Download the “Outcomes Rocket Podcast_Dr. Elliot Hirshorn audio file directly.
Outcomes Rocket Podcast_Dr. Elliot Hirshorn: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Saul Marquez:
Hey, everybody! Saul Marquez here with the Outcomes Rocket, and I want to welcome you back to another episode on the rocket. Today, I’ve got the privilege of hosting the amazing Dr. Elliot Hirshorn. He’s a sought-after healthcare practitioner whose journey reflects a unique blend of science, education, personal hardship, and perseverance. The early years of his career saw him imparting knowledge as a biology, and anatomy, and physiology teacher at Deptford Township High School, his alma mater in New Jersey. When faced with personal health challenges and a career crossroads, Dr. Hirschhorn made a pivotal decision to return to academia. What was his aim? It was to delve deep into the world of functional medicine and acquire skills needed to reclaim his health. The endeavor was not without struggles, but his unyielding determination led him to achieve a personal health revolution, and now he’s spreading that good across all of his patients and practices with New Life Medical Centers. So I want to welcome Dr. Elliot Hirshorn to the podcast. Elliot, thanks so much for joining us today.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Thanks so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Saul Marquez:
Look, the pleasure’s mine. You have a story that is really inspiring. So I only hit the tip of the iceberg here, but talk to us about what inspires your work in healthcare.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
So it actually starts back to my earliest memory as a kid, and I was about four years old, and my dad brought me into his room, and he plopped me on this bed, and he said, Elliot, you know I love you, I love your brother, but it’s just not working out for your mom and I anymore. And so this was the beginning of a conversation about family breakup, which obviously too many families go through. And so later that night, he came into my room, and he was tucking me in the bed, and it was just kind of a sad moment, and I picked up my favorite stuffed animal, which was Wiley Coyote from the Roadrunner series, right?
Saul Marquez:
Nice, yeah.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Handed it to him, and I said, you know, take this because I don’t want you to forget about me. And then, the next day, my mom takes me down to a neighbor’s house for safekeeping while my dad is getting ready to move out of the house. And so I, like, run over to the window, and I pull the curtains back, and I peer down the road, and I see my dad walking out of the house with this big box, and he loads it onto the truck, and he jumps up, and he pulls the roll down, door down, and he hops in the cab, and he drives down the road, and I’m just like watching this truck disappear. And later on that day, my mom had taken me to a daycare because now she was a single working mom, and so later that day at the daycare center, I was kind of like, what’s going to happen? Who’s picking me up? What’s this new life going to look like? And we were kind of kids, like looking out the daycare window and down this long dirt road, I see this big box truck turning the corner, and it starts rumbling down the road, and I’m like, oh man, I hope this is my dad. And so the truck pulls up, and my dad jumps out, and I run up and give him a big hug, and we end up going back to his new apartment that he had to set up for himself, and shows me the room that he has for my brother and I, and my brother wasn’t there at the time. So he just says, you know, Elliot, are you hungry? And so I said, sure. So we go over into the kitchen, and he said, you know, let’s get something to eat. So he opens up the freezer, and he pulls out a box of frozen chicken parmesan, and he throws it into the oven, and then he runs over, and he grabs a big pot or pan, and he dumps canned white potatoes into the saucepan and then throws the butter in there as well, right? And so this was what was the first of probably thousands of times that I watched my dad, single dad, newly single dad, make this meal of frozen chicken parmesan and white potatoes, and so this started to form the foundations of my behaviors and thought processes around food. And to add to that, when I got back to my mom’s now, she was a newly single mom, she’s a new single working mom. And so prior to that, having, you know, made home-cooked meals most of the time, now she’s also having to figure it out on her own, not having a whole lot of time or energy when she got home from work. And so what I remember from that is she would come home, and she would pull out of the cabinet a can of SpaghettiOs, and so it would be this pasta meal with, in many cases, hot dogs in there. My brother and I love this stuff because it tasted delicious, right? But in terms of nutritional content and value was slim to none. And so, between the two of them, they did the best they could, I loved my parents dearly, I don’t blame them for any responsibility for my health as an adult, 26-year-old high school science teacher. And if you can imagine the stereotypical picture of a 26-year-old male science teacher, I was coming home from work, I’d sit on the couch and turn the TV on the evening news, and then within ten minutes, I was passed out sleeping. And this was happening day after day, month after month after month. And so eventually, I thought to myself, what the heck is going on? Why am I so tired? Why am I falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon? I’m in my mid-20s, I’m newly married, I don’t have any kids. I should be like, out running or exercising, walking the dog, cutting the grass and here I am, just kind of wasting away the time, and eventually got on the scale, and I looked down at a number, and I was like, what is that? I realized that I was actually approaching the line of obesity. And so I thought to myself, I got to figure this out. And as a science teacher, you know, I had some background in health and fitness, actually for a few of those years, I was teaching anatomy and physiology. So I loved teaching, but I didn’t really love the venue in which I was teaching. And so, kind of at this crossroads of what do I do? Do I, what’s the next step for me? What’s the next career? And so, you know, I had the background of family in medicine, my grandfather being a doctor; and so I did some research, and I looked up the word teaching and found that that word comes from the word doko in Latin, which also is where we get our modern-day word doctor from. And so I thought, oh, well, I mean, I’ve got a family history legacy in medicine, let me think about maybe going back to school to be a doctor. And then also from my own personal journey thinking, okay, if I can go back to be a doctor and learn how to help people, I can help myself. Because, again, I was approaching the line of obesity, I was tired all the time, I’m only in my mid-20s. And so I decided, okay, let me go back to school and be a doctor. So I did that, and in the process of learning how to be a doctor, learning how people develop chronic diseases, learned why I was gaining weight, learned what I could do to make changes to affect that. And so, I started making changes to what I was eating, changed my lifestyle, and I was able to lose the weight, I was able to get back to a healthy weight, and one of the most profound things that happened was I was actually get my energy back. And so I realized that, first of all, it’s not just about weight, but it’s about overall health. And I realized that that’s why I was having so much trouble as a teacher in terms of energy and weight, is because there was these underlying issues that I was able to identify once I knew what I was doing, so that really started to drive the passion with getting to the root cause of people’s health problems is I was able to do it for myself. And so, then I started looking around at my own family first and realized that I had multiple family members who had chronic health problems that potentially could also benefit from just a holistic approach to their care. And so I had everything from family members with migraines to anxiety to depression to diabetes to heart disease to dementia. And the more research I did, the more I realized that some of these things could be cured with a holistic approach, some of them maybe not be cured, but people could benefit from a greatly improved quality of life as well. And so people like my brother, my mother, my father, my grandmother missed out on quality and quantity of leaders because they didn’t have an opportunity from a functional perspective to figure out what are the root causes of what they’re experiencing, what can you do before you start a medication from a dietary lifestyle nutritional perspective to give yourself the best possible chances for a good outcome. And unfortunately, I actually lost my brother to PTSD. He was 30 years old, he ended up taking his life.
Saul Marquez:
Sorry to hear that, man.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, thank you. That was very early in my career as a doctor and really started to push me even further in terms of how I wanted to help people, because it was actually August 29th of 2014 when he passed away, and I had a previously scheduled conference to go to in September. So just a few weeks later, and there at that conference, I was learning about research that was literally having just been published that was being done to help veterans with PTSD using functional medicine approaches, and my first reaction was anger. I was really angry that I didn’t have that information necessarily to share with my brother and help him prior to him dying. So, but then it quickly turned into, how can I use this to help other people? So I’m a firm believer in even the most terrible things that happen to you, you can use them in a positive way in your life and in the lives of others, and so, I was trying to immediately take that heart-wrenching tragedy in our lives and how do we start helping other people as a result of that. So that came out of my brother’s passing, and we help veterans with what we do, but also from these other chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s. So my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer’s, my mom suffered from anxiety and depression, she had uncontrollable migraines until she started doing something different with her approach, previously having just done medications. And then even my dad, going back to the original story about what my dad was cooking, unfortunately for him, he did not take a left turn in terms of what he was eating and his lifestyle like I did, and so eventually, he developed diabetes, although he denied it. By that time, I was already practicing and realized what was happening to him, and I tried to help him with that, but people are stuck in their ways, and diabetes is a sugar issue, and sugar is addictive, and so there’s all kinds of other things associated with that. But ultimately, it led to him having cardiovascular disease, and he had kind of a mini-stroke, and then he almost had a heart attack, and so he ended up having a quadruple bypass as a result of all the years of his eating habits, which is, again, what formed my early thoughts about food as well. And so, between my brother and my grandmother, my mom, and my dad, and myself, I am very motivated from a personal perspective to help people to avoid all of these things as much as possible. And so out of that is where we’ve gotten to today with my practice at New Life Medical Centers, helping people. You know, our mission is to inspire hope by identifying and addressing the root causes of disease, thereby renewing optimal function and restoring desired quality of life. So no matter what somebody comes in to see us for, our goal is to figure out why. That’s the question we’re asking: why, why, why? And then.
Saul Marquez:
I think that’s great. And look, when you were telling your stories about all your family, I know I related, I know the listeners are relating because it’s a very common story, sadly. And we are in a system that is focused on sick care, not healthcare, and we need new ways, and that’s why I love that your practice is called New Life.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
Because it is about that. And so, you do a lot of things, and the thing that I was wondering is, we have a national audience. Is what you do available virtually, or are you strictly in South Carolina? Talk to us about that.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re absolutely able to help people virtually. I think that’s one of the most important things for health, I think, that’s come out of the pandemic is the whole ability to do things virtually now, and we’ve kind of learned how to do that. We were actually doing a little bit of it before the pandemic, but obviously, that has forced a lot of people to figure things out. And so, yes, we do things virtually, much of what we can do is deliverable virtually. You know, we can send you to a lab anywhere. We can also, we do a lot of telemedicine, so on virtual platforms like this that are hyper-secure, we can have a conversation face to face with you, we can review your labs, we can talk to you about diet, lifestyle, nutrition, you can meet with our health coaches, and we can implement a functional medicine or a weight loss program with people virtually, absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. So there’s opportunities for everybody listening to this. If you’re looking for a way to be healthy from the inside out, there’s certainly which, by the way, is the book that you’re working on. So I want to tee that up for you as well.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, I’m super excited about that.
Saul Marquez:
So talk to me about that. Is it done, or is it in the works?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
It’s in the works. I’m literally, I was working on it last night. I hope to have it out in the next couple of months. It’s a combination of my personal journey, so there’s some storytelling in there, you’ll hear the same story I just told you earlier and a lot of other ones, and then we’re mixing that with the principles of functional medicine and kind of how I came from where I came to where I am now with the practice but, and then also weaving in some stories of lives that we’ve changed with what we’ve been doing over the last ten years as well. So it’s called Healthy from the Inside Out, because I really believe that that’s the only way to be healthy is you have to get from the inside out. And then, from a functional medicine perspective, the only way to figure out what’s going on inside is you got to do testing, right? So we always do testing on everybody, even in our weight loss program. You know, that’s one of the biggest things people look for when they’re reaching out for, to really, to a lot of healthcare providers is, you know, want to lose weight. It’s a very tangible thing, a pain, and a problem that people have. But our weight loss program is different because we’re not just giving you coaching, we’re not just giving you medication, we’re not just saying move more, eat less. We are actually doing testing to figure out why are you stuck. Because most weight loss programs will help you to lose weight, it’s the sustainability piece. How do you lose the weight and keep it off, is what people want. And if we don’t know what’s going on on the inside, we’re not going be able to help you get healthy from the inside out, so we have to do testing, and that’s a part of all of our weight loss programs.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. If you had to point to one thing that you’re most well known for out of all of the services that you offer, what would you say it is?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
It’s definitely functional medicine, it’s what we’ve been doing over the last ten years. And it’s a broad category, but I would say right now most of our clients are weight loss clients. They don’t know they’re coming for functional medicine, but we try to meet people where they’re at, right? So they want to lose weight, we want to help them with that, and then we talk about getting healthy from the inside out. Weight is a side effect of being unhealthy, and so if we want to get you to a point where you’re losing weight, we have to get you healthy and we have to do that from the inside out. So that’s the whole concept that I was explaining, and most people come and they don’t realize that, but then after we have a conversation with them, they’re like, oh, absolutely, that makes total sense, let’s do this. And so, yeah, so functional medicine we’ve been doing for a long time and now we have a specific weight loss program that we do, and it just kind of was born out of the fact that we were helping people for ten years with functional medicine, they were losing weight naturally, because we were just getting them healthy. And then we realized we could probably reach more people instead of advertising functional medicine, actually advertise what people are looking for, and that’s weight loss, obviously, is a lot of people are looking for.
Saul Marquez:
Man, well, I’m looking for it. Can I sign up with you?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
You know, when we did the pre-call on this, you were telling me, I’m like, oh my God, I think you came on my podcast for a reason.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Absolutely, everything happens for a reason.
Saul Marquez:
I’m open to it. So certainly let’s talk after this. And for anybody listening, have you been struggling to lose those COVID lbs? That’s certainly me. And so something about having the zoom that’s neck up.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
It like, helps.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, you know, the pressure’s on, folks. But take note of what Dr. Elliot just talked about, you know, the health. And I’ve been thinking about it more and more and so excited to dive into that with you, Elliot, for sure. You know, as we think about some of the biggest setbacks, what would you say has been one of yours from the business side, and what’s been your biggest learning out of it?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, so that’s an interesting question. I was listening to one of your other guests a while back, and it was another functional medicine practitioner and they were talking about the payment model in functional medicine, and from my perspective, insurance companies really just get in the way. They’re really good for catastrophic emergency care, like that’s, in my opinion, what it should be for, and that’s what they’re really good at. But the quality of life care, which is what we’re helping people with, is getting your quality of life back, the coverage is not really great. So for functional medicine, they don’t cover a whole lot, and so we don’t even get involved with that from our perspective, and I think that’s one of the biggest challenges from the patient’s perspective. And obviously running a business as well, it’s easy to try to sometimes get trapped into relying on insurance, and we’ve worked with insurance for some things. And one thing in particular, which is what I wanted to talk about with this question, is we were working on a program for neuropathy, and that’s where people have like burning numbness, tingling in their hands and feet. And it can be very debilitating, and the standard of care is just gabapentin medication which just numbs your feet and hands so you don’t feel it and that’s it. But the treatment that we do actually restores function to the nerves and relieves the pain, relieves the weird sensations over time. And for a while, there was some potential insurance coverage, and so it was really great for the patients, and obviously, from a business perspective, it makes it a little bit easier to not have to worry about where’s the money coming from, but eventually, the insurance thing didn’t work out. And so that for a while was a big source of revenue for us in terms of the practice, and so then we had to pivot and figure out what to do next. And so we kind of had to go back to that pretty much cash model, and it works fine, but it’s just a different outlook on how you talk to the patients. It’s a different outlook on how you do your marketing and what type of patients are you looking for. And it’s not that you don’t want to help everybody, but we have to be able to help people that have a problem with it and have the ability to pay for it, and it’s just the way it is in life. And so that was definitely a challenge, having to make that pivot from relying on the insurance. But ultimately, I think, honestly, that people who make an investment in their health and it’s not just a financial investment, it’s an investment of time and energy and finances end up having better outcomes because they are they have skin in the game, the invested in the process, not just the financial piece of it, and that’s what we’ve seen because we’ve done both types. And so I think that people get a better outcome on things, whether in this arena or not, when you pay for something, then you pay attention, right?
Saul Marquez:
Yep, totally agree, and kudos for retooling your approach, and now there’s a perspective there. But I agree with you, you know, when you’re invested, you make it happen, and so I couldn’t agree with you more there. As you approach the market with these approaches that are unique, what are you most excited about now?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Actually technology. So you know, everybody’s talking about AI, and prior to like January, AI was an abbreviation I used for autoimmune because we see a lot of autoimmune patients, and now every time I see AI, I see artificial intelligence, but.
Saul Marquez:
It’s real.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, it’s real, and the technology, the first time I got on ChatGPT and I typed in a question or a prompt and I saw what it put out, I literally jumped out of my chair and ran out to the living room and said to my wife, you’re never going to believe this.
Saul Marquez:
I did the same thing, man. I love it.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, and so.
Saul Marquez:
So great.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
The cool thing for me as an analytical science-based person is that when I’m asking questions about healthcare or scientific approaches or this, that, or the other thing, you know, I can do my research on there, and it’ll actually spit back the references. So I know I can verify that the information is providing is accurate because it’ll give me the peer-reviewed research to click on and verify the information, and so it’s changed the game clinically to start with because we can get more information about how to help people in better ways and we can do it in a shorter amount of time. And so if a patient asks, what do I do for this, or does what you do help with this weird thing, I can put a prompt in there, and I can pull together resources super quick and answer a question on the spot for the patient about whether or not what we do might help with their weird diagnosis that’s gone on. So it’s been super helpful that way, and then just from a business and marketing perspective, marketing, I mean, you can create content super quick, and then from a business perspective, you can create office policies and procedures and all of that. And you have to, you still have to filter your human editing element over top of that, but to get the foundation to start with, it’s made me infinitely more productive over the last six months. And it’s not only helpful for the business, but I think clinically the patients are benefiting. And for us, that’s our hierarchy, so whenever we talk about what we’re doing in the office, whether it’s a new service or whatever, the number one priority is, is it going to be beneficial for the patient? And then number two is can we do it compliantly? And then number three, is it profitable? And it has to meet all three of those if we’re going to do something in the office; otherwise, it doesn’t make sense.
Saul Marquez:
I will say amen to that, and I’ll say that at Outcomes Rocket, we also embrace AI. We believe that it is the future and you won’t be replaced by AI, but you will be replaced by a human that has embraced it.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Exactly, right.
Saul Marquez:
So awesome that you share that excitement with us, Dr. Elliot. Look, this conversation’s been exciting. I will be taking advantage of your program, I hope listeners do too. Leave us with a closing thought. What closing thought would you leave the listeners with?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
I would say, whether you’re a patient or a practitioner, to know, you’ve got a lot of healthcare, people listening is, never stop learning. You know, one of the interesting things is that, you know, doctors wear white coats, and there’s actually I did some research into this just recently, there’s different lengths of white coats, and the length of the white coat is traditionally associated with the level of knowledge and learning that you’ve gone through already. And so first-year doctors in residency, interns, whatever, they have a really short white coat.
Saul Marquez:
Like a belly coat.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Yeah, exactly, not quite that short. That’d be funny, though.
Saul Marquez:
I know, right?
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
And then as you graduate and you’re an attending and you’re practicing for a long time, then you get the longer coat. And yeah, and I’ve never cared for the longer coats, they’re just awkward to walk around with and especially sit down in, and so I hung it up, and it hangs up for a while. But then as I was doing this research recently, I learned that at Harvard Medical School, and it’s actually the reason I was looking at Harvard is, because I’m doing a course through Harvard right now, actually on nutrition, and I learned that everybody at Harvard, no matter if you’ve been there for one day or three decades, they all wear a short coat, and the reason why is because you never stop learning. You’re always learning.
Saul Marquez:
Love that, love that.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
And so that’s what I would encourage. Never be afraid to say, I don’t know, and ask the question, why? Remember I said, that’s the question we ask about what’s going on with the patient is why. So for patients, I would encourage you to be your own advocate. If you come armed with knowledge and information about what’s going on and what possible root causes could be contributing to your symptoms, then you’ll be better able to advocate for yourself in taking those steps. And for providers and other healthcare professionals, again, if you don’t know the answer to the question, don’t be afraid to admit to the patient that you don’t know. I think there’s a lot of pride in being a doctor, there’s some, obviously, societal and cultural status to that, but, you know, we’re all still learning, hopefully, as providers. So don’t be afraid to say, I don’t know, and then look it up. I think that if you feel like you’ve arrived in your knowledge of medicine, then you’ve already fallen behind.
Saul Marquez:
Well said.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
They say that, you know, the saying goes, you’re supposed to learn something new every day, right? And so if you’re a healthcare provider and you’re not learning something new every day that can better serve your patients, then you’re probably not serving your patients very well. And so, like I said, the best tool that I’ve found recently to help with that, and this can be used for anybody, patients or providers, is the artificial intelligence. It’s just a great way to get that information very quickly. And as I said in the prompts, one of my mentors says the quality of your question determines the quality of your results, and I learned that before I knew about AI, but that applies 100,000% to AI, because if you don’t give it a good prompt, you’re not going to get a good response, and so.
Saul Marquez:
More than ever, I love that.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
And so if you’re looking for science information, when you’re prompting, just say, provide references, and it’ll give you all the references.
Saul Marquez:
Love it. Elliot, this has been fantastic. I really appreciate your, first of all, your stories, your vulnerability, thanks for sharing those with us, it really helps us relate to you and connect to your message. And then, secondly, the work that you do, an invitation goes out to everybody listening to check them out, check out your work. We’ll leave links in the show notes so that they can get in touch as well as look into the programs that you’re doing. And then after I get set up with you, I’ll, maybe three, six-month kind of progress, we’ll get you back on to explore the results. So I appreciate you jumping on with us.
Dr. Elliot Hirshorn:
Thank you so much. I appreciate the time. It’s been great.
Sonix has many features that you’d love including collaboration tools, automated translation, world-class support, powerful integrations and APIs, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.
