It Takes A Village: Why Community is the Missing Link to Bio-Optimization (& How to Build a Community You Love)

Introduction to the Bio Optimized Summit 0:00

Welcome to the bio optimized summit where we are exploring the next level of physical and mental health you can achieve through targeted and intentional optimization. I'm your host Dr AMY and today I have with me a good friend, James Maskell and my goodness. It's been several years ago now that we met James and he helped me when I was first starting out on my journey in becoming a practitioner for functional medicine and that of course came out of my own personal health journey where that was really what was the missing piece for me at that time when I was getting sick and all of my labs were somewhat normal and I couldn't find answers with conventional medicine and so I found functional medicine and then decided that that was where I wanted to also learn more to be a practitioner and James was there to help guide me in that process to know how to do that. So James has spent the past decade now innovating at the cross section of functional medicine and community, which is what we're going to be talking about today.

And to that end he created the functional forum, the world's largest Integrative Medicine conference with record setting, participation online and growing physician communities around the world, his organization and best selling book of the same name, evolution of medicine prepares health professionals for this new era of personalized participatory medicine. His new project find functional, makes functional medicine affordable and accessible for all. He has been featured now on ted Med huffpost live Ted X as well as luxury and internationally.

Thank you James for joining me today. I am so excited to talk to you about community today. Great to be with you Amy and it's been wonderful to witness your journey and this is an exciting next step on the journey. So I'm glad to be here with you. Yeah, thank you. So, your latest book is about community and it was last year that both of us were actually participating in Health Talk The Future of Medicine at Mindshare and you gave your talk about community of course. So tell us about like why are you so passionate about community?

What is it that you have learned about community that is essential for us to thrive. There's a few things. So you know, first I was born in a community, like I was actually born in an intentional community in colorado um and I was kind of embarrassed about that for most of my life growing up, like no one else in school when I went to school in England, no one knew what the community was and I didn't really talk about it, I remember being kind of laughed at about it. Um and so that was, it's always been you know part of who I am Then, you know, through the work that I've been doing in functional medicine for the last 15 years, I came to realize that one, you know, functional medicine is the future of medicine.

It has to be because we're drowning in chronic disease and functional medicine is really well

Why Community Matters for Functional Medicine 2:53

set up to reverse chronic disease and we need to get it out to more people. And the reason why I wrote my book is because over the last seven years I've had just an opportunity to see how functional medicine is being delivered, you know, across the country and across the world and see you know, what are the models that could make this affordable and accessible to most people And you know, over the last two years it really just became clear that this community delivered model was the way that it was gonna be the way that it was gonna happen and there were so many benefits in delivering functional medicine in a community group setting And for people who can't get their head around it. I mean just imagine kind of alcoholics anonymous for type two diabetes, right? Getting groups of people with type two diabetes together, you know, supporting them having practitioners, support them having them support each other through accountability and support and mentorship.

And when I've seen those kind of models move forward, I've seen the results are exponential and it's really, I've decided to write the book to just showcase all of these examples of successfully delivered community delivered care. Yeah, when we're talking about health care, especially health care delivery, that accessibility is a big issue, it becomes a big issue and functional medicine traditionally has not been something that's covered by insurance. And so there there has been that block to accessing more of that.

And yet it really has been transformational for so many people, right? Including myself, which is why you're passionate about it and helping fizzy be able to develop models for themselves that mirror the other models that are working. And so this community piece is important, not only for the physicians and that's kind of what I love about what you've done is that you've created a community for the physicians. And then throughout that process, showing them like, hey, and this is the type of community that you create for your patients, for your community so that they have this community effect.

And when we talk about community effect, like, can you go into a little more of what, like what is this community effect you grew up in the community? There are positive things about that. What are some of those like positive benefits that we get from being in the community? Yeah, So, I mean, the biggest thing for everyone to know on this summer is that loneliness is the biggest driver of all cause mortality. Right? And if you look at um, you know, just the last year here, you know, with covid and everyone being isolated, you see depression go way up, You see suicide go way up and we're just seeing the very beginning of that right now, um, you know, we are we are we are humans that were, you know, evolved in community and we were used to being um part of part of groups.

So I, you know, when I recognized, you know, functional medicine likes to think of itself as the root cause medicine and when I started doing more research and sat in lectures and heard about this new understanding of human social genomics and how health at a genetic level, at an epigenetic level was being affected by our the quality and quantity of our relationships. I realized like there was a huge missing missing piece here. So that's the first thing is just what it cause it is then when you start to think about what what what kind of effects it has, it's kind of a twofold effect. What I've noticed is, you know, one is you're solving you're solving isolation essentially when you put people into these groups and we've even, you know, we've been doing experiments on how to do this even in a digital format and we found that it is possible to create community and build new relationships in a digital format um you know, this year, so you're one, you're solving isolation, you're giving people new people to connect with, you know, talk about their situation um and support.

But the second, and the most important thing is that, you know, if you look at the healthiest places in the world, if you look the places in the world where people live to 100 consistently, it's that the community reinforces healthy behaviors, right? So if you look there's these places called the blue zones around the world and you know these places people live to 100 consistently and it's not because there's an awesome functional medicine doctor just like reversing everyone's chronic illness with their supplements. It's because there's a culture that is healthy and that culture is reinforced by the community and one of the yeah, I'm so glad you're bringing this up because one of the other speakers that I have on the summit is the president of the Loma linda University of Health right there in the Blue Zone here in the United States and it's exactly like what you're saying.

So I really want to affirm what you're saying like they don't have their main health system as this, you know, may major functional medicine system, they have some people doing that, but the bulk of it really is this community peace and how they bring that community that all of them like promote healthy behavior, getting out and exercising. You see so many of the elderly out early in the morning out walking out in the hills walking and so it's this community effect that promotes the healthy behavior that dr hart spoke on on the summit as well.

Yeah, they reinforce, they reinforce the culture and if the culture like I know in that seventh day event is culture that makes up the that Loma linda blue zone, you know they have fasting one day a week, you know, they have a mainly plant based diet, they are you know, out like you said walking and getting into nature consistently, no alcohol so that there's just a lot of healthy things that are reinforced by the community and and you know, if you grow up or you participate in that community, these are social norms that are expected of you. And it's there's there's similar concepts in each of the different blue zones. So you know, I as I was starting, you know on my journey to try and uh you know to try and transform healthcare basically to try and you know, my my my passion actually came from, I was a health economist, I did economics at university and I saw that the cost of health care is going like that, you know, exponentially, and it didn't really matter whether you're in the US where you know, it's kind of a hodgepodge of payers versus the U.

K. Where I grew up, where you have single payer health care, the cost just keeps going up and up and it's because so many people have chronic illness and that chronic illness, you know, has to be medicated over a period of time and everyone's getting sicker and sicker with chronic illness. So, you know, the first step on my journey was to understand, okay how do we reverse chronic illness and that was took me to functional medicine and I saw

Loneliness, Blue Zones, and Healthy Culture 9:26

chronic illness being reversed inside clinics that I worked with and worked at and then the last, you know, the last few years I've been really thinking about, okay, how how would we scale this up? Like what would be the point where everyone could have access to it? And that's brought me to, you know, things like technology and community. And I would say, you know, like you said, the first thing, my business partner and I in 2013 were like, what's the first thing that we have to do? Let's build communities of practitioners and help practitioners doing functional medicine meet each other.

So that was like the first stage and now this next stage is really about, you know, helping the functional medicine community deliver this community care to introduce people to each other and have people support each other through that transformation and so far so good, we're just getting started on those on that sort of next phase, but this is what I'm going to be doing for the next decade at least. And it's so important and as you were mentioning like with the Covid and the pandemic and the changes that have come with that, there is no better time right now to put that emphasis on community than right now, because it's really brought to the surface how important that is. And yeah, we've known, well not everybody, I would say that, you know, you know this because you've studied this about, you know, loneliness and being the number one cause of all cause mortality.

But Covid has just really brought that to the surface to more people's awareness and me having been in the addiction medicine space and I'm seeing also the number of increases of relapses on drug use, overdoses on drug use. And it's all because of this loneliness, this sense of isolation and not feeling like you belong in a community. And with that comes a higher level of stress. Right? And so whether it's something that acutely happens or it sets into play this chronic disease, like it really is the root cause of so much of the chronic disease.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You're gonna see those, you know, the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of Covid, you know, that's why early on in this, in this lockdown, you know, some of the people that I really think highly of like Dr David Katz, we're really talking about, look, you know, if you knock down for extended periods of time, yes, there are covid deaths and those are important, but there are also deaths of isolation and addiction and And that come as a second or third order consequence of, you know, the economy going down and, you know, people losing their jobs and also people being isolated, really, really think about that. And it's sort of ironic in a certain way that I released my book, January 14. I mean, COVID was already in circulation in some parts of the world, maybe in California for sure because I think my my mother in law had a pretty bad case of it back in December.

But you know, ultimately we we do need community. And what's really exciting is that, you know, in response to the pandemic, there are little little little pieces of light I think, which is doctors who are seeing the same issues are waiting to be able to deliver the sort of a decentralized, community based approach. And you look the number one reason why community is so powerful is because we don't have an unlimited number of medical resources. Like if anything, the number of resources of medicine are going down and so what we need to do is we need to take advantage of this unlimited untapped potential of peer to peer engagement and support. And I just want to give an example to all of you amY and for your listeners here because like look, I've been involved in functional medicine for 15 years and I've seen all the protocols, I've sat in the back of all the, you know, all of the lectures and I've taken all kinds of supplement protocols over time and bio hack myself and I've done all this kind of stuff, but about a year ago, um as I was going through the book and I was just like realizing how important this was. I actually just moved to a new city.

I live in sacramento California and I realized like my community wasn't that strong, right? Because I had my wife's family, but I didn't really know that many people here and I joined a men's group and this men's group is not necessarily connected to health at all. Although I've seen, you know, health really be created in this group over the last year and myself and the other men in the group. But what this group is really about, it's about accountability and it's about supporting people to hit their own goals.

You know, it's about understanding, you know, mission is about processing the emotion that comes up, you know, and and the different things that come up with relationships and kids and wives and family and business and having a group of people to to connect with and you know, and to, you know, process some of that stuff with and having been in that group for a year, it's my wish and desire that everyone would have that experience, right? That everyone would have something like that in their lives, where other people who really care about them, you know, are there to support them in their journey.

And I think for a lot of people, they're not that excited about being in groups because just think about your average person who might be listening to this today. Your first few experiences of being in community were probably really traumatic, right? It's about families, the first one, like, people really like going back to their family on the week on the you know on thanksgiving like that's a traumatic moment because you know people aren't really taught how to do that and people are just having kids and there's no real training on it right?

Second is school. So you show up at school, what's it like to be in the high school locker room? Is that traumatic for you? You know that's most people and then think about your first job right? That's you know three your first three experiences of community and I'm not surprised if those were traumatic for you because those are traumatic for most people and it sets people up to not feel great about being in groups or feeling like they've been groups have been like if anything mutually disempowering not having your family support your goals, not having your family support your desire to get healthy, you know reinforcing unhealthy food choices, unhealthy behaviors, T. V. And pizza and you know all that american culture that is profoundly unhealthy and so feeling like you don't belong with a group of people. Exactly and so you know ultimately what I found is in the one thing across all these functional medicine groups and other groups and even this group that I'm part of that has no connection to functional medicine that is has a sort of an ethos and a culture around accountability, support emotional processing like everyone in that room is there because they want to help the other people in the group, you know, be better and when you start a group with that sort of energy then it has the potential to be truly transformative and people choose to be in the group or not and you know people you know show up every week, it costs me nothing to be part of the group and I wish it upon everyone because I just feel like it is so transformative in in my life where I've had unlimited access to all the functional medicine, all the coaching and and what I've come to realize amy is that everyone doesn't need functional medicine as much as I've been saying it for 15 years, what everyone needs is, you know, accountability to healthy behaviors which is actually functional medicine. Like if you really get into functional medicine, there is a part of it that is focused on consistently doing healthy behaviors but it

Scaling Care Through Peer Support and Mentorship 16:48

just sort of sometimes that gets lost in the, you know, in the excitement of like getting to the root cause and do you this and do you have that doing the right testing? There's most people need to just get into a habit of doing healthy behaviors and having the support of other people can do that and we can, that's not actually that hard and that's what we're going to be focused on for the next 10 years giving everyone the opportunity and here's again like what I really love about what you're doing and what you're promoting right now, is that something that has traditionally been seen as something psychological, right? If someone is experiencing loneliness then they are seen as hey, you know, this is a mental health thing, this is something that belongs in therapy. Go talk about it with a therapist.

And yet what you're really pointing out is how much this really affects our health, like our biology, even down to our epigenetic sex and the social, you know, epigenetic that you were talking about. And so when a person gets in a group like this where it is supportive and you can feel like you've got other people watching your back, right? Like you've got that, it's like a resource, you're well resourced. Then it's not only changing your mood, it's not only changing your outlook, but it's also changing your biology and then adding on top of that, the more healthy behaviors, the accountability that you're going to be doing as part of that group, like that is your win win situation for your best health.

Absolutely, Yeah. Just to give you some statistics, I mean in the, in my book you can you can see all the details but each of the biggest killers in America heart disease, type two, diabetes, you know, Alzheimer's these are all affected by loneliness significantly like 30% bigger chance if you don't have like right relationships when they looked at women with an epithelial cancer, they saw that the people that the women that were still alive five years later with the people with strong relationships.

So, you know, that's, you know, it's just it's just a fact, right? So now we have to operate from that, you know, from that, that point of view. And I want to give everyone an example of of what I'm talking about here because you know, you could you could listen to this and say, well I'm just gonna wait until James convinces my local doctor to do a functional medicine group and then I'll join, you know, because I can't really, I can't really control it or input it. But what I want to share with you guys is that the most exciting groups, the most exciting execution of community is actually, you know, even though we're starting in the medical system, it makes sense to start in the medical system because lonely people end up there with diagnoses and, you know, there's also budget assigned to help them.

So, you know, there's there's Medicare and Medicaid and there's, you know, there's, there's there's insurance, like there's budget to help people, you know, meet each other and so that's where my efforts are focused. But you know, there's this um, there's this guy actually, I think we both know him dr Joel Kahn who's a guy in, he's a cardiologist out of Detroit and he had one of his, his patients come to him as a, as a as a man in his like late fifties and was just like, you know, I really want to get healthy, I really want to reduce my risk of getting heart disease. I've seen all your diets, I want to execute this plant based diet to help my heart, but it's hard, you know, I don't know how to cook, like I'm a single, I don't have anyone to do it for me, I don't have really any community. So they started this thing called the plant based nutrition support group, which is basically a support group for men who are trying to eat healthy and try and be healthy and not have a heart attack Within six months of starting that 7000 men had signed up in what? 7000 in these local little groups, right?

Meet once a week, once a month in their little pods, they talk about healthy eating stress reduction. You know, they actually learn how to cook, they exercise together. They walk together, they do these healthy things together, it doesn't cost anything anyone a couple times a year. They bring in, you know, top speakers and they have like a kind of a symposium. So you know, that came from one patient sharing his, you know, his desire to have community meeting with this doctor realizing there was a lot of other men, sort of putting it out there through, you know, the internet and ending up building this really, really resilient community. And so if you're sitting there watching this and you're thinking, well that doesn't exist where I am like you can affect that.

Like we have tools today like facebook like event, right? Like meet up dot com where you can build community today. Now, obviously during covid we have, you know, we have we have a lot more time on our hands so we could be getting busy with those technical tools And we can be setting up an infrastructure right now that you know, when we can meet again and the chances are when we do meet again, we're gonna start with smaller groups, right? Rather than huge groups, but small groups is what you want, right? It's hard to be, you know, you can't it's hard to be open and vulnerable in front of a group of 500 people, you don't know. But you know, in my mind group, these are like 5 to 8 men every week that I've got to know over a period of years.

I tell them everything, they know everything about me, They know me better than my wife in some cases, right? Because I'm able to like really talk about things that I want to bring to my wife, she's not my therapist, but not to like bring things about how I feel about the world and my daughter and what it's like to be a father and what it's like to be a human, right? Those groups and so you know, I I just I feel like this is something that it requires a little bit of leadership and that leadership is available to you know to any doctor who wants to lead and wants to like you know, facilitate the supporting of those groups and there's plenty, plenty examples in my book of doctors who just decided all right enough is enough, we're gonna do this like let's see what happens and you get results like that, like you know what I just shared with Dr Conn.

But the good news is is that this community based model is reversing chronic illness across the board. Right? In all disease categories in the book you'll hear about heart disease, you can hear about M. S. You can hear about type two diabetes, like all of the biggest afflictions that we have in society. When you get people together, you get them brought together around a culture of health and you get them support each other and executing that day to day magic can happen. And just those three diseases that you mentioned James are ones that do have an association with a higher adverse childhood experience score.

So I'm realizing that yeah, those types of early life experiences do set our biology up for more disease, more chronic disease and we've been able to Really identify which types of diseases are a person is more at risk for. But what I'm hearing you say is that those very same diseases are reduced with this sense of community and with that support, which is really cool, right? Because that's how you basically reverse the some of the damaging effects of earlier life experiences 100% and you need a place to process that and there's not enough therapy for everyone.

But the truth is, you know, one of the things that I found from being in the group is you learn from other people's work, right, when you're there and you're witnessing people talking about experience, they've had, most of us have had the same experience and I found for groups, all you need to do is go to one group and experience it once and then you're like, wow, this is really amazing because I thought a lot of these things that I was seeing in my life are just just me because we don't get into this kind of stuff in our culture doesn't doesn't set up for having deep converse our experience.

So finding ways to facilitate that and to see everyone's kind of struggling with the same thing or I felt that or I felt this the things that I've experienced suddenly you realize like it's a pretty normal human experience and that ultimately what I've, what I've found is this the power of mentorship and if you look at, you know what I what I've come to realize is, you know, in in the reversal of chronic illness, you know, obviously that the patient becomes the most important person, right, the patient is there, but the most important sort of medical person that you could have is actually not the doctor from my, what I've come to see is that it's someone who had that condition and reversed it and you know, is now in a position to support people in doing that and that's why you see a lot of people become health coaches or those kind of roles because they reversed it, they say like I want to help people to know what I know now, you know, we've been teaching doctors to higher health coaches for six years and what we started to see is that, you know, I think a lot of people feel um traumatized by the health care system, what it's like to navigate it and all the different doctors and the drug first approach that I think most people into it is really trying to even get in to see your doctor and then they only have 10 15 minutes for you and you don't even feel like they're really listening and they even know you and I would say it's probably the worst of the worst because you're addicted to this stuff, but then you keep on being given it right,

Building Safe, Empowering Communities Online 25:48

you know, so so I think that's you know that's where having the mentorship and if you look again alcoholics anonymous who do you get paired with you get paired with someone sober, sponsor, sponsor. It's part of the program. You know, there's there's also a huge opportunity for people who if you're watching this and you've come through like the moment that this hit home for me was with with dr terry walls and a few years ago, four years ago I think. And she said, you know, she is someone who reversed her M.

S. She's like the hero of the M. S. Community, right? Went from being in a wheelchair to now walking again. Like that's incredible, incredible. That's like a heroic moment. But she told me this is that when she started running her M. S. Groups inside the V. A. She found that people that had made a little bit of progress in the groups that they were in were more inspiring to new people than terry walls, the hero who's now like out and so she realized like, okay, we need to get these groups, we need to get some people in the group who have come a little bit further along, you will get that. But like if you're, you know, if you're doing M. S. And you want to do terry Wahls protocol, eating nine cups of vegetables a day, right? Could be super intimidating, You'd be like, like my family, like we're not vegetable people, but then if you see someone across the road said like we've never eaten a vegetable either.

Now I do nine cups and guess what, I can walk when I couldn't before you know, then you'd be like, I'm going to get into broccoli, I don't know, like alright, that's powerful and so, you know, as you're listening to this on the summit, I would say wherever you are on your journey, you could be valuable to other people and this is what the transformation of healthcare looks like. It's people supporting each other on their journey towards health. End of story, you're connecting a lot of dots for me, James and I, and so I'm gonna share very briefly and um and I'm gonna pay you later for the therapy time.

So I grew up in the 7th day adventist community and When I was uh it was, it was gonna be like 2011 when I went for the first time with a friend to an Allen on meeting, which is the 12 step meeting for friends and family members of those who are alcoholics or who use drugs. I was not going there because I identified with that at all. There was no one in my family, no one that I knew of necessarily, I was, I had already completed medical school and I was going just to spend time with a friend who she was in town for that weekend and I wanted to be with her, she was going to the meeting. So I guess okay, I will go with you just to be able to spend more time with you.

And I remember so distinctly James walking into this meeting and it was a big meeting, this was in Portland and there was probably about 50 people in the meeting that had just started, so he stuck into the back And in the next 60 minutes I felt the most powerful community and it was almost like this safe space that this community was providing each of its members and the things that they were sharing James, I found myself crying and I'm like why am I crying? Like I shouldn't be identifying with anything that they're talking about but I was and it was such a contrast for me of having been raised in the community, A very, very tight community, very close community and yet never having felt this level of safety and support and mentorship, like you're talking about then what I experienced in that 60 minutes and I went back and I went back and I started going to Alan on meetings and that became my community for the next three years and it was so transformational in my life and like I literally point back to those meat in that community as what shifted more things in my life than anything else up into that point, just because of this community and this space, the accountability, the sponsor, like all of this that they provided in that type of setting and recently I was faced with a big challenge, a big stress and I was talking with my life coach about it and she she asked me how resourced are you and I was like, I don't know like how resourced am I am like, you know, thinking of all, you know the different types of resources and she's like, no community, how resourced are you in terms of people in your life, the community that you have built around you right now, And I'm like, yeah, I've lost that. I didn't maintain that I've been busy, right? And those things weren't the my top priority and I'm realizing in order to get through life and life stressors like yeah, I need that community and so building that back into my life has been has been huge.

But yeah, can you, can you speak a little bit on like the differences in the community and again, just that type of community that people are going for, where it's not just it's not just getting into any community, right? It's getting into a community where it will give you that feeling of safety in order to process in order to try things in order to, you know, do new things cook new things because otherwise, um it can be a community again, where it's old dynamics and it doesn't feel good that there are plenty of mutually disempowering groups and I'm not to say that any group is going to be healthy, I mean I think you can feel it for yourself and and honestly that the easiest way to start a group would be like a book club, just think about, you know, Amy you and I know just think about how many books there are out there that would be, you know mutually empowering. I mean I've got some of them you know behind me right here, like I just pull one out, this is my friend dr Chatterjee, he wrote a book called How to make disease disappear.

It's like the most solid fundamentals of building healthy behaviors ever. You know, he's got an amazing TED talk, you can watch, I mean you get a group together and you study this over over 10 weeks, you know, that's it, that's all you need to know, it's empowering, it's a good information. Exactly, like it's not rocket science, you don't need, you don't need more than five people, you know, one of the best examples in my book of transformation in community, like if you want to talk about churches losing, you know, £15 each across 15,000 people, you know, this was groups of five in bible study on Wednesday, taking a little bit of time out of bible study to do like that book study and realizing like, okay, yeah, a lot of unhealthy behaviors were being reinforced by the culture and pizza and all that stuff and no exercise and when you just change the culture to reinforce healthy behaviors, it has a dramatic impact and so like I think for anyone, you know, it's about, it's about if you can find it great and if you can't find it make it, it's not that hard. Use it right, use meet up, use facebook, you know, there are plenty of people out there looking for you and looking for that kind of help. And so, you know, the first step that you might have to take will be to look. And then the second step, if you can't find what you're looking for is to lead.

Yeah. And in our last few minutes together, I'd love for you to speak on what you've seen happening in the online space in terms of building community, what are practitioners doing that are successful? What are non practitioners, what our customers, clients, patients doing in order to create their community successfully uh in this time of covid and online right now. Yeah. So, you know, I've been working on, I've been like, you know, looking as to who's doing what and following along like the chapter seven of my book Was the Future. And it was like, oh, we're gonna do this online. Well, the future just arrived a month later, two months later.

So we've been working this summer on a project to, you know, to really understand how we could essentially in a period of 12 weeks take people through a journey that would include um, you know, going through a elimination diet together, doing a really deep functional medicine like self evaluation, you know, doing it in community, understanding the root causes of health and and delivering it and it's been a wonderful experience. And now we're starting a pilot program with a clinic in sacramento where we're going to do it and we're gonna build it on insurance, we're really you know, really trying to make the kind of medicine we need deliverable on the, you know, so system that we have and you know, but there's plenty of examples around the country of doctors innovating and I'm just trying to keep my eye on the ball but really to to go for it and try and and see okay, what is, what is something that we can really scale up and have you know, sort of like an add on to a clinic where your average primary care, family medicine, if they have people who have unhealthy behaviors that they can't break.

Here's a virtual, exactly, I love it. Where can people find you James um Check me out yeah, instagram Mr James Maskell and there if you're a doctor or if your health professional, check out one of my books the evolution of medicine, I think it's sort of like the, you know the starting point. Yeah. Yeah. The book, the community cure, you can find it anywhere online and if you go to the community cure dot com, there's also different ways to find it. But yeah look, I really appreciate it and Amy, thank you for you know for your journey and it's been amazing to watch and I feel like addiction medicine is certainly something that you know needs to evolve rapidly and I know that you're on the, on the front edges of this and appreciate all of your work and being able to connect.

Yeah, thank you. It's exciting times, big changes are coming and it's yeah, it's exciting to be a part of that change. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining me today. Thank you for the time. Thank you for your mentorship. Thank you for yeah, helping guide me in my process and thank you for joining us today. I am your host for this bio optimized summit Dr Amy and make sure and get the discount price for the Summit recordings and the content while it's still available. Once that is gone, it is gone forever.

And I would just love to see you inside connect with you more. I get to know you more and together let's find that next level of health and aliveness