#213 Inflammation, Autoimmunity and Thyroid - Dr Will Cole

Will Cole (0:00)

Many people are kind of left to fend for themselves in the standard model of care. They're really told, hey, like, there's nothing wrong with you.

You're just depressed. There's an antidepressant. But the people that are diagnosed, they're really given very few options with things with potential side effects and stuff that they don't really feel good on either.

Siim Land (0:17)

Welcome to the Siim Land Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and today we talk with Dr. Will Cole. Will was named one of the top 50 functional medicine and integrative doctors in the US. He has written several books like Ketotarian, The Inflammation Spectrum, and his latest book, Intuitive Fasting.

Will, welcome to the show.

Will Cole (0:34)

My goodness. Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you.

Siim Land (0:38)

Yeah, I'm also a big fan of your work and glad to have you on the podcast. So, but maybe let's start with like, what drove you into becoming a functional medicine practitioner and starting your own practice?

Will Cole (0:53)

Yeah, I'm so interested in health and wellness and I have been since I was a little kid. So I grew up kind of a weird kid, I guess, in hindsight. I loved learning about nutrition and the impact that food could have on one's health. And then when I was in high school, I had my driver's license. I worked in the States. There was a shoe store called Finish Line. It's like an athletic shoe store. So I did that in high school and I used my paycheck, my money from my paycheck to go buy a health food at the health food store at like 16, 17, 18 years old. So I was always just naturally interested in what was out there and the options to use food as medicine and health and wellness at large. And then that evolved to wanting to be formally trained in this. So I went to an integrated medicine school, Southern California University of Health Sciences in Los Angeles.

And then that kind of, you know, formalized what I'm doing. And I graduated and I would be writing or speaking about functional medicine online and there would be people in different states and countries and different parts of the world that would hear about what we were talking about.

And this is 12, 13 years ago.

So functional medicine was a little bit less, you know, popular or mainstream than it is now.

And, yeah, so we started, we launched the clinic here as a telehealth clinic. We were actually one of the first telehealth functional medicine centers in the world, as all we've done is telehealth for the past 12 years. So it's nothing's really changed as far as my day job. I love my patient cases. These are like amazing people that are going through really serious things that I take very seriously that I want to find out what are the underlying impediments that are keeping them back from living the life that they were created for.

So these are hard journeys sometimes. These are complicated, complex journeys sometimes. But they're journeys that are necessary in many cases. They're journeys that are so sacred to be on, and I don't take that lightly. So every day, 8 AM to 6 PM, 10 hour days, that's what we're doing here. Consulted people online, and I love it. And it was all born of me just being interested in health and wellness and medicine. I think the traditional, original medicine of let food be your medicine and medicine your food, the original Hippocratic oath.

Siim Land (3:29)

Yeah, absolutely.

It's a correct message, I think. And is it kind of fortunate that you had already been like an online service, sort of say before the lockdown. And so imagine the lockdown didn't have like a huge negative impact on your like revenue.

Will Cole (3:45)

No, the patient base is still the same. If anything, people I think had more time to focus on themselves because they were our world really lends itself to being distracted and procrastinating and putting ourselves were actually the important things on the back burner, right. And we get distracted on things that ultimately at the end of the day don't really matter. So I think it really was a reckoning for many people in many different ways.

But it was like a slowing down allowed them to be a little bit more introspective and pick up things that maybe they were putting off and the health being one of them.

Siim Land (4:17)

Yeah, absolutely. But have you noticed any like any particular issues people struggle with more nowadays or is there something that kind of pops up more?