QUESTION: I’m a licensed health care provider looking to expand my education and potentially start a practice outside the insurance-based system. I can’t decide whether to sign up to get certified with the Institute of Functional Medicine (IFM), learn a CAM modality like acupuncture, or join WHMI. Can you explain how they’re different and why I would do one over another?
Answer: Our physician students wrestle with this question- for good reason. Many doctors who are looking for alternative careers find it beneficial to get additional education that positions them as “integrative” or “functional” medicine doctors, or they choose to develop another CAM skill that allows them to work outside the insurance system. This can be a wise business decision, since the general population values integrative, functional, and CAM approaches to treating illness and, at least in the United States, patients have come to expect that this will require them to pay out of pocket, since few of these kinds of practitioners accept insurance. Because what we teach in WHMI is so cutting edge, patients may not even know to seek it out as a valid option when conventional medicine has failed to elicit cure. This leads a lot of doctors who consider themselves integrative or functional medicine to be attracted to this program, since it educates students in radical remission-inducing touchstones that functional or integrative medicine programs may not cover. Anecdotally, our graduates have found that adding this glaring missing piece to a Whole Health treatment changes everything for patients and can lead to drastic improvement in symptoms or unexpected cure.
Certification with IFM or certification with a CAM modality are very different than what is offered in WHMI. While we touch on nutrition, hormone replacement therapy, and functional medicine, WHMI does not teach you what supplement to use for what chronic illness, how to get up to date on the latest laboratory tests to assess and optimize the microbiome, or detailed use of bio-identical hormones. What you learn in WHMI will not make you a master acupuncturist, trauma therapist, energy healer, shaman, or guru. If you’re wanting to become a master, you may need to get additional training with one of our guest faculty or seek out additional certification. This training very specifically focuses on root cause work and is very holistic rather than allopathic, although it includes in the Whole Health approach allopathic treatments that patients add to their intuitively-guided Prescription as part of the Six Steps To Healing Yourself.
In WHMI, you will learn how to facilitate patients through illness as a psychological and spiritual healing and transformation, identifying and treating why the body’s self-healing mechanisms broke down to begin with. While patients may also benefit from adding to their Prescription conventional medicine or functional/integrative medicine approaches, those approaches don’t tend to examine issues like how childhood trauma affects adult onset disease- and how to clear it in a way that may lead to resolution of symptoms and radical remission. Most allopathic methods treat the symptoms, if not with drugs and surgery, than with herbs, supplements, and IV’s.
Your education in WHMI is guaranteed to expand awareness and practice of the tools in your holistic medicine bag in a way that can help you treat the patients who conventional medicine- and even functional or integrative medicine- have failed to treat. Nobody in WHMI is suggesting that conventional medicine or functional/integrative medicine doesn’t have its place. Many of our graduates have also sought certification with the gold standard of functional medicine certification via the Institute of Functional Medicine, which is a $12,000-15,000 process. We know time and money may require you to choose one or the other, but please know that we fully support those who want to combine these educational opportunities! When it comes right down to it, as always, we encourage you to tune in and trust your intuition.
What distinguishes WHMI from these other programs the most is the Heal The Healer aspect of this work. You will not just be learning cognitive knowledge. In order to expertly facilitate Whole Health in others, you will need to become wholly healthy yourself. Therefore, you will be undergoing your own transformation as part of your education. The degree of your transformation will depend on which level of commitment you choose- Level I or Level II.
If you are allergic to the painful emotions of your patients (or the emotions their emotions elicit in you), then you’re probably better off seeking training in integrative or functional medicine over WHMI. If, however, you welcome the intimacy of helping your patients feel, express and clear the painful, suppressed emotions that may lead to illness, and if you’re open to seeing illness as an opportunity for emotional healing and spiritual awakening, WHMI may be a good fit.
QUESTION: How much of a time commitment will this be? Will this interfere with my full-time job, the attention I give my children and my partner, or my self care?
Answer: We know that many of the people who sign up for WHMI are doctors, full-time employed health care providers, busy professionals, or juggling family responsibilities. That’s why this program is designed so you should be able to show up at your work full time, attend to your families, and still find bandwidth for the core basics of WHMI. However, many of our WHMI students are working part time, or they’ve left medicine because of burnout, depression, illness, or broken relationships, and they’re desperate for as much content as we can possibly throw their way! We’ve tried to create WHMI so it’s streamlined enough to meet the needs of busy professionals, while also offering a lot of optional content to satisfy the intellectual and spiritual hunger for additional content that people with more time might desire. Some students use this as a container for extensive continuing education, almost like they’re in graduate school, while others just take in what they can on weekends and commutes.
QUESTION: If one person wants to jump all in to WHMI and another has very little bandwidth, do you have a way to help students consume the amount of content that’s right for them?
Answer: Yes. Students will receive more content than they may need or want to consume. With no deadlines for learning WHMI is a safe bet for those who are worried about time and bandwidth.
We’ve also broken down the content so you can adjust what you take in depending on what you need most urgently. Some of you will be wholeheartedly “all in” for everything, and that’s awesome. But that’s not required. We’ve customized the program into three recommended tracks, and we’ve broken down how many hours will be needed, depending on how much time you have to invest and what you need from the program. (We’re not including the hours you’ll invest in the live calls and the peer mentoring time. You are free to do one, two or all three tracks. The time investment will depend on how much of what is available you wish to utilize.
Heal The Healer Track
For those who are on a healing journey of their own and are motivated to enroll in WHMI because of a personal need rather than a professional need, it’s possible to limit the number of hours needed by skipping one of the three pillars of WHMI—the business development pillar. This doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be free to pursue additional learning in business development in the future, but if your primary focus is personal healing, this may not be a priority right now—and that’s totally okay. You can still get the gist of the work—and practice being a patient with your practice partner—and enjoy all the physical and metaphysical benefits of the program—without distracting yourself with concerns about customizing your medical practice or getting certified to facilitate the 6 steps.
Estimated # of hours invested: 56 hours (2.5 hours per week)
The Certification Track
This track is for people who intend to use the tools learned in WHMI to become a certified Whole Health Medicine Institute practitioner, someone who helps patients/clients work with the Whole Health Cairn and facilitates the 6 Steps To Healing Yourself, either in an individual one-on-one setting or in groups. This track is a potentially career-boosting track that gives you tools to differentiate yourself from a practitioner who accepts managed care insurance, someone who has done additional training to offer skills that can help support people for whom conventional medicine has failed to meet their needs. You may intend to use these certification skills inside or outside the conventional health care system. We will let you know exactly what is mandatory to qualify for certification, so you can choose which events/calls to prioritize if time is restricted.
Estimated # of hours invested: 74 hours (3.25 hours per week)
Fast Track To Paycheck Track
Some of you have left your paying job, you don’t have other means of support, and you’re desperate to pay the bills. Paying the tuition for WHMI may have been a stretch already, so now the pressure is on to find a fast track to the “return on your investment.” You’ll likely want to get certified, plus you’ll want to dive right into the content that will help you figure out what’s next in your business life. This may or may not include pursuing certification, but it’s definitely going to behoove you to take advantage of all that WHMI offers regarding running a “fee for service” practice, building a platform so you can attract paying clients, get a book deal, fill workshops, or get paid for public speaking.
Estimated # of hours invested: 116 hours (5 hours per week)
QUESTION: Why did you decide to accept lay people this year? If I’m a doctor or licensed health care professional, will this dilute my WHMI experience?
Answer: We have been asking ourselves this question since WHMI’s inception. Our first year, we offered WHMI only for doctors with MD’s and DO’s, and everyone with letters after their name got triggered. So the next year, we opened it up to anyone with letters after their names- chiropractors, naturopaths, Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners, midwives, physician assistants, nurses and nurse practitioners, psychotherapists, etc. Opening the program to other kinds of professionals definitely changed it, but we feel it changed it for the better, breaking down the hierarchy that usually places doctors at the top of the power pedestal and other health care professionals beneath them. Over the years, we’ve fielded countless requests from professionals in other industries- like law, education, the churches and temples, corporate life- ask if they can participate so they can become ambassadors of Whole Health inside their institutions. We’ve also had many coaches and lay people with passion and experience in health care beg to be allowed to bring Whole Health to their private practices and communities.
Our hesitation to open WHMI to lay people has been two-fold. 1) We don’t want to water down the experience for the people we originally set out to help- doctors. 2) We care about quality control, and we’re fully committed to protecting the patients our graduates touch with this penetrating and transformational healing work. With so much corruption and loose boundaries that Lissa has witnessed in the field of Sacred Medicine, we want to ensure that our graduates have both mastery in their field and air tight ethics. This is why we have taken great care this year to add the mandatory Ethics & Trauma Safety course to our curriculum for those who are not board-certified, because we want to ensure that we can maintain quality control as we expand to allow lay people to join us.
We acknowledge that this is an experiment, and this might be the only year we make WHMI available to lay people. If our experiment dilutes the program or in any way harms the integrity of the frequencies we hold, we will reset the boundary next year. So if you’re a lay person and you’re on the fence, consider participating this year, since we may not do it again.
We will be soliciting feedback from all graduates next year to assess how this big change affects the experience of our students, so please trust that we will do everything we can to bring a Whole Health perspective to the widest audience while doing our best to ensure that our growth doesn’t diminish the experience of our students.
QUESTION: What inspires people to sign up for this program?
Answer: People enroll in WHMI for different reasons.
Some are driven by their integrity. They know there’s more to healing and they want to stay on the cutting edge of how best to help patients and clients heal in a Whole Health-informed way.
Some are starving for like-minded community of practice, purpose, and belonging. After feeling on the fringe or marginalized by their beliefs about health and healing, many students find that the community of others who are passionate about Whole Health is the best part.
Some attend because they are personally sick, on disability, and seeking healing from a chronic illness or a health crisis and they want to use the tools in this program personally.
Some attend because they’ve left a conventional medical job and they’re broke, scared, and desperate for a career change that will allow them to pay the bills while still using their gifts and serving their calling.
Some attend because they are passionate about healing health care and they hope to do so from inside the system.
We imagine that some might be passionate about Whole Health and seeking new career opportunities as a Whole Health coach. Others who are not health care providers might see that a Whole Health education would bolster their career in other ways.
Some have no idea why they’re signing up, other than their intuition said “This is the medicine I need now!” (Seriously, we hear this all the time.)
