Dr. Weatherby:
Alright, welcome everybody. This is Dr. Dicken Weatherby for another one of our success calls, and I’m joined today by Dr. Kasi Rote. Dr. Rote is a graduate of Parker College in Dallas, Texas. She graduated in 1993 and is a board certified doctor of chiropractic by the state of Texas. She has never stopped researching ways to get better and faster results with her patients. She integrates bio energetic and chiropractic techniques with clinical nutrition, diet, and lifestyle correction, and these treatment techniques are governed and coordinated with multiple evaluation techniques using acupressure, reflex analysis, and lab testing. She is the medical director of Rote Wellness, an alternative health clinic offering natural approaches to health, and instead of diagnosing and treating a disease or health condition, Dr. Rote evaluates to find the reason why the body isn’t healing and then uses natural techniques to assist the body to regain its ability to heal. So, thank you Dr. Rote for joining me today and for agreeing to this interview. You know, for many people that may be listening to this, be it patients or other chiropractic physicians, you know, they may be struck by the combination that you have between the chiropractic techniques and also clinical nutrition, diet, and lifestyle correction, but also by the assessment and diagnostic techniques that you use. I’m just curious, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your practice and how you got involved in functional medicine and functional diagnosis and what that brings to your practice.
Dr. Rote:
Okay, so a little bit about my background and how I got where I am. When I started practice—first I would like to go back before actually before I went to chiropractic school I worked in a chiropractic office in Houston for a chiropractor who was not afraid to take on lots of different things. We would have people come in who would have seizures in our lobby and he would still adjust them. So I got exposed early on to lots of different things from a natural perspective and caring for people and then when I went through chiropractic school learned lots of different things, not what I thought I was going to be learning, but when I came out and was doing more manipulation and caring for pain I started to see patterns in people developing and things just kept recurring and not getting better and I started wondering why, why were they getting stuck in patterns. So I started looking more into how the body was functioning and what was going wrong and that curiosity led me to functional medicine and then studying that and studying Dr. Weatherby’s books. I put a lab in my office to do urinalysis and started looking deeper into adrenal fatigue and that kind of is the kick-off point for a lot of patients. Most people have trouble with stress or sleep and that’s an easy opener for conversation. So as that went on and I got more education in functional medicine and then with the tools that I’ve been able to implement that help to streamline being able to see patients and do blood analysis, certainly the software has helped speed things up significantly and analysis and helping patients achieve wellness and certainly seeing patterns early on. People want to know what you see before things become pathological and often times, you know, we end up finding things that are pathological and sending those out where they need to go, but other people aren’t screening. Even the regular doctors don’t have time to screen and look at things as deeply as we want to look when we look at the whole body. So that’s kind of how—how I got to where I am right now.
Dr. Weatherby:
And what kind of patients do you typically—what are they coming into your clinic, you know, sort of with the chief complaints and presentations?
Dr. Rote:
Well, most of my practice is referral so usually they don’t get a lot of detail as to what we do here, just that I can help. So often times it’s stress or sleep or they may come in with back pain and then based on what they see on the walls and the materials around they start asking questions and certainly without sleep you can’t recover so it kind of starts the conversation and then we move into the functional medicine aspect of it, gathering their records and blood work and then ordering labs if they don’t have anything current and that’s just kind of how we kick it off.
Dr. Weatherby:
So primarily they are coming in for visceral work, be it manipulation back pain, and do you—how easy is it for you to transition into a discussion about other underlying conditions that may be associated with stress or their weight loss or weight gain or insomnia and that type of thing?
Dr. Rote:
It comes very easily, certainly when they find out that if they are not sleeping how that affects the body and that they can do something about it, or that you have objective means to measure what’s going on with them and then track that. And so they are very interested. People love to hear about what’s going on in their own bodies and they just don’t get that information anywhere else.
Dr. Weatherby:
Yeah, and I think also a lot of people have had blood testing done. It is probably the most popular test on the planet. I think billions of them are done every year. And, you know, at least what I hear and other practitioners have shared with me is they go to their general practitioner to have their blood work appointment and the doctor pretty much says oh, everything looks normal. Your cholesterol might be a bit high but everything looks normal. And yet they don’t feel normal. And so I think when someone comes to a practitioner like us it’s a real breath of fresh air because we’re actually able to give them some pretty interesting information about what’s going on. Do you feel that that’s true for your practice in terms of being able to interpret blood tests and [inaudible].
Dr. Rote:
Absolutely. Well, one of my favorites is cholesterol. So I just had a lady this week who came in and her cholesterol is over 300 and it’s a significant jump from, you know, it was 200 a year ago. And she has just now become a new patient here and we discussed, you know, why her cholesterol—what are the possible reasons why it might be elevating, not that she needs to run out and get on a statin, but that we are going to do an experiment to see how her body responds to reducing inflammatory foods. So what I often do with patients is we’ll do a ten day trial of removing high inflammatory foods. We usually pick one or two and then we rerun the blood and lo and behold the cholesterol typically will drop 50 to 75 points and then they are just amazed because typically it’s run every year, nobody ever said you could actually make a change or why it’s there and nobody explains the good benefits of cholesterol and how it affects your hormones and how it affects stress, they just say you’ve got to get it down. So having that dialogue and using tools for each person it’s a little different, but blood is something that they are familiar with, they are comfortable with, but they don’t understand it. So helping them make sense of it helps a lot.
Dr. Weatherby:
And since you’ve been, you know, using sort of the reporting tool and the software, I’m just curious what the response has been from your patients when you present them with a report like that.
Dr. Rote:
They are very impressed. I mean, they are just—and then the fact that we can keep the history in there so we can compare year on year or if there is stuff going on we may have three or four reports in a year, but having it all they know that we’ve got everything organized and we are kind of the go-to to keeping up with their stuff. So it’s helpful and very powerful to put a report in the patient’s hands that is about them and I think that’s important when they leave.
Dr. Weatherby:
And, you know, obviously the software has only been out for, you know, two or three years. I’m just curious what life was like before you had a tool like that. I mean I remember my days of templates and spreadsheets and, you know, a lot of time it took to [inaudible].
Dr. Rote:
Yes, it’s very time consuming. It probably took me closer to two hours to do the charts, make my notes, things I wanted to look back through their file and rule in or rule out, and this is just so much more efficient and I can have it all done in 20 minutes and feel very comfortable that I haven’t forgotten anything and it reminds me of things that oh yeah, don’t forget to look at that. Okay, yeah. And so it has been valuable. I’m just so happy to have the software help me.
Dr. Weatherby:
Yeah, that’s a great benefit. Are there any other benefits that you can think of? Are there any other features that you like?
Dr. Rote:
I like the history and I like whenever I need a refresher on why I might need to go look at something, I like that I can click on it and it just pops up and makes it easy for me to refresh my memory on a few things.
Dr. Weatherby:
Well, I have one last question for you. If there was a chiropractic physician who was interested in this work and kind of toying with it and has maybe more of a structural practice and wondering about moving into doing blood work, I was wondering if there was any words of wisdom that you might be able to share from your experience of how one might go about implementing blood chemistry analysis into practice and using a tool like this.
Dr. Rote:
Well, I think having the software makes it so to me it’s not a question of should you, but why wouldn’t you? Because it just helps to elevate the level of care you are able to provide for the patient and even if you didn’t want to get too deep into functional medicine, making suggestions for things that their traditional physician should be looking at for them is valuable and it just helps to solidify the relationship and keep you as someone who is looking out for them.
Dr. Weatherby:
Wonderful. Well, I want to thank you very much for taking time out of your busy practice and your busy day to share that with us and sharing your experience. So, thank you so much.
