some sort of solution. The second thing I would say is, with zero disrespect to our medical colleagues, I think the majority, if they're being honest and self-aware, would say that they have not had a strong track record with chronic health issues or with brain-based issues. These problems are only getting worse, and the brain health epidemic is on the rise. We're now approaching like a trillion-dollar problem with brain issues and, as Dr. Walter Koroshetz famously said, brain health alone is going to bankrupt the country. We have to step in and do something. When you look at statistics, they say between now and 2030, we're going to have a shortage of medical physicians of 89,000, so who's going to fill that deficit there, especially as it pertains to brain health stuff? We're going to have a 20% shortage of neurologists. Chiropractors have an incredible opportunity to step up to provide solutions. I'm not making any sort of over exaggerated claims or anything - I'm suggesting if you want to become certified, we can show you the path to doing it. At the end of the day, if a person's coming through your doors and they have those problems, just treat the patient treat who's in front of you. We don't treat conditions. We treat the person.”

32:22 - Incorporating AI into your practice. “How aren't you using it is probably a more appropriate question as to how are you using it. It's become a utility. It's like the internet. It's like a phone line. We're getting to that point here very soon, if not already, where you can't operate a business in a meaningful capacity or way without some degree of leverage of AI technology. It's just becoming one of those things that's essential as part of normal business. In general, we're using it in a lot of different ways, but more specifically, we use it for marketing purposes, content creation, research, idea and concepts analysis, patients communication and follow-ups, creating solutions and protocol development. Did I cover all the bases?”

35:51 – Augmentation tool for creativity vs license to be lazy. “If we look back in history, anytime there are significant market shakeups, there are tremendous opportunities. I'll give you a perfect example that most of us listening can appreciate in our lifetime – the invention of the internet, the invention of Google, the invention of social media. I think all of us, to some degree or another, can appreciate if we could hop into a time machine, knowing what we now know at any one of those points, we could say pretty quickly and easily what we would do different or what we would do to set ourselves up for success. But to answer your question, I truly don't want to be known as a self-proclaimed AI expert because we're still in the shakeup. Even the experts don't necessarily consider themselves experts because we're still not sure what the future holds for this technology. Again, I look back when the internet was first invented, people had no idea the way in which life was going to be revolutionized by that. In a similar way, by all accounts that I can see, all of the experts are saying the AI revolution that's upon us is going to dwarf the internet revolution, which is shocking and wild to think. There's this convergence of technologies, whether it's AI, augmented reality or virtual reality that's all coming together in this very profound way that we can't quite yet see fully. We can see two distinct and clear paths in my opinion - those who choose to use AI as an augmentation tool versus those who don't embrace it. AI becomes a really beautiful thing, in my opinion, when it's woven together with human creativity. There's going to be a massive discrepancy between those who use it as an augmentation tool and those who use it as a license to be lazy. Practitioners who don't embrace it are going to get left in the dust and become quite frankly and utterly irrelevant. Truly.”

44:18 – AI is an amplifier. “You've heard the saying about money that it's an amplifier, right? Jerks are even bigger jerks with lots of money. Cool people are even cooler with lots of money. I think it's the same thing with AI. I think it's going to be an amplifier. Those who are creative producers are gonna be that much more valuable to the world because they're going to be amplified to be able to create, produce and solve problems at an even greater level because it's just a phenomenal resource. For those who are worried about the apocalyptic or existential implications, who knows about that? I'm not smart enough to say and predict the future there, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that AI is an amplifier. That's what I mean by an augmentation tool. If you have a desire, and I know the listeners here, you want to serve people at a higher level. You want to do more. You want to be more. It's going to be an amplifier for you, should you choose to allow it to augment and amplify that.”