Hello, my name is JP Salibi, I'm a functional medicine physician from Charleston, South
Carolina.
I'm on the advisory board for the body and also chair the educational committee for the
body health care system, and I'm going to talk a little bit about how we can create
owner operated holistic medical practices.
So I'm going to do something a little different.
I'm going to talk about my journey, how I got here.
So I was born and raised in Beirut until the age of 13.
My father was part of the pharmaceutical industry, I like to call it little pharma instead of
big pharma, because the company was privately held, it was a small company of maybe a hundred
employees, and they provided non-patented medications for North Africa and the Middle
East.
And so that was my first exposure to medicine, and fast forward to high school, I had a wonderful
science teacher, Mr. Fagan, who steered me in the direction of the sciences and medicine,
and actually he doesn't mind me saying, but he's a patient of mine today, and he's in
his late 70s, and a major influence.
I'll have to say that medical school, when fast forward to medical school, was horrific.
I have PTSD because of the way the medical education was run back then and still is today.
So that prompted me to consider changing the system.
My first go-around with a functional medicine integrative practice owner operated was in
the late 1990s.
Actually 98, I opened up a practice in Savannah, Georgia that was cash-based, called the Salibi
Longevity Institute.
That lasted about seven years, and with that experience I knew what not to do and what
to do.
Lots of bumps and bruises along the way.
Then I married a Charlestonian and moved to South Carolina, and Charleston specifically
opened up another practice in 2013 called Carolina Holistic Medicine, and we celebrated
our 10th year anniversary last year.
So through all the trials and errors, bumps and bruises, I didn't have a playbook.
Well I have a playbook now, and there's a book out there that was written some years
ago by an English economist named James Maskell.
It's called The Evolution of Medicine, and if you've not read it and you're intending
to open up your own practice and jump out of the matrix and system medicine, I would
encourage you to read Evolution of Medicine, again by James Maskell.
I want to throw out the idea, it's a philosophical thing having to do with the difference between
transactional medicine, which is you pay a fee for some medical care, and transformative
medicine, where you're transforming your patient from a sick to a well person, or from
ill to health, or maintain health.
That's a philosophical issue you have to wrap your mind around as we really try to proceed
to a better health care system.
My advice to folks, if you're trying to jump out of the matrix and you've been a hospital
based physician like anesthesia, radiology, or part of big medical groups, and you don't
have any experience on how to run an office, I wouldn't expect you to because you're basically
sheltered and insulated from all that.
When I started out, I didn't know what E-verify was and how to hire patients, I didn't know
about payroll and HR, so I had to learn sort of the hard way, but you all don't because
I have developed a system in which to teach you not only the clinical stuff, but also
how to run and operate a sustainable, profitable practice.
One word of advice, if you don't want to go to the bank for a $100,000 loan, is start
putting a little money away into a savings account to help do this because unless you
plan to drag your patients from the old system with you and you have a patient base, you
should do okay, but in my case, I did not.
I went from the emergency room, zero patient base, essentially, to starting from scratch.
For the first year and a half, I was in the red, I had to live off my savings, and at
this point, 10 years in, I am making more money than I could possibly make as an ER physician.
I don't have to deal with Mtala rules, I'm my own boss, the only one over me is my wife
and she's my chief financial officer and my boss, and it feels great to be free and practice
the way I want.
I want to talk about concierge, the term concierge medicine, VIP medicine, don't like the term,
I think it's exclusive, and I'm very inclusive, so exclusive was considered the dirtiest word
in the American language by our poet laureate and author, Carl Sandberg, and he brought
that up in one of the last interviews he gave with Edward R. Moros right before his
death, and he called exclusivity the dirtiest word in the American language, so I hold that
true to my heart.
I am working with Dr. Avery Jackson at The Body, and we're at the tip of the spear on
creating a parallel healthcare system totally separated and divorced from the insurance
model, the biomedical industrial complex.
And I think I will probably stop there, oh, one last thing, I want to advance my sides
a bit because I neglected to do that the first go around, so this is going to be posted on
the website, FLCCC, in their forums, and also available, I think, as a PDF after the conference.
So this is the structure of how we're doing things at the priority health academy with
education, not only clinical education and functional and engraved medicine, but also
how to build a sustainable practice.
And this is an example of how to evolve your practice going from traditional mainstream
insurance based to that of cash for care and membership, part of which we do master classes,
we put a schedule up, we do Q and A sessions weekly for clinicians, and we do an annual
symposium of anywhere from 12 to 40 lectures per year.
And okay, so just in summary, there are several national non-government organizations and non-profits
that are developing a parallel healthcare system, you all as clinicians need to seek
them out and discover them, some of them will be listing here.
So for clinicians and providers, they have an online forum in many of these organizations
to help you find doctors for those seeking doctors.
And you know, stay tuned and keep up, follow my sub-stack for up-to-date postings on the
world of medicine.
Here I've listed a few, the body for patient-centered care, freedom healthcare, and there's one
that's kind of faded out, doctors for patient care.
And the newly formed South Carolina Physicians for Freedom, of which I'm a member, and Indie
Docs, independent doctors organization to help folks with DPC and cash for care practices.
And of course, our favorite FLCCC has an online resource to help patients find doctors and
doctors to find each other.
