Weatherby:
Hi, welcome everybody. This is Dr. Dicken Weatherby. Welcome to another Success Stories. I’m joined today by Jonathan Cohen. Jonathan received his Master of Science in Nutritional Therapy from the University of Worcester in the United Kingdom and has over 20 years of multi-disciplined experience in healthcare. Currently, Jonathan holds the positions of Treasurer and Director of the British Association of Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy, and is registered with the Complimentary and Natural Healthcare Council. He is also the clinic director for the Center for Applied Nutrition and Health in the United Kingdom. Welcome Jonathan, perhaps you could start out telling us a little bit about, about your background, a bit about your practice, and the type of patients that you see.
Cohen:
Yes, well, my practice is a multi-disciplinary practice. I see patients from all walks of life with a variety of different conditions, so I, I tend to specialize in, in complex cases now days. I am a nutritional advisor for the Multiple Chemicals Sensitivity charity, MCS Aware in the UK. I’m also working with a group of people who have been poisoned by organic phosphates, these are primarily farmers and associated farm workers and their families, so there’s lots of epigenetic effects as well. And trying to help them with the, with the effects of organic, of organic phosphates and I’ll do, I will work with anybody who is willing to work with me. And anyone that I think, you know, can help benefit from necessary, necessary nutritional and other advice.
Weatherby:
Terrific. So, given the sort of the type of patients that, that you work with with what you just described, I mean, obviously, you, you must have some, some assessment tools that you’re using. Obviously, blood testing is one of them. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of your approach to assessing clients?
Cohen:
Yeah, well, I was, as part of my training particularly in my Master’s training, using a functional medicine approach as being the underpinning modus operandum for working with and assessing clients. And I, I always start with questionnaires, questionnaires that I’m, have always used and is my preferred questionnaire of choice is the one which you yourself devised which I find an invaluable tool. In fact, I insist that my patients answer them otherwise they tend not to become my patients because I, I believe it’s really important that people are willing to invest a certain amount of time into, into their health and well being and answering questions is, is important from, at that point onwards once I meet them and they’ve, I try and get them to do a full blood chemistry analysis, and the results of which will lead me into if you like laser pointing where other interventions and testing is required the stool analysis. I won’t mention company names but it could be any of one of three, they usually tend to be American. It may be adrenal, assessing adrenal functional, hormonal function, but my first protocol is always questionnaire and for testing is always blood chemistry analysis. And the blood chemistry analysis, and I’ll say consistently probably through this process is the best tool I’ve ever come across, and the one I, the one I recommend to absolutely everybody.
Weatherby:
Terrific. Yeah, me too. You know, you and I have been colleagues for, for awhile and you know use my book, and stuff like that and I think one of the interesting things talking to you before the software was just the amount of time that you were spending doing your analysis. Perhaps, you could speak to a little bit about what, what your life was like before, before the software tool?
Cohen:
Yeah, well, many years ago when I was a young man. When I started off, I think it must have been about 2006. Certainly, certainly around 2006, 2007, that’s when I came across this when it was a book, and I saw that’s all that there was and I had no idea, very little background in, in blood analysis and certainly no blood chemistry analysis as it was portrayed, and I used to take people’s blood test and results that they had and I used to enter them into a sheet by hand with little arrows for ups and downs and stars or double arrows for really up or you know double down, you know, if they’re really, if they are you know, if they were clinically low, and little stars and notes and scribbled notes and opening up the book and cross-referencing from page to page and then trying to scribble notes and I, I would end up after about two hours of analysis with lots of notes which I hope I could read and make sense particularly when I was going to speak with a patient. And of course, my wish list as you knew was, you know, and it’s just, time was wouldn’t it be great if this was computerized and wouldn’t, wouldn’t it, you know, make a change in, you know, from two hours to less than, less than 15 minutes, you know, for entering and assessing is just fantastic. I, I can’t thank you enough and I can’t say how happy I am that my life is made so much easier.
Weatherby:
Oh, it’s gratifying to hear, and so you and I have also talked a lot about how this software is not diagnostic, and we have to really stress the difference between diagnosis which is, you know, the realm of allopathic physicians, diseases, to see changes and that type of thing to the realm of functional medicine, functional diagnosis where we’re really you know assessing for the underlying cause. And you’ve talked a lot about health trends to me in the past. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about sort of that concept and how you apply that to your practice and how you talk to your patients about what it is that you see when, when you’re looking at the blood test report and that type of thing.
Cohen:
Well, when I, when I get a report down and the first thing I always do with every, with every patient I have. I’m not a doctor. And therefore my ability to state I’m making a diagnosis is clearly impaired and it’s not something I wish to do or wish to fall foul of any authority over. Moreover, what I’m most interested in is heading people off before they get to the pass because when you know realistically when people get into clinical dysfunction, in other words, their results show that they’ve fallen into serious issues be it, you know, cholesterol or any of , any of, any of the lipid panels, or the thyroid, the thyroid panels. At that point, they really need to be under the supervision of their registered healthcare or chosen healthcare professional. At which, quite frankly, at that, that point you can be pretty assured that the chances of them receiving a natural or nutraceutical intervention are pretty slim and they’re going to be into the synthetic pharmaceutical approach with all of their sad side effects that are possibly likely to occur because of that and once on that treadmill, getting off of it is really, really hard. And here is a tool by which you can have a client who comes in or a patient and they can state that they’re not feeling 100% and they can mention certain symptoms and you can start making some, some assessments based on experience. And then in black and white you can see in front of you that there is a trend away from an optimum norm. That part in the center of that bell curve that you know is perfect health, and you see people in that, in that particular sphere, not many, but, you know if you get them you go there’s nothing there, you, you know, as far as I’m concerned your, the metabolism and the results are perfect then people who fall just outside of that before they hit the clinical dysfunctions, i.e., you know, the, the lab beginnings and ends of the ranges. You can say you’re trending to or away from an optimal norm. And that’s what I like to tell them is that I am looking at you to diagnosis health trends that conventional blood analysis misses because we can find that, we can see that, we can see where they’re heading, and we can warn them. For example, you can see a trend towards sugar mismanagement, coupled together with various other factors whether you know you’re, you’re looking at, you know, potential risk of metabolic syndromes developing, you know, and that cluster of events and dysfunctions which you really want to avoid and everybody wants to avoid. You can head them off, you can give the advice, the warning, the you know if they keep on with their lifestyle where they’re going to more over, you can then say to them, well look if you get to that endpoint these are the kinds of life events you can be looking at, do you want, I’m giving you the chose now if you want to get there or not. And if they say no, I prefer to turn, turn the clock back you’ve got the opportunity to reverse their health trends and help them do that and again, I reiterate, I know of no better tool than blood chemistry analysis and the way that it’s presented as the first line to get people to do exactly that. And the beauty is the report that they get is visual, and, you know, indisputable. You know, they’ve got plenty to read and there’s plenty to explain.
Weatherby:
So, in some ways, you know, it’s, it’s truly preventative medicine is what we’re doing here.
Cohen:
Absolutely.
Weatherby:
And this is, this is…
Cohen:
Absolutely.
Weatherby:
…a tool allows us as clinicians to really practice that art of identifying health trends, identifying where people could be going to, and how we can actually stop it from happening, you know.
Cohen:
Yeah, from, you know, you know there are two, two aspects to this. One, one is obviously that the clearly I’m in the UK and you’re in the U.S.A., so there’s a different, there’s a different set of models. Ideally, we all want to capture people and for people to have their, have their, their health explained to them where they are on their road at any one time. Here is an ideal opportunity to help, help them as a preventative and to a certain extent restorative measure. I won’t use the word curative because we, we try and catch them before there is a need for a cure. The other, the other side of course is that here is an ideal tool that for people who are in healthcare to utilize to encourage people to come in to their practices because it gives them an edge, and obviously a way for, for their patients or clients to come in to see exactly where they are, so it’s a, it’s another practice, another practice tool and another practice benefit. It creates value. And of course high quality client management. You know, the time it saves, the results that are achieved, you know, are, are speedy, and I think, gosh, how many, there are potentially at moment something like 80 markers that can be applied and so that is a absolute massive amount of data that it can be crunched into, into comprehensive and comprehensible results in a matter of minutes.
Weatherby:
Yeah, it’s really quite remarkable actually. When you, when you think about the number of elements that are, are included so well, any final words that you might have in this, this audio, might be, might be an inspiration to nutritional therapists like yourself who may not be as aware of what this tool can do. Are there any sort of parting words that you might have for, for a nutritional therapist who might be listening?
Cohen:
Well, I, I will say to anybody that may be listening that that is in the business of establishing trends for their, for their patients, that there’s an opportunity for them to produce a sophisticated and very detailed health report, and the beauty is they can track their clients progress because there are the facilities in here to see how there is a progression over time, it’s visual, you know can see the last five tests at any, any time in this you can see how people are moving along there. Of course, there’s added value, the time you save and it makes anyone as a practicing professional more effective and enables them to achieve high levels of success quickly. It’s a win-win situation all around and I, I completely recommend it wholeheartedly.
Weatherby:
Well, thanks very much indeed for that, and thank you very much for taking time out of your busy evening to share your thoughts with us and appreciate that very, very much. So…
Cohen:
It’s, it’s my, my pleasure.
Transcribed by: www.iDictate.com
