Introduction
[00:00:00] Detective Ev: Well, hello my friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Health Detective Podcast by Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. My name is Evan Transue, aka Detective Ev. I will be your host for today’s show with FAQ from course advisors’ calls with the public.
If you’re listening to this one on one of the first days that it came out, then I am currently in the wonderful wild city of Boise, Idaho for the Cell Core Conference. I will be representing FDN there. So, if somehow you happen to be at this conference and you are listening to the podcast or you’re local, come say hi. We’d love to see you guys. There are plenty of FDNs that are going to be at this conference apparently, so I’m really excited for this, and I can’t wait.
Anyway though, today I wanted to do a shorter podcast and more course focused. As many of you know, I went back to the course enrollment side of things a couple of months ago. That means I am one of the several people that you can talk to if you are interested in the course, to learn more about it, see if it’s a good fit for you, all that good stuff.
What’s really cool about those calls, I love the way that FDN does this. I don’t really mind sales or salesmanship, but I don’t like having to lie to people or mislead people. I won’t do sales for that reason. Honestly, in many of the jobs that I had before this that were sales oriented, like at 18, I sold cars. You know, it wasn’t always, but it happened. After like a couple times of that, I just got uncomfortable, and I didn’t want to do it anymore.
FAQ: In No Particular Order
What I love about FDN is we are genuinely on those calls to guide people. That is the idea. There are people that I have referred to other courses, some I have referred away from the FDN course. And there are people that I have referred to just practitioners instead of going through an entire course because that’s what they needed. That’s a good way to do sales or course enrolling, or whatever you want to call it. You ethically advise people, figure out what their problem is, do some investigative work to figure out what’s going on, and then you help them find the solution if you’re qualified to do that. That sounds like a pretty good thing to do.
With that all said, I’ve been having conversations being in this role again, and I just figured I gotta make a podcast on this, an updated one, cause I think I did this a year and a half, two years ago. But I needed an updated one that our team can send to people so that we can just buff out some of the most frequently asked questions.
I highly recommend watching our course tour. But I figure more people will listen to this because, one, you only have to listen to it, and two, it is going to be about half the time of the course tour itself, I estimate. But I can talk a lot, so we’ll see what happens today.
I’m just going to buff through these and give some answers and they’re in no particular order. I will put in the show notes what questions we will be talking about today so that you guys can just skip to one or two of them if you’d like.
FAQ: Who Can Go Through the FDN Course?
First one I want to address is who can go through the FDN course. Good news, anyone, but I put a little asterisk on that.
When I say anyone, it means that, we’re not going to stop you from purchasing it per se. I mean, especially if you don’t get on a call with us, you could literally just go online and buy the course, which is wonderful. But you might find yourself either pleasantly surprised or disappointed if you didn’t go through the process to figure out if it was a good fit for you.
So, when I say anyone can go through the course, it does mean that the FDN course was not designed in such a way that you have to have a science background. You do not need a medical background, or a health background. What you do need though, is definitely a passion for this, which I assume you already have if you’re looking into it. But you need to have a willingness to do the work and study.
Clearly, FDN doesn’t take as long as college, but I would imagine that this is probably pretty equivalent to college level classes. We’ve heard that said before by Reed Davis himself. He considers it almost like a master’s level in terms of its toughness. So, impossible? No. Many people can do master’s programs. But what you need to understand is that you are not doing an online certification where you just click a few buttons every single week for a stupid quiz, and all of a sudden you get a certification. You’re not buying your certification here. You are paying for our actual training that we give you.
FAQ: How Long Does the Course Take on Average?
There is one-on-one mentorship, there’s one-on-one testing. It is a somewhat tough course. Certainly, for the online world it’s a tough course. The point is, though, there’s a benefit to that and that means that you will actually have credibility. Because a lot of these other courses, if you haven’t realized, can’t offer much credibility. Not even because their content is bad, but because they allow you to just graduate without actually properly testing you.
So, anyone can go through but be ready to study and be ready to work.
Next is how long does the course take on average? The course has actually shifted upwards in time, and this is not because our students are getting lazier, it’s because more content has been added over time.
I just got informed that the average is now taking between nine and nine and a half months, where for the longest time we were saying eight and a half. I’m going to have to update this in my conversations because apparently it is nine and a half. Is it possible to do it quicker? It absolutely is.
My girlfriend was working full-time, and she had to deal with me. I always kind of make a joke of that, but that is quite serious. She just finished in seven months, graduating just a few weeks ago. My one friend just graduated on Thursday, and it is Friday at the time of recording this. So, by Thursday, I mean yesterday. He was not actually working at this time, but it took him about six or seven months to get through this. So, it can be done quicker for sure, but the average rate now is nine and a half.
FAQ: What Are the Advanced Courses For?
What are the advanced courses for? Some people get confused by this. They ask, I see all these advanced courses about blood chemistry, thyroid, what is that? How is that different than the main course?
The main course is a program that is designed to teach you the FDN system. The FDN system is actually something unique. It was a system created by Reed Davis, who I reference all the time on this show, the founder of FDN. He came up with it by running over 10,000 labs on clients and concluded that the set of labs that we teach, even though they’ve been updated for the times because there is more advanced technology now than there was before, the core labs stay the same. That is because they show the most prevalent issues in people who are chronically ill.
When you get those things that show up on those tests under control and you coach up their body through D.R.E.S.S – diet, rest, exercise, stress reduction, and supplementation – that’s how you get a person well on a consistent basis. That’s what we’re doing here.
So, if you want to learn that, if you want 150 hours of course content and counting, if you want access to the labs, that’s another big one, the only way to get access to the labs through any of our programs is by going through the main FDN course. If you want the one-on-one mentorship, group mentorship, all that stuff, that’s the main course.
The advanced courses are intensives that are way cheaper because there’s no mentorship and they’re just shorter, obviously, but they’re for one or two specific topics. We have Functional Blood Chemistry, we have Organic Acids, we have Thyroid, Oxalates, Blood Sugar Management, Heart Health.
FAQ: FDN Advanced Courses Are Also Available to the Public
There’s a bunch of cool advanced courses that we offer. When you would want to use those is maybe you’re someone who graduated, and you want to just expand your knowledge, totally fine. Maybe you’re someone who graduated, and you want to dive into a very specific topic deeper just to have that as your niche and you want to really be able to speak that language, that’s fine too.
Another category that it’s for is it is available to the public. You don’t have to be an FDN to go through the advanced courses. So, generally speaking, who I recommend to the advanced courses are people who I’m talking to on calls that I see that our philosophies are not aligned. And I’m not necessarily condemning them for that. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing or that we’re good or they’re right and we’re wrong. It’s a difference in philosophy.
I will talk to some people on the phone, they are bent on using specific labs. They are bent on just using blood chemistry for functional healthcare. That is fine. They’re entitled to that. And if they are so gung-ho about it, there’s no point in sending them through the main course. They won’t get a benefit if they believe that only blood chemistry is beneficial for clients, which of course, I don’t believe that.
I actually rarely believe that, but some people do. They are entitled to that and I’m sure if you give me five more years, my knowledge base will expand, and my opinion might change to some degree. So, they are great people for the advanced courses too. They respect what we’re doing, they like our teachers, they like our philosophy, they just don’t want to go through the main course.
FAQ: Health Coach Mastery for Board Certification
The other quote/unquote “advanced course”, it’s not really an advanced course, it just came out and it’s between the main course and the advanced courses. It’s somewhere in the middle. It really is, and I’ll explain why.
It is now a program where we teach health coaching. Some people are still coming to us and asking about board certifications. They’re asking about more of the coaching side. The FDN main course has always been about lab testing and really getting deep into science. Of course, coaching’s helpful. We’re not saying it isn’t, but it was never about that. It was about being a health consultant more or less, right?
Picture a business consultant coming into someone’s office to tell them how to better run their business. We’re kind of telling them how to do that with their body. Versus a business coach might come in and talk about the mindset and how to structure the finances and all those things, and how to stop having limiting beliefs. So, we’re not coaches in that sense, although you could be both, we are consultants.
But so many people ask for the coaching side, and many people are very attracted to this board certification. Apologies if you’ve never heard of this, but it’s called NBHWC. It stands for the National Board of Health and Wellness Coaches.
That program that we have now, it’s called Health Coach Mastery. That’s the course I’m referring to that’s in between the advanced courses and the main course, somewhere in between. That one gives you all of the requirements necessary for board certification.
FAQ: Upcoming Podcast on Health Coach Mastery
I’m going to have a podcast out soon with Dr. Lori Rose. She’s the one who does the main parts of the teaching in that particular course, and we’ll get to hear a lot more about that. That’ll be out in a few episodes, so stay tuned for that.
But yeah, that one’s health coaching and it does have a few advanced courses. It includes in it: Coaching Mastery, which is something that we have as an advanced course, Functional Blood Chemistry, Herbalism, and Mitochondria. So, you basically get four advanced courses in that course. Pretty cool. Can I make meal plans?
I know this seems like I’m jumping, but I’m really just going to the most commonly asked stuff.
FAQ: Can I Make Meal Plans?
Can I make meal plans?
No, you cannot make meal plans. You are not a nutritionist or dietician just because you went through FDN. If you are a nutritionist or dietician, I would imagine you could do that, but you’d have to do that separately.
What we can do though, we’re not completely helpless here, and this is actually how we do a lot of our stuff. When you have a correctly worded terms of service agreement and you have your client sign it, there is nothing wrong with you educating them on dietary changes that you believe would benefit their current state. They can make an informed decision to do those things or not do those things themself. We include that terms of service agreement in the course.
FAQ: How Do I Legally Get Lab Work?
How do I legally get lab work?
We have thousands of graduates; we’ve been around for years. It’s funny cause they think we’re doing something sneaky. Like, oh yeah, we say we don’t diagnose or treat, right? That’s what we have to say. I’m thinking, you’re not great for the course if you are willing to be sneaky, but also, this isn’t a play on words. It’s not what we are doing at the FDN course.
We facilitate the orders through our medical director program. The legal way to do this, again, is to have your clients sign a terms of service agreement, accepting that you are allowed to send their information to these doctors to order the tests. The clients will run the tests on themselves. When you get the results back, you are allowed to give them an educational consult to show them what you have learned from the labs.
We’re not diagnosing anything. We are educating them on the labs. It’s not a play on words or being sneaky with legality, it is a completely different thing than someone going in and diagnosing someone with a disease. That’s not what we do.
Most of these people have already been diagnosed and it didn’t help them. It just gave them some clarity as to why they were dealing with what they had, but it didn’t get them better. So, we don’t even want to do that anyway most of the time.
I hope this makes sense. And if it doesn’t, you can always reach out to us for this or any question you have from the podcast at fdntraining on Instagram. You can check that out there.
FAQ: In What Countries Can I Work as an FDN?
What countries can I work in as an FDN?
We have practitioners in over 50 countries around the world and counting. It would be probably a little bit easier to say which countries you couldn’t work in.
We can get the labs almost anywhere. Most of these places can actually ship the labs back out too. The real issue comes in, if it’s going to come in at all, with places shipping them back out. For example, China would be a place that it is tough to do this. I believe we can get the labs in. It is hard to get the labs out.
This is kind of easy cause if you’re listening to this podcast, I can see the most common countries that listen. So, I will tell you this right off the bat. Canada, USA, totally fine. Australia, totally fine. The UK and almost anywhere in Europe, totally fine. These are not issues for us as FDNs. Mexico, fine. All those things are good to go.
We will use slightly different labs depending on where you’re at in the world, but we have the training for that in the course. In fact, if you are living in Australia, for example, the course will change just slightly to address the labs that you will personally be using as someone who is working with clients in Australia. You might live in the USA, but maybe your client base is in Australia for whatever reason, and that’s totally fine. We can help you with that. So, there’s really not a lot of limitations on what country you can do this in, which is amazing.
FAQ: Book a Call
But even if you couldn’t get the labs there, FDN is still a very lifestyle-based program, and you would want to definitely call us before making this investment. Like if you know that you can’t use labs in your country for whatever reason, give us a ring and we’ll make sure that it would still benefit your situation.
FDN is so much more than the labs that it might still be worth it for you to pursue the program. That’s situational and that would need to be discussed with someone. So, definitely book a call with us at fdntraining.com/call.
FAQ: Can I Run Labs In New York State?
What about New York State? Apologies for anyone out of the United States, this might be irrelevant to you. But I get asked this all the time, so I have to say it. What about New York State? Can I run labs in New York State?
Yes. There is a disclaimer though. That one disclaimer being that we will have to sometimes swap out certain labs, but FDN has figured this out in pretty much every way.
The only issue is blood work. We cannot order the blood work through our medical director program. I mean you can, but they would have to leave the state to get a blood draw, basically. Super annoying. I don’t like it. You know what? It’s very rare that this can happen.
So, I will take this moment to join us all together politically, because we all have different politics. That’s fine. In FDN, there’s a wide range just like there is anywhere else. One thing I’m sure we can all agree on is that New York state believing that you do not have the right to take a test where you voluntarily go somewhere to have your blood drawn, yeah, that seems ridiculous to me.
I don’t know why they believe in that or why you wouldn’t have the right to get your blood drawn and get results from it, but that is what is believed there. Now, of course, a doctor can order blood work, but they don’t believe that you should just have the right to go do that yourself. A little crazy to me, but that’s actually how it is in many countries around the world too. So, it does happen.
FAQ: Will There be Enough for Me to Start a Career in the FDN Course?
The rest of the stuff in New York state is totally easy. You can do all the main stuff taught in FDN in New York. We have a ton of practitioners there and even more clients there. Not a big deal, definitely not a reason to not go through the course if you otherwise consider it a good fit for you.
Will there be enough for me to start a career in the FDN course? Yes.
FDN is a system. Remember what I said in the beginning. It is made for people who have possibly never even gone through anything medical or health wise. Maybe you are an accountant or a teacher or an engineer. I always use these examples because I actually know of people who have had these exact careers and went through FDN. In fact, many of them have been on the podcast before. You can actually listen to their stories. They switched to FDN and were able to make careers out of this.
If you do not believe that you have any business savvy whatsoever, like you’re really helpless out there, whether it’s social media, talking to people or whatever. Cause you don’t have to do any one thing. But if you don’t have any plan, now we offer a business school. You can literally add that on when you are purchasing the course and you get a thousand dollars off. Normally it’s $2000. Now it’s a thousand dollars if you buy it when you buy the main course.
If you don’t feel like doing that, you can purchase it afterwards. It’s going to be more, but you always have that option to purchase business school at any time. We did a podcast on that as well, and I can put that one in the show notes for you guys.
FAQ: FDN Business School
I had someone leave a review and they were nice enough to still leave a five star. But they said, Ev, please put some of the episodes that you’re referencing in the show notes. So, I will make sure that I do that for you guys. But yeah, we have a podcast on our business school.
It’s designed for someone who doesn’t know anything about business, and we can take them from zero to hero in 90 days onboarding their first client or set of clients. Just like the FDN course is designed for someone who might not necessarily have the health side, and we can take you to a very advanced level. We took the same approach with business school.
We’re assuming you know nothing and we’re trying to get you to an advanced level, at least advanced enough that you can go out there and earn a significant income doing this or replace a job if that’s what you’re looking to do.
FAQ: Are There Job Opportunities for FDNs?
With that said about jobs, are there job opportunities? Do I have to work by myself or for myself, or can I get a job somewhere else? The answer is yes. But the most guaranteed way, in my opinion, to have a positive ROI on this in a quick manner is to work for yourself. Some people, no matter how many times I say that they’re not going to do that though, and that is fine.
So, what the job opportunities look like right now at the time of recording this is thankfully they get better every year. When I graduated six years ago, you didn’t really hear about this at all. At least, I certainly didn’t hear about it. Nowadays, constantly there are postings in our professionals’ group where people are asking about, all right, how can I hire FDNs? And some of them are outside people.
They are doctors or chiropractors or people who never went through FDN reaching out to us to hire our practitioners. That’s amazing. And they’ll actually let you work remotely, which is even cooler. Other times, and this is, I think, a really big testament to our system. One of the more common ones is you see other FDNs hiring FDNs because their practice is so big that they need to bring on other FDNs to their business. I think that’s pretty awesome.
So, are there job opportunities out there? Yes. Are they increasing by the week? Actually, yes, they are. Would I go through this course trying to just get a job? I personally wouldn’t. I think it’s very competitive, I think there’s a lot of applicants, and I think you’re going to probably need to bring something extra to the table to compete with the other applicants.
FAQ: Competitive FDN Market
Because what happens is the people that come into our professionals’ group asking to hire someone, they start out by just looking for someone who has the FDN certification. But then maybe 20 people apply, and a few of them have some advanced degrees, and a few of them have some maybe advanced trainings in other functional medicine things like other testing or whatever. So, you’re going to be competing against people that have been more involved with this for a longer period of time. It’s just not a good way to bank on it.
Even though I’m someone myself who hires other FDNs, it’s not what I would bank on personally. I just want to be honest with you guys. So, take the job opportunity if you feel that it’s right for you. I would not go through this course banking only on that unless you have a preexisting deal with someone that you know in your local area, maybe a chiropractor or acupuncturist. I have heard of that before. I’ve heard that working. That wouldn’t be a good move overall.
FAQ: How Does Financing for the FDN Course Work?
How does financing work? This will be my final question for today. Keeping this nice and simple, short and sweet.
Financing works in a few different ways. If you pay in full for the course, you do get some bonuses. You get credits towards our advanced courses; you also get a credit towards one of our lecture packages.
Our lecture packages are these things that Reed used to do and people still do. I just did one about a month ago myself, and it was awesome. It was really fun actually. The lecture packages have all the slides that you need to give a public talk, talking about one or more FDN topics.
I did our stress and hormones one. It has all the marketing material; it has the exact step-by-step guide for what you need to do to figure out who in the audience would be a qualified client that you can actually help and that can move forward with your services. That’s pretty cool.
And if you purchase it, which again, you get a credit for it, so you would’ve technically purchased it as far as we’re concerned, you will get a call with the big man himself, Reed Davis. He will coach you for an hour to help you with your talk and make sure that you’re ready to go. I think that’s about as cool as it gets. Totally worth it.
So, if you pay in full for the course, you get those bonuses. Outside of that, you can finance in-house for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, or 24 months. And I’ll touch more on those in a second. But I want to list off the third option. Those other payment plans, remember, were in-house.
FAQ: Monthly Finance Fees & Paying the Balance off Early
There is third-party financing available through a firm. If you have good to excellent credit and you want to try that out, that would be the cheapest monthly option overall. Not by a significant amount, but it is enough. So, if you feel that that could be good for you, that’s something to look into.
Otherwise, assuming you do one of our in-house payments, and let’s say you do the 18 month one, you are going to be adding a $25 a month finance fee for every month that you finance with us. If someone did the 18 month one, they would be paying $450 extra in finance because 18 times $25 is $450. Similarly, 24 months would be $600.
Now, what’s really fun about FDN, and I like that they do this. It’s not necessarily fun, it’s more cool. I don’t know what classifies this as fun. But what’s a nice part about all of this is if you ever pay off your remaining balance in full and you’re on a payment plan, you do not owe us the rest of the financing fees.
What would this mean? If I’m on a 24-month payment plan, I’m paying an extra $25 a month for the finance fees. Let’s say I graduate in eight months, I start taking clients, I have a good amount of extra money in the next two months. And I’m like, well, wait a second. This is spare income, so I might as well just pay off the course.
I would’ve been paying for 10 months, right? So, I would’ve paid $250 in finance fees, 10 times $25. Now I would’ve spared myself of an extra $350 in finance fees cause I paid off the remaining balance of the course at 10 months.
Talking Fast & Technology
We will only charge you for finance fees if you literally financed that month. Anytime you want to pay off early, you’re more than welcome to do that.
This answered a lot of the main questions I typically hear, and our other course enrollment advisors typically hear. I know I went through this pretty fast, but here’s the wonderful thing. It’s a podcast, so if you click pause and you rewind it, you can actually hear it all over again. I’m just being funny, I’m not actually that much of a smart aleck.
So many people comment on how fast I talk, and I know I’m a podcast host. I’m trying to do better, but I’m an excitable person. And dude, I don’t know, something in my brain is mis-wired. Or you could say it’s wired well, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s a little mix of both. I think most people that know me would say it’s both.
I’ve never understood it. Cause not only do I talk fast, but I type like way, lightning fast. It’s like 90 plus words per minute, and I do mean that actual number. Because if you know typing, that sounds almost unbelievable. But it really is 90 plus words per minute, and I’ve been able to do that since I was in fourth grade.
If I’m doing one of those tests, it’s, well, okay, no one cares about this. I’m going to shut up. Just please, please forgive me for talking so fast. I just get excited. It’s just who I am and that’s why we have pause and rewind and slow down buttons. We have technology, we can all work together here. I can talk fast, and you can still get the information.
Conclusion
If you have any other questions or you listen to this, and this is all sounding pretty good for you and you want to clear up a few other things, one of the links for this podcast is fdntraining.com/call. You can choose to book a call with one of our course enrollment advisors. I’m hoping to talk to you guys soon if you do find that that’s relevant to you.
But I will be back next time with another interview. I’m going to go continue to enjoy, again, the wild city of Boise, Idaho. You guys have a great week/weekend. I’ll see you next time.
You can always visit us at functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com.
For more informational and functional health-oriented podcasts like this one, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/health-detective-podcast/.
To learn more about us, go to functionaldiagnosticnutrition.com/about-fdn-functional-testing/.
