Autoimmune Protocol Medical Study + AIP Certified Training Program
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Autoimmune Protocol Medical Study + AIP Certified Training Program
Our friends and upcoming NTA Annual Conference speakers, Mickey Trescott and Angie Alt have exciting news to share! Not only are they enrolling for their AIP Certified Training program, but they’re sharing the results of the first-ever medical study on the Autoimmune Protocol. The results were published by the journal, Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, and are available for everyone to read for free! If you’d like to read the full article now, you can find it here.
Read their guest blog post below.
How Did We Get Involved in A Medical Study?
In December of 2015, we were contacted by Dr. Gauree Konijeti, the Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Program Division of Gastroenterology at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. Dr. Konijeti told us that a patient with inflammatory bowel disease had introduced her to AIP and the patient’s improvement was so remarkable she was inspired to learn more. After further discussion, Dr. Konijeti explained that she’d like to undertake a medical study of AIP to evaluate its potential efficacy for patients with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis. She asked if Angie’s online group health coaching program, SAD to AIP in SIX, could be used to help the study participants transition to AIP. Our answer, of course, was, “YES, YES, YES!!”
Medical studies take lots of time, planning, and money to get off the ground. It wasn’t until September of 2016 that we were finally ready to get underway. Angie, joined by Amy Kubal, RD and Nicole Erickson, NTC, spent six weeks helping the participants, all of whom had Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, slowly work their way through eliminations until they reached the full AIP elimination phase and then spent another five weeks in a maintenance phase. During the process, just like in SAD to AIP in SIX, the participants were introduced to important lifestyle changes too (like sleep, stress management, movement, and support).
We waited another year for all the results to be calculated and the study be published, but now they are ready to be shared!
What Were the Results?
Let’s just cut to the chase and look at the best line in the whole publication!
“Clinical remission was achieved by week 6 by 11/15 (73%) of study participants, and all 11 maintained clinical remission during the maintenance phase of the study. We did not hypothesize, a priori, that clinical remission would be achieved so early (week 6). Indeed, this proportion of participants with active IBD achieving clinical remission by week 6 rivals that of most drug therapies for IBD . . . (Konijeti, et al. 2017)”
YES, you read that correctly!
(There were 15 participants, nine with Crohn’s and six with ulcerative colitis.)
- – By Week 6 (that was full AIP elimination), 11 of the 15 participants were in clinical remission (six with Crohn’s, five with ulcerative).
- – All eleven participants maintained clinical remission through the maintenance phase.
- – Seven of the 15 participants were on active biologic therapies but not in clinical remission at baseline, this suggests that diet can be an important component of successful treatment.
- – Patients were advised no medication changes before study start, however one participant self-discontinued oral biologic therapy but still achieved clinical remission by week 6.
- – Another participant self-discontinued oral biologic therapy, but continued biologic suppository and still achieved clinical remission.
- – Two of the participants were able to discontinue steroid therapy.
To learn in-depth about the study methods, measures, analysis, and results, you can access the full article here.
What Does This Mean and What’s Next?
“It’s woooorking!” That’s a little thing Angie usually says to the members of SAD to AIP in SIX, when they start to report health improvements. Sometimes at the beginning, they aren’t quite sure it will work and when the first health improvements pop-up they are often uncertain the dietary and lifestyle changes could actually be the cause. That line is meant to be a humorous nudge about having confidence in the body’s response. In the future, we might be able to inspire confidence more easily with study results like this!
These results help the community put data behind our conviction that this process is benefiting so many of us. More importantly, it opens the door for big conversations with the medical community and massive changes in the standard of care for those with autoimmune disease. It’s our hope that the experience of Dr. Konijeti and her initial patient describing AIP inspires all of you to speak up at your medical appointments. We may be surprised by how many more forward-thinkers exist!
Our fingers are crossed that the future will hold more research. The opportunity to duplicate the process with other kinds of autoimmune diagnoses is top of our wish list at Autoimmune Wellness! We also hope Dr. Konijeti and other researchers like her will have the chance to conduct larger studies and address any limitations encountered by this first study. Again, it is our voices and support of the organizations funding this research that can help this become a reality.
And for those of you wondering, yes, Angie was tempted to tell the research team when results started coming in, “I told you . . . it’s woooorking!”
The Autoimmune Wellness Mission + Training Program
At Autoimmune Wellness our mission is to truly change the future of healthcare for those with autoimmune disease. In fact, we were motivated to become Nutritional Therapy Practitioners or Consultants in the first place, so we could do that work. In mid-2016 we decided to take the lead on scaling up that mission. We moved from a sole focus on producing resources to help people help themselves, to an expanded focus of directly impacting healthcare and allied providers. We saw that what was lacking were healthcare and allied providers who knew about and could effectively integrate the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) into their practices to best serve our community. We decided to combine forces with our friend, Sarah Ballantyne, Ph.D. to create the AIP Certified Coach Practitioner Training Program, an AIP-focused education and certification course specifically for the those working in the health and wellness fields. We saw that the healthcare world was already beginning to change. There are studies being done on the efficacy of AIP (with exciting results) and we heard from our community that their healthcare and allied providers were asking about and even in some lucky cases, recommending AIP. We wanted to speed up that process by bringing the details right to the providers with our training program.
Two and a half years after first hatching our plans, two classes of AIP Certified Coaches have been certified! We have had over 200 students with backgrounds as diverse as medical doctors to personal trainers, pharmacists to health coaches, registered dietitians and nurses to naturopaths, mental health professionals, and many NTPs and NTCs just like us! Not only have all these students been diverse in their health and wellness backgrounds, but geographically they have spanned the globe and represented both brand new and long-standing experience in the field. Our virtual classroom is a very rich environment for sharing how best to serve autoimmune clients and patients.
We’re getting ready to train our 2019 class and if you are a NTP or NTC (including current students) or other practitioner or a provider in either the conventional or natural healthcare worlds, please seriously consider being a part of the third enrollment of AIP Certified Coach! We’ll be getting started in mid-January 2019 and enrollment opens December 26th, 2018. You can learn every detail about the program and join the interest list for reminders and exclusive information on our website.
What You’ll Learn During the AIP Certified Coaching Program:
Here are some of the areas we are educating our students about:
- – The science-based foundation for using dietary and lifestyle approaches to wellness
- – Integrating dietary and lifestyle approaches to healing into their scope of practice, whether they are massage therapists, fitness instructors, or medical doctors
- – Collaborating with their patients and clients, as well as other members of a healthcare team, to give patients and clients more complete support
- – Using troubleshooting to address the individual and complex needs of someone with autoimmune disease, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach
- – Raising awareness levels about the nature of invisible illnesses and validating patients or clients struggles and concerns with deeper compassion
Our AIP Certified Coaches are dramatically changing how autoimmune disease is approached by sharing all they have learned with their colleagues and patients. Autoimmune disease is complex and requires a nuanced strategy using all the tools in the toolbox. Collaboration and integration are the future of healthcare and these new coaches are doing everything in their power to make that future a reality! We hope you’ll join us!
Want to learn more about this training program?
Watch: Nathalie Garcia, Organize your practice to save time and money
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Watch: Nathalie Garcia, Organize your practice to save time and money
In this interview, Nathalie discusses:
- – The story behind Practice Better Management and how it got started
- – Common mistakes that NTP and NTCs see when working with clients
- – Ways that health and wellness professionals are managing their businesses
- – Why having effective systems in place matter for building and maintaining a successful practice
- – How NTP and NTCs can reduce some their workload and better prioritize tasks
- – How NTP and NTCs can better support clients without burning out
- – One, simple action an NTP or NTC could implement today that would help better organize their business and in turn, save time and money
Setting Your Practice Up For Success
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Setting Your Practice Up For Success
Guest post by Nathalie Garcia, co-owner of Practice Better Management
Working with clients is without a doubt one of the most rewarding jobs you can have, and it’s also hard work! There are so many moving parts you need to manage to organize and grow your practice.
I remember finishing my own nutrition studies and quickly realizing that I was now expected to not only coach my
‘What, that’s not what I had signed up for.’ I so clearly remember thinking.
The truth is, if you want to earn a living helping people improve their health then you need to make sure you have a system in place to make sure you’re being as efficient as possible with your time.
Here are two ways to run a more efficient and successful Nutritional Therapy Practice.
#1 Be efficient in your business
Whether you’re currently working with clients or you plan to work with clients in the future as an NTP or NTC, you’re going to be required to wear many hats. Here are just a few of the tasks you’ll be responsible for:
- – Bookings
- – Payments
- – Accounting
- – Forms
- – Reminders
- – Notes & Charting
- – Recommendations
- – Client communication
- – Client accountability
This can all be very overwhelming for one person to handle on an ongoing basis. If you don’t find a way to cut back on the never-ending busy work, you’re going to be working for free, burn out, and most importantly, become unable to show up and support your clients when they need you the most.
Practicing Better
Until the past couple of years, these tasks were typically managed from multiple single-use applications, folders on your computer and emails or by paper and pen. As you can imagine, none of these options really offered a solution for being more efficient.
As a health and wellness practitioner myself, I needed a solution to this problem and created a Practice Management Platform to automate these workflows from day one.
Now, you can create workflows that string together and automate everything from booking and payments, form delivery, reminders, content delivery, client communication, and client accountability.
Just think about how much time you’d save and how much more you’d love your job if your clients could book their sessions online, pay for their session, receive a receipt, receive forms to fill out and sign, and get reminders for upcoming sessions without you having to do a thing. And this is just one example of how you can slash the time you’re spending on busy work.
Here are some key automated tools to consider for better efficiency:
- – Online Scheduling. Eliminate the dreaded back-and-forth that so commonly goes into scheduling an appointment via email, text, phone by allowing clients to book online when they’re ready. Online scheduling systems will also take care of the reminder emails so that’s another thing off your plate.
- – Required Payment. Never chase another payment by making sure you have a system in place that allows you to automatically collect full or partial payment for services when clients book.
- – Online Forms. We all use forms as a regular part of our practice (e.g. initial consultations, liability waivers, detox questionnaires, follow-up forms). Online forms are an easy and user-friendly way of collecting vital information. Require forms to be completed at the time of booking or set up forms to automatically be delivered to clients depending on the service they book.
- – Document & Recommendation Sharing. Crafting emails and sending handouts to clients are other tasks you’re wasting time on. Automatically sending out a notification that lets your client know they have a new resource to review will add up in time saved.
The ability to share these documents with clients with the push of a button will drastically cut down on your busy work.
#2 Be efficient with clients
If you want to create a successful and sustainable practice, you need clients coming back and bringing friends. Word of mouth is gold when clients are praising you. But before you get that rave review, clients first need to get results. Using a management platform like Practice Better helps you support clients as they work through big changes without burning yourself out.
Here are some tools built into Practice Better to help keep your clients on track:
- – Clients can track and share with you what they’re eating and how they’re feeling from our mobile app in real time. Knowing that you can see everything they enter is definitely a motivator to make better choices, but you can also offer direct feedback on their journal entries for additional support.
- – Secure Messaging. Put an end to client communication via text, social media, email, and courier pigeon! It’s hard to keep track of communication when it’s coming from so many different channels and important information can very easily be missed on both ends. Having one designated channel for client correspondence is a great way to keep the lines of communication open, create boundaries, and keep everything on record.
- – Tasks & Goals. Set tasks with reminder dates to help clients keep their eye on the prize.
- – Client portal. Having one place where clients can go to review all documents and notes you’ve shared will help keep them on track. A client portal also means that clients can access their recommendations from anywhere, even the grocery store or on vacation. It eliminates chances of losing handouts, resources, or forms.
As you may have noticed, technology can be such an asset in helping you grow your Nutritional Therapy Practice. We live in a technology-advanced world where there is an app for virtually everything! It only makes sense to leverage technology to improve your efficiency and, in turn, your success.
Nathalie Garcia is the Co-Founder of Practice Better, a Practice Management Platform that allows Health & Wellness Professionals to automate their workflow so they can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time helping clients reach their health goals. If you want to learn more about Nathalie and how to better organize your practice for success, join her and the NTA’s Career Development Course Lead Instructor, Jessica Pantermuehl for
A Graduate’s Path to Profound Transformation
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A Graduate’s Path to Profound Transformation
What is the first step on this path of your profound transformation?
The first step is hidden, small, and quiet. It begins at home when you are with yourself in a quiet space. It begins by learning the discipline to be silent and face who you are in your alone time. It is about leaning into this place, holding space for yourself, and listening to your authentic voice… your soul voice. This is important because in every moment, you are given an opportunity to make a decision; to decide what to do, how to react, how to perceive each moment and incident. What typically guides these responses is the part of your mind that is full of drive, organizational strategies, a love of information, logic, and reason. Many call this part of your guidance system the ego. Your ego loves you and wants to protect you from harm. This leads to a decision-making framework that has a low tolerance for risk and growth as there is an anticipation of failure and fear of the unknown. This makes the backdrop in any decision grounded in a primal protective stance that is ultimately fear based. Your ego is driven to meet deadlines, to avoid making mistakes and being vulnerable, to keep you safe and sound. Unfortunately, many times this leads to keeping you small, stagnant, and settling for mediocrity. In contrast, your authentic, or soul voice, is the place of your wisdom, your truth, the place where your Call is summoning you. It is the place showing you your next level, your next chapter, the next place to step into your greatness and power. It is asking you to play a bigger game, to take up space, and go all out with what you are here on this planet to do. Leaning into the silence and tuning in deeply helps you strengthen your attunement to what your authentic voice sounds like. This needs to be a serious endeavor. It needs to be so habitual that your attunement to this voice becomes so fine-tuned that you can discern between the voice of fear – your ego, and your authentic voice and at any given moment. It is most critical because there will be surges of doubt, fear, and naysayers that come your way. But if you are strengthened in this practice, you will still be able to hear this voice of truth and guidance. You can begin now. And continue every day. In quiet. Concentrating and asking: what is my soul saying to me right now? What comes next is actually doing what your soul says despite the fears and doubts. But that is for another time. I share all of this because as NTPs and NTCs, a time will come for you to do the inner work so that you become a soul-empowered leader in the field. With my leadership coach, Lisa Fabrega, I have learned:- – There comes a time when you do not need to be a master of more knowledge. Rather, it is time to be a master of your energy, your internal state, and how you hold space for others
- – This deeper work is about getting your internal game strong, so you can hold your energy powerfully and can hold a space for your clients like a master
- – It is about really seeing your clients and calling them out in the places they play small
- – It is about embodying what you speak about and helping your clients embody their own truth so they can be free
- – It is about showing up as the master who knows how to point someone back to themselves
- – This work of becoming an inspirational model for your ideal client and showing up as a beacon for master level space holding, mirroring, and seeing is a unique kind of work
- – It will lead you to be more fulfilled in your work, to stand out in the field, and ultimately to be happier
- – It all starts in the quiet work of tuning in to your heart and soul