Latest / The Lauren Castle Show / What is a functional medicine pharmacist?
Transcript
- Lauren Castle: In pharmacy school, we all learn that lifestyle intervention, lifestyle modification is the first non-pharmacologic step towards treating any type of condition. And yet we spend very little time discussing what that actually looks like in practice and how we would properly counsel a patient on those things. So we normally just end up thinking, okay, well, the person's just not gonna do those things. They're not gonna change their behavior, change their lifestyle, or change the way they eat, or change the way that they exercise and work out and move. And so we just sort of make this assumption that people are going to need to go on a pill or a medication because it's easier. I think people are really starting to wake up to the fact that the pill for every ill model just isn't really working the way that we hoped it would or we thought it would. Or welcome to the Lauren Castle Show, a podcast for people on a path to well-being, body, mind, heart, and soul. Join us for conversations at the intersection of pharmacy, functional medicine, and psychedelics. My hope is that each episode will leave you feeling inspired to step into your power, speak your truth, and live your most authentic life. Let's begin. Welcome back for another episode of the Lauren Castle Show. In today's episode, we are going to talk about what is a functional medicine pharmacist. We're going to define the role, talk about the Clinical advantage and why pharmacists are uniquely positioned to practice functional medicine. So let's dive in. Most people don't even know that the role of a functional medicine pharmacist exists. Most pharmacists don't even know that this role in this field exists. And so I'm hoping to change that in this episode and really just break it down clearly so that you can understand what we do and how pharmacists can practice functional medicine. So, to back things up, let's begin with some definitions. What is functional medicine? So, functional medicine is a systems biology-based model that empowers patients and practitioners to work together towards achieving the highest expression of health by addressing the underlying causes of disease. Now, that definition comes specifically from the Institute for Functional Medicine, which is sort of the organization founded by Dr. Jeffrey Bland. To further the mission of functional medicine and define it and create it into the field that it is today. And so functional medicine uses what we think of as an operating system, kind of a way of thinking or a lens that we're going to look at a patient. And it really is a personalized therapeutic approach. So we're intervening in a way that we can support individuals towards achieving optimal wellness instead of just. Treating disease or covering up symptoms. And generally speaking, I don't like to pit allopathic medicine against functional medicine because they're all working towards the same goal of helping people get healthy. But at the same time, the way that our medical model has evolved has really gotten away from promoting health. And it has become very focused and fixated on finding a diagnosis, aka Labeling or naming and blaming, as Dr. Mark Hyman likes to say, and then finding the right treatment for that, which typically is a pill or a surgery or an intervention. You know, in pharmacy school, we all learn that lifestyle intervention, lifestyle modification is the first non-pharmacologic step towards treating any type of condition. And yet, We spend very little time discussing what that actually looks like in practice and how we would properly counsel a patient on those things in a way that it would make it stick. So we normally just end up thinking, okay, well, the person's just not gonna do those things. They're not gonna change their behavior or change their lifestyle or change the way they eat or change the way that they exercise and work out and move. And so we just sort of make this assumption that people are going to need to go on a pill or a medication. Because it's easier and you don't have to change and you don't have to adjust your whole lifestyle. But I think people are really starting to wake up to the fact that the pill for every ill model just isn't really working the way that we hoped it would or we thought it would. Or there's other side effects that come later on down the road, which is what we sort of call like pharmageddon. ⁓ again, to quote Dr. Mark Hyman, who is another physician who's very well established in the functional medicine field. But it's true, we see this all the time as pharmacists. Whenever you start the prescribing cascade and you end up taking medications to cover up symptoms or manage symptoms from another pill, rather than just saying, Well, hey, could we stop this drug, choose a different drug, or better yet, could we actually figure out what is causing the underlying dysfunction? And get the patient to work with us and a team of practitioners to really change what is driving the disease process. So that's sort of in a nutshell what functional medicine is. But I think a lot of times, you know, we look at pharmacists. And I actually met Dr. Mark Hyman back in twenty nineteen and we went to the Cleveland Clinic and got to have lunch and I was At Walmart at the time, and we were talking about how we could introduce the functional medicine model to my work there. And, you know, James Maskell was kind enough to bring me along and introduce me. And we had sort of been having this discussion on a plane ride together across the country. And, you know, he's a health economist. Like he could see where I was going with the vision of, well, what if we were able to take a company with millions of employees? And actually get them better. And rather than having them have to take time off of work, have increased costs for their insurance, for their medications, for procedures, for more office visits, if you can actually get them better, and you can actually get them better with food that they can buy in their own store, right? It just creates this ecosystem of health and a healthier workforce. So we were on the same page, and I I sort of pitched this idea to Dr. Hyman and he's He says, Well, why would a pharmacist want to do functional medicine? Wouldn't that put you out of business? And I laughed and I said, Yeah. And that's the secret. Every pharmacist in the country would love for us to actually be able to go out of business because you're healthy and you don't need us anymore. And you don't need pills or medications to manage your disease states anymore, right? In an ideal world, we would be able to use medications. really in a way that they're designed to be used for more acute or critical types of interventions, right? Life-saving interventions, ⁓ or for conditions that we don't yet have lifestyle treatments for, genetic conditions, right? I think medicine is really getting so advanced in many ways for conditions that previously were untreatable. And yet at the same time, we've taken conditions that should be treated by lifestyle, and we've just kind of kind of Continue to go with this pill-for-every ill model. So, why are pharmacists uniquely positioned to practice functional medicine? I like to go back to our training. Most pharmacists go through four years of a bachelor's, four years of pharmacy school, followed by even a year or two of clinical residency training. So that's 10 years total of education. For people like myself that graduated in 2013, I went the fast path and I did. A six-year zero to six PharmD program. So pretty much every pharmacist who's graduated since the 2000s actually has a doctorate in pharmacy in the US. And so outside of physicians, right, DOs, MDs, we are actually one of the most highly trained professionals, particularly when it comes to understanding drugs and therapeutics, right? There's other practitioners like nurse practitioners or PAs that I think a lot of people are now seeing in a healthcare or clinic setting, which is amazing because it frees up doctors to be able to go on and really specialize in more advanced areas, right? Things like surgery and cardiology and all the different specialties. But at the same time, you have pharmacists that are really starting to specialize in certain areas like Cardiology or geriatrics or psychiatrics, like there's all of these different specializations that pharmacists can do too. And yet most of us choose to practice in things like community pharmacy or hospital pharmacy, where we are understanding and seeing a broad variety of patients. And I think that gives us a unique lens because, again, there's very few professionals that are going to have the depth of knowledge we have around pharmacotherapy. But also the breadth of having to know every single drug on the planet and every single drug interaction on the planet. ⁓ We spend our entire curriculum focused on the medications, the mechanisms, understanding how they work and how they all interact in the body at a biochemical level. And biochemistry is really what functional medicine is focused on. So when we think about that, you know. We're kind of shifting out of this model of the silos, where, you know, you see an endocrinologist for your diabetes and your thyroid, you see a cardiologist for your heart, you see a psychiatrist for your mental health. And we're starting to take a step back and say, how are all of these different diagnoses and these different organ systems actually connected under the surface? And so You know, that that's kind of a common example that I see is a patient will come in and they're on all of these medications, right? They're on a thyroid medicine for their thyroid, they're on blood pressure medicine, cholesterol medicine, diabetes medicine, probably an SSRI for their mental health and who knows what else. Maybe some birth control if they're a female. And when you actually look under the surface from a functional medicine lens. Instead of just seeing a patient that's on all of these meds and saying, you know, from a pharmacist perspective, is it the right drug? Is it the right dose? Is it the route right of route of administration? Are they taking it correctly? Is it, you know, prescribed according to the guidelines, right? Are we using the right beta blocker or whatever it may be? Instead of just saying, is it the right drug based on these guidelines and these protocols and these parameters? What functional medicine does is that it takes that step back and it says, okay, great, patient might be on all the right medications, but why are they still sick? Why are they still having all of the symptoms and having all of the underlying disease process? And the moment you take the medications away, everything goes back to chaos. Why is that happening? And when we look at it through the functional medicine lens and through that systems biology lens, it's actually really obvious. The thyroid hormone is one of our master hormones in our body that regulates our metabolism and it also impacts our mental health as well. And so the moment I see a patient on thyroid hormone, that's my starting point. 80 to 90% of people who are on thyroid hormone. For hypothyroid, meaning low thyroid, it's actually an autoimmune condition known as Hashimoto's. And believe it or not, I went back through my pharmacy school notes a few years ago as I was cleaning things out and kind of getting rid of stuff. And flipping back through, I saw that written out there and I was like, man, we just kind of glossed over that. Like we really didn't take the time to explain what is Hashimoto's, how does that work, what is an autoimmune disease. And so since then, through my functional medicine training, we've really talked about how autoimmune diseases have a genetic component, yes, which we can only do so much about the genes that we're dealt. But the epigenetics is how our genes are expressed. We can change that through our environment, which again, when you're growing up, sure, you can't really control the environment that you're raised in. That kind of goes back to the nature versus nurture discussion. But as we get older and we live independently, We are fully in charge of the environment that we are in. So we can make changes to that. And then thirdly, is what we think of as intestinal permeability or our gut health. And so you might have heard this more recently, but most of our immune system is actually in our gut. And that's because that is the interface between the outside world and the inside world. So whenever we have gut permeability or intestinal permeability. Sometimes you'll hear it called leaky gut. And what we're talking about is that normally you have these tight junctions that keep everything nice and protected. And as those start to get quote unquote leaky or permeable due to things like inflammation, and that inflammation can come from a lot of different sources, then our body starts to allow in other types of proteins or other types of toxins that. can create more inflammation in the body. So it all comes back to the gut and being able to optimize our gut health and remove things that are causing inflammation. And for a lot of patients with Hashimoto's gluten from wheat and bread and those types of things can be very inflammatory. So that's one of the first places that I would start whenever I see that patient on all those meds coming into me is has your doctor ever told you That your thyroid condition could be driving everything else. And that we can treat this condition. And you don't necessarily have to be on thyroid hormone for the rest of your life, depending on where you're at. Like it is possible to put this in remission, but also the thyroid hormone itself is helping us, right? Like it is it's physiologically repleting something that your body needs in order to function well. So that's sort of the flip side of it, where again. Functional medicine is not anti-medicine. It's not anti-prescription. It is an integrative modality, meaning that we're going to use conventional allopathic ⁓ interventions like prescriptions or surgeries or whatever it may be. But we're also going to use a holistic complementary sort of approach, which could be things like nutrition or stress management or even acupuncture, like all kinds of other different modalities, supplements, labs, all these things. We're using all the tools that we have instead of just one. So that's an example of how I would think about a functional medicine patient, right? Is looking more upstream and being able to see how it's all connected. ⁓ and how oftentimes, again, we just start adding prescriptions on instead of treating the cause, right? That cholesterol level is going to change whenever we. Fix the thyroid hormone. And whenever we start to optimize that, your mental health is going to change. And, you know, this is my personal area of interest and expertise. And I see this so often that people go into their doctors saying that, you know, they don't have energy or their mood has been low. And rather than doing the the full workup and really ruling out all of the potential causes of depression. We just say, well, here, start this SSRI, like start this medication and maybe it'll help you feel better. And then down the road, we wonder why we have patients who are failing two or three different SSRIs and, you know, depression medications and not getting better. And then they get labeled as treatment resistant and all of these things. When really, if we just take a step back and we look at things like your thyroid hormone and your other sex hormones, or Your nutrient status for things like vitamin D or omegas, ⁓ magnesium, like so many different nutrients. All of those things play a role in your physical health and your mental health. So again, kind of just riffing on how we start to think differently in functional medicine. And again, why pharmacists are so good at being able to do this on the fly, because Very few practitioners see their patients every day and see all of those medications. And it's our job to actually do this. So getting back a little bit more into that pharmacist's clinical advantage, and this is something that we teach inside of our boot camp program within the functional medicine pharmacist alliances, pharmacists are trained in something called MTM or medication therapy management, as well as the pharmacist patient care process. And so this is sort of a model for how we work up a patient. But in the functional MTM, we're doing the same thing, but through that functional lens. So a few of the types of interactions that we might be looking for go beyond the traditional drug-drug interaction. Now we're looking for things like drug-induced nutrient depletions, right? And some of these we learn in pharmacy school too. So metformin, super common diabetes drug, actually depletes B12. And This is something we know. And if you're a patient and you're listening to this and you're on Metformin and your pharmacist or your doctor has never told you about this possibility, ask them. Ask them about it. Because one, you can test a B12 level. You can look for, you know, is my level high enough? Because that's going to affect your energy. Of course, a lot of people with diabetes struggle with energy. And there's many reasons for that. It could be your blood sugar fluctuations that can cause that sort of crash and that fatigue and that sleepiness or shakiness. You can also have B12 depletions, and that's going to cause lower energy. It can also cause numbness and tingling in pins and needles and anemia and all of these other conditions that are extremely dangerous for someone with diabetes because we hear the statistics about people. Having their toes amputated, or maybe a grandparent or someone that we knew that had diabetes and had a poor outcome because of something like that. And part of the underlying mechanism is we need that B12 to be doing its job to help our circulation and to help all of that. So that's one example. You know, the statins with CoQ10 is another example. And this is where in the medical world, we start to get into debate of, well, Is this evidence-based, you know? And a lot of times when we're talking about evidence-based, we are looking for double blind, placebo-controlled, you know, randomized trials, all of these things at these huge population levels. And to be honest, a lot of times supplements just don't have that level of backing. It's not something that's patented and that we have millions and billions of research dollars going into, but mechanistically. it makes sense, right? And we can kind of understand how this works and why CoQ10 might be so beneficial for someone who is taking a statin. And, you know, whether we're recommending it across the board for every single patient or we're looking at the individual patient in front of us and we're making that decision based on, you know, how they're feeling and what side effects they're having and if they are able and willing to afford and take a supplement like that, it's all individualized, right? So drug-induced nutrient depletions is a huge one. ⁓ I could go on and on, and maybe we'll do a whole episode about this. ⁓ but supplement interactions is another one. And pharmacists already do this on a regular basis, ⁓ but it becomes even more important in the functional medicine realm. And this is an area where we've actually had some pharmacists who have gone through our boot camp that most of their business is actually made up of patients coming in. From other functional medicine providers in their local communities with brown bags full of pills, prescription pills, and brown bags full of supplements. And they have pill fatigue or pill burden, as we call it, where they're just so tired of having to swallow handfuls of pills and they don't know what's working, they don't know what's helping, they're just exhausted by it all. And so This is something that pharmacists can do. We can sit down with you. We can look at all of the different medications and supplements that you're on. And we can figure out what's overlapping, what's needed, what's not needed. You know, how can we optimize the regimen that you have from a cost perspective as well as from an efficacy perspective? So it's probably one of my favorite things to do with a patient. I Do this with my own family whenever I go to people's houses and I'm like peeking in the medicine cabinet and I'm like, ⁓ let's go through this. We're gonna get rid of all the expired stuff. We're gonna take all the stuff that we don't need anymore out of here. We're gonna pull the things up to the front that you should be taking that maybe we forgot about because it was stuffed in the back. Like, I have been doing this since I was a kid in my mom's medicine cabinet because she was a very crunchy mom. And had all the supplements. I remember the Valerian because it was stinky. We had ginkgo. We had echinasia. We had ginger. Like we had all the supplements in our house. But we also had all of the traditional prescription drugs in our house, you know, antibiotics and amoxicillin and all that stuff that I had to take as a kid. I just I remember that. So it's it's just something that I think we all really enjoy doing. getting back to more of the clinical advantage pieces and what we do specifically as functional pharmacists, pharmacogenomics is a very up-and-coming area. It's actually been around for a long time, but I think it's becoming more affordable and more accessible. And the nice thing about it is that it's a one-time test. Once you have these results, then you know how your body is going to respond to different types of drugs. what those drugs are actually doing in your body based on your genetics. And so this is especially important again for our mental health patients, people who are on SSRIs. There's a lot of them that have different response levels based on certain what we call CYP enzymes. ⁓ But the flip side of that is that we can also see genomics being used from a nutrigenomics standpoint. So same thing goes that we have different receptors in our bodies. Things like vitamin D, vitamin A, you might have heard of MTHFR, that all manage how our genetics are sort of guiding our response to different nutrients. So this was something for me that was really life-changing to learn ⁓ that yes, I have some of these different SNPs or polymorphisms. And the again, the genes themselves are not what we're treating. What we're looking for is the epigenetics. Is there an outward manifestation of these genetic SNPs that could be contributing? It's never the only factor, right? There's like lots of other things. But for me, an example is that I had keratosis polaris, which is what we call like chicken skin, the little bumps on your arms. And that can be something driven by omega-3 deficiencies. It can be vitamin D deficiencies, it can be vitamin A deficiencies. And so I had a vitamin A SNP in my genetics. And I had other symptoms that correlated with it, right? Like difficulty with seeing at night. Like, so you start piecing together the puzzle and saying, okay, this is something I want to pay attention to. And yes, I can get vitamin A from food, which can be a little tricky for some people, or I can take a supplement. And do I have to supplement all the time? No, it depends on how I'm doing with my food and if I'm getting enough intake or You know, perhaps in the winter months I want to add more vitamin D because I'm not outside as much. ⁓ and again, these are all things we can test. And that is what makes it fun and exciting to see the response that we're having. The last piece I'll talk about in this pharmacist clinical advantage is deprescribing. So this is again something that all pharmacists are trained in, like from the beginning, is that. Any drug that we start, we need to have a plan in mind for how long the patient is going to be on it and what it looks like to take the patient off of it. Because many drugs are not something that you can just quit cold turkey, right? Our body physiology changes, our biochemistry changes the longer that we are on medications. And so sometimes once your body is adapted to having that medication on board. When you stop it suddenly, again, I use beta blockers as an example of this, you can have a sort of like rebound effect, where now it's like you take your foot off the brake and it's like, wow, okay, what's going on? So deprescribing is really important. And the beautiful thing about using a functional medicine approach is that it allows us to have this sort of off-ramp, right? Where we're changing the physiology from a lifestyle perspective. While we're slowly decreasing the drug and we're potentially using supplements and food in a synergistic way, right? Sometimes I think we look at interactions as this sort of binary black and white, like, ⁓ there's an interaction, so don't do it. But we can use interactions to our advantage as well if we're doing it carefully. And if you have a well-trained functional pharmacist on board working with your practitioners, your prescribers. Help manage the full picture. So that is sort of the breakdown of the functional MTM process, right? It's very involved, it's very in-depth. So again, for people who are listening, if you're a pharmacist, you're probably shaking your head, like, yeah, I know this is what we do. It's a lot. And if you're a prescriber or practitioner, you're maybe you're like, wow, I didn't realize pharmacists can really do all of this behind the scenes. ⁓ and if you're a patient, then I hope that's really enlightening as well. And that you can hand this episode over to your medical team and say, How do I do this? Like this is what I want for my care. so let's kind of take this a little bit deeper in terms of, well, if I'm a pharmacist and I want to do all of this, but I feel limited in my current role, like I feel limited in what I can do. I really like to explain functional medicine as something that can be done in any practice setting. Right. Whether you're in community pharmacy like I was for 12 years or in a hospital setting, there are ways to integrate functional medicine into this, right? It's all about finding those opportunities ⁓ to really just think deeper into the root causes. And so in like a hospital setting, can you create a transitions of care program? And like, can you start to integrate some of these nutrition components where Could you look at the patient, you know, and the supplements that they're taking at home and not just saying, okay, well, now they're in the hospital, like too bad. Like, how can we start to create a more holistic process for patients across the board? I think independent pharmacy and compounding pharmacy is a natural fit for functional medicine and is sort of like the genesis of where I think a lot of functional medicine pharmacists were practicing to begin with, because in compounding, we're Already thinking individually. We're already looking at how a patient could have this, you know, personalized treatment plan for them. ⁓ and I really think independent pharmacy is a great venue for doing functional medicine because one, we know that practicing an independent pharmacy in 2026 is really challenging. There's a lot of reimbursement challenges. And so functional medicine, whether it's a cash-based service or you're working in a collaborative practice agreement with a local practitioner, you know, or you're adding in other types of services like RPM, ⁓ you know, different things to increase the revenue and make your pharmacy more profitable and more sustainable so that you can actually stick around and help patients in your community for decades to come. I think functional medicine is a huge opportunity there. ⁓ collaborative practice agreements. So this is also where I really see pharmacist heading in this more clinical way. So for those who don't know about what a CPA is, it's basically where a pharmacist, a prescriber, practitioner, and a patient enter into an agreement that allows the pharmacist to manage the drug therapy for the patient. So doctor starts the process, sees the patient, makes any diagnosis, and then collaboratively, the doctor and the pharmacist decide on a treatment plan. And it can be a doctor, a PA, a nurse practitioner. Like this is flexible depending on the state that you're in, but it is a state-specific process. From there, the pharmacist gets to actually manage the drug therapy in terms of dosing it, ordering any labs to follow up and make sure that it's working appropriately, looking for side effects, ⁓ and really just making sure that it's it's doing what we want it to do. And the nice thing about this is that it takes some of the burden off of the physician to have to do everything. Right. We're already the ones who are sort of the experts on making sure that pharmacotherapy plan is what we want it to be. And so now it just allows pharmacists to take a more active role in managing it from the beginning instead of just dispensing a pill on the back end or having to play telephone tag. Like how many patients, pharmacists and providers, all of us at some point in our lives have probably had to go to a pharmacy to get a prescription. And the worst thing in the world is when you show up and it's not ready. Because, ⁓ sorry, there was an issue with the prescription and we had to call your doctor and we couldn't get a hold of the doctor. And so now we're having to wait. This collaborative practice agreement removes all of that because we get it right from the beginning, and then the drug can be dispensed. So those are some examples. There's also virtual practice. So COVID off obviously changed this in a really big way that a lot of practices moved online to do telehealth. And so now pharmacists can also do virtual practice. Again, state specific in how this would look, but a lot of functional medicine practitioners leverage a virtual approach just because it's more convenient and easier. And a lot of the things we can do, especially with supplements and labs, can be ordered online. And so the nice thing about virtual as well, we can build things like online courses where We guide you through all the steps you need to take from a lifestyle perspective. Instead of trying to squeeze it into an office visit and having to pay each time you go for an office visit, you can do courses and things to really help guide you on the journey. And that also makes it easier for the practitioners as well. ⁓ The last couple of paths that I would talk about in the functional medicine space, we'll probably do some future episodes on these, very specifically when I interview a few of my amazing pharmacist friends. But things like herbalism, things like again, pharmacogenomics that I mentioned, ⁓ nutrition, and even health coaching. So these are all sort of adjacent to what I think of as traditional functional medicine pharmacy practice, but they're tools that can be integrated in. Or if you're a pharmacist and you're like, I don't like drugs anymore, I don't want to have, you know, anything to do with dispensing or even really managing drug therapy, you can pivot. You can change the direction that you're going in. You can go back to school and you can get a completely different scope of practice in order to do something that really fulfills you and lights you up. So those are all possibilities that are out there for pharmacists and functional medicine. The last thing I think I will kind of mention and talk about in this episode is again this idea of. Making functional medicine more affordable and accessible. I really and truly believe that pharmacists are so crucial to this. You know, even right now as we speak, there's legislation that's finally going on at Capitol Hill about turning pharmacists into providers under Medicare. And what that would allow us to do is bill for our services. So in the collaborative practice model, we can bill incident to a physician. Which basically, again, is just that we're not billing under our own NPI, we're billing under theirs, but we're allowed to do the things. This would free us up to really be able to just directly bill for our services. And the model that they're sort of looking at for this is what we call test and treat, which, you know, again came out of COVID and pharmacists being on the front lines and doing all of these COVID tests, and flu tests and strep tests and all of these things. But actually being able to bill for our time, not just for the test, not just for the prescription that gets dispensed on the other side, but for our time and our clinical knowledge and expertise. And so as this starts to roll out, I think that there will be more opportunities for functional medicine tests to be part of this, for you know, other preventative screenings to be part of this. and you know, eventually for all of our pharmacotherapy services and MTM services to be something that can be billed. And that just helps it be more accessible to patients, right? That helps keep pharmacists and our profession moving forward, more integrated into the healthcare team, less fragmented, and ultimately more affordable and accessible for patients, which is what we all want. We all, again, are working towards the same goal of trying to help people feel better and live longer and live healthier lives. And so I just see functional medicine as such a natural extension of what we do and really getting back to our roots as pharmacists, you know, that it's it's about being this expert in plants and in food and phytochemicals and all of these other things that, you know, pharmacognosy really was based in. And so I think that that's kind of where we'll leave it for today's episode. There's so much more that we're gonna talk about in future episodes specifically around again if you're a pharmacist and you're like, I want to start doing this, but how? How do I make the transition? Or how can I start doing this in the current job that I'm in? We're gonna get into all of that. So thank you so much for joining me on today's episode. I hope you learned it. Learned something new from it. And I hope that you'll share it with a friend or a colleague or a family member ⁓ because this is what we're here to do. This is what FMPHA was founded for. This is what my mission really is. And, you know, it's really not just about the theory. It's really about how do we put this into practice? How do we start to change people's lives? And that only happens one person at a time and one pharmacist at a time. So thank you so much for tuning in. And we'll see you on the next episode of the Lauren Castle Show. That's it for this episode of the Lauren Castle Show. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you'll join us for the next one where you'll hear more stories from me and some of my amazing guests. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast no matter where you watch or listen, and check out our website, drorincastle.com and fmpha.org. We'll see you next time.