In this episode of Conners Clinic Live, Dr. Kevin Conners hosts Laura Frontiero, a nurse practitioner with extensive experience in both conventional and functional medicine. Laura discusses her 21-year tenure at Kaiser Permanente, where she specialized in areas such as internal medicine, osteoporosis, and women’s health. Despite her initial commitment to conventional preventive medicine, Laura gradually shifted towards functional medicine after realizing the limitations of traditional practices in truly preventing disease.

Laura shares her journey of integrating functional medicine into her practice, focusing on root causes of chronic inflammatory diseases. She emphasizes the difference between preventive screenings and genuine preventive measures, highlighting the importance of addressing underlying issues such as chronic infections, environmental toxins, nutrient deficiencies, and emotional traumas.

The conversation delves into Laura’s courageous decision to leave Kaiser Permanente, forfeiting a substantial pension and Cadillac insurance, due to her opposition to mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. She now runs a successful virtual functional medicine practice, helping clients worldwide tackle chronic health issues by addressing root causes and promoting true health and wellness.

Throughout the episode, both Dr. Conners and Laura stress the importance of personalized care, love, and compassion in the healing process, contrasting it with the depersonalized approach of conventional medicine. Laura’s story is a testament to the transformative power of functional medicine and the profound impact of holistic, patient-centered care.

Tune in to learn:

  • Laura Frontiero’s Career Journey: Insights into Laura’s 21-year tenure at Kaiser Permanente and her transition from conventional to functional medicine.
  • Difference Between Conventional and Functional Medicine: Understanding the limitations of conventional preventive medicine and the benefits of a holistic, functional approach.
  • The Concept of True Prevention: Clarifying the distinction between preventive screenings and genuine preventive measures in healthcare.
  • Root Causes of Chronic Inflammatory Diseases: Exploring the underlying factors like chronic infections, environmental toxins, nutrient deficiencies, and emotional traumas.
  • Impact of Chronic Infections and Toxins: How hidden infections and environmental toxins contribute to chronic health issues.
  • Overcoming Nutrient Deficiencies: Addressing how chronic infections and toxins affect nutrient absorption and overall health.
  • Role of Emotional and Physical Traumas: Understanding the lasting impact of traumas on health and the healing process.
  • Transition to Functional Medicine Practice: Laura’s decision to leave Kaiser Permanente and the challenges and rewards of starting her own functional medicine practice.
  • Personalized Care and Compassion in Healing: The importance of personalized, compassionate care in the healing process.
  • Navigating Healthcare System Challenges: Insights into the bureaucratic challenges and ethical dilemmas faced in conventional medical practice.
  • Functional Medicine Success Stories: Examples of how functional medicine can significantly improve health outcomes.
  • Laura’s Functional Medicine Practice: Information on Laura’s virtual practice and how she helps clients worldwide.
  • Practical Health Tips and Strategies: Simple, effective ways to improve health and well-being through functional medicine principles.
  • Upcoming Health Summits and Resources: Details about Laura’s Silent Killers Summit and how to access valuable health resources.

About Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Root Cause Healing & Functional Medicine with Laura Frontiero Conners Clinic Live
Laura Frontiero is the founder and CEO of BioRadiant Health, creator of six online functional medicine health summits, and over the last 25 years as a Nurse Practitioner, has served thousands of patients in the clinic and online virtual setting. Laura’s work in the health industry marries both traditional and functional medicine, and she’s known by her community as the go-to person to reverse Middle Age Deficiency Syndrome (MADS).

Laura’s online and virtual wellness programs help her high-performing clients resolve the hallmark symptoms of MADS: low energy, moodiness, decreased brain function, and the cluster of irritating digestive symptoms like bloat, constipation and food intolerances. In a word, she helps people thrive again.

Her belief is that to create optimal wellness, first we need to identify and clear the four main root causes of our health problems: toxins, chronic hidden infections, nutrient deficiencies, and traumas/stress. Through her 3-step full body healing system, she helps her clients restore their gut, brain, and cellular health.

Her signature system helps reclaim what she calls “The Energy Edge”. For each person it’s a unique journey back to their highest mental, physical and biological performance. When your body is bio-optimized, and you’re operating at your peak level, you are unstoppable, productive, happy, and fulfilled.

In addition to functional medicine, Laura is passionate about educating her clients; she’s also a Master Leadership Trainer who has mentored hundreds of students on shifting mindset and being responsible for their own health. Her mission is to help them navigate the myths in modern medicine, eliminate negative self-limiting beliefs, remove toxins from the body, and restore health for peak performance.

Laura’s message is clear: take back your health to live a full life. With the right knowledge, tools, and resources, you can take control of your health and live a full, vibrant life.

Listen to or Watch the Full Podcast Episode

Root Cause Healing & Functional Medicine w/Laura Frontiero | Conners Clinic Live #51

Transcript

Dr. Kevin Conners

Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Kevin Conners. Welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. We have a very special guest who I just got to know a few months ago, and we really clicked because we believe in so many of the same things.

Let’s start by talking about your history of working with Kaiser.

Laura Frontiero

Yeah. I was a conventionally trained nurse practitioner, or I should say I am, because you can’t un-know what you know. I worked for I worked for Kaiser Permanente for 21 years. I worked for a total of 25 years in the Western conventional medicine arena, the last 21 at Kaiser. It’s interesting because I’ve worked in a lot of places in Kaiser. I worked in internal medicine, preventive medicine, and I specialized in osteoporosis for a decade and a half at one point. I worked in a lot of areas – women’s health as well. But the ironic thing is that I started my nurse practitioner career in preventive medicine. I can’t remember-

Dr. Kevin Conners

In “medicine’s” preventative medicine.

Laura Frontiero

Exactly, which is very different than a natural approach or a holistic approach or a functional approach to prevention. It’s interesting. It took me a long time to figure this out. About 15 years into my Western medicine career, I actually started studying functional medicine. There was a big overlap. I was in the conventional Western world studying functional medicine, starting to take on clients privately and separately away from my Kaiser clinic to help people heal their bodies and solve the root causes of their chronic inflammatory diseases.

But the irony of the whole thing is that I started in “preventive medicine”.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Sure.

Laura Frontiero

I realized at one point, this isn’t prevention at all. So think about what preventive medicine is from your insurance perspective. So you have this health insurance for our viewers who are our listeners who are here in the United States, you know about our health system here. We have something called preventative medicine, and that is covering things like mammograms and colon cancer screenings and prostate cancer screenings and pap smears and vaccines. This is all part of the preventive world, the Western medicine preventive world. But the irony is that when we do a colonoscopy, I’ll just use a colonoscopy as an example. This is a colon cancer screening test. Are we really preventing anything with that test, or are we just looking for early disease? This is when I realized when we’re going in with a colonoscopy and we are finding polyps that may look adenomatous, suspicious for potential cancer, those are removed. Then you get another colonoscopy every so often after that. That was an early detection program. We were looking for early disease.

Dr. Kevin Conners

It’s just a screening test. It’s a screening. Is that preventing anything?

Laura Frontiero

It’s not preventing anything, but you know what it is preventing? It’s preventing a big bill to the insurance company if that polyp had not been discovered and if it had turned into full-blown colon cancer. That’s a much bigger procedure and a much bigger expense to the insurance company than if they just snipped a little polyp out. Really what it is, it is a prevention strategy. It’s preventing money from leaving the insurance company’s hands.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah. Well, it’s also preventing money being lost by the doctor because they did nothing before that. It gives them something to do before disease sets in.

Laura Frontiero

You might think, but Laura, that polyp was caught and didn’t get cancer. Yes, it was a screening for cancer. It was a screening test for early disease. That’s what you had. Just don’t mix that with the concept of prevention. Prevention is a strategy to prevent the polyp from occurring in the first place, to prevent the cancer from occurring in the first place. Just separate the two is what I’m suggesting. Prevention is prevention, screening is screening.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Exactly. Yeah, there’s a lot of misunderstanding there in the medical field for sure. You’ve got medical doctors who think that they’re practicing preventative medicine when they’re just doing screenings.

Laura Frontiero

Exactly, and I was one of those. I was very proud of the work that I did. I did good work and I did a good job, and I did what I knew how to do. I worked to the extent of my training, and I fully believed in what I was doing until I studied and learned more and realized I could be doing something different and I could be doing something more.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I think you hit a key phrase there. You work to the extent of your training. That’s where we have to understand that there’s a different level of education. Maybe level isn’t the correct word. There’s a totally different track of education. If you’re doing functional work, preventing disease, improving people’s overall health so that their body can fight disease, versus getting good at detecting and diagnosing and labeling a disease, and then looking up on your, it used to be the Merck manual. Now you put it in the computer and you find the protocol that the pharmaceutical company wrote for said disease. The practice of medicine definitely has changed. You’re not old enough to remember Marcus Wellby, but I remember as a kid watching Marcus Wellby where we really went in and sat with the patient and talked to the patient and tried to understand, improve their health, and at least spend time with the patient. Now, it’s been reduced down to being a technician.

Laura Frontiero

I know I’ll speak into that a little bit, too. When I very first started my career in medicine, we didn’t have electronic medical records. We had paper charts. We would write down. We’d take a history, we’d write a SOAP note, a subjective, objective assessment and plan of our patient. Everything came out of our head and flowed load out of our head from that through the pen to the paper. There’s an art to that. There really is an art to that. We know that when you do put pen to paper, ideas emerge, plans emerge. It’s just a different experience than the digital world. Once the digital world came in, and I can remember distinctly, it was 2007 in Kaiser Permanente when this happened, and we went to this huge electronic medical record. Now you could create what we call smart phrases, where you would just, at the stroke of a couple of keys, you would pull in the entire note that you had already pre-created, and you’ve pre-created a treatment plan. You’re not creating this treatment plan as you go. You’ve got a template for it, and now you’re giving everyone the same treatment plan because you’ve created this template for it and you’re not actually creating it in collaboration with the patient and with the specialist.

It takes the art out of it. It takes the flow that happens when you’re with someone out of it. I don’t know how to explain it any other way, but it changed us. It changed your brain. It changed your critical thinking skills. It changed everything because now we were expected also to work faster because we had this tool where you could auto-populate everything. No longer did you have to take time to scribe and write what you were doing with a patient. Now we’re seeing more people in less amount of time. It’s wild. I feel like we could take and dissect this even further, and I’m sure studies will come out and people will ponder on this for decades to come. When did medicine change so much? One of those events would be when the electronic medical record came into play.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah, it’s kind of sad. It’s taken out the personalization of everything, of taking care of a patient and loving a patient.

I remember years ago, there was an article that came out in the American Medical Association Journal bashing chiropractors. The title of the article was, “The only reason why chiropractors get patients better is because they love their patients.”

Laura Frontiero

I just got chills in my whole body.

Dr. Kevin Conners

They saw that as a bad thing. Would you rather be loved to hell or drugged to death. But their line of thought was that that was a bad thing.

Laura Frontiero

Well, because pharmaceuticals can’t compete with love. I mean, you just can’t. You take love out of out of the equation, and now people need to lean on other treatments. But love is very much part of the healing process. Just listeners, right now, think about the practitioners you’ve seen throughout your lifetime. All the doctors, all the nurse practitioners, all the physician assistants, all the nurses, all the respiratory technicians, pharmacists, anybody who has ever laid hands on you or helped you, the ones that you remember the most are one of two. They were either were total jerks and they made you feel like crap, or they were so loving that you felt like you had a better healing experience with them. It wasn’t that they prescribed a better drug, it wasn’t that they ordered a better test, it was that they actually cared about you. I will also say that you may have also experienced somebody who was a jerk who could have been the smartest person in the room and had the most perfect treatment plan for you, but you would perceive it as not working because they were a jerk.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah, and you’d get worse results.

Laura Frontiero

Totally.

Dr. Kevin Conners

So much of healing is in our heads and our belief systems. I think I was in an interview a few years ago, and this was being discussed, and I said, if all I do is give people hope, hope heals. Having faith in the God that made you and believing that you can heal is a big part of the step of turning the corner from a serious disease.

Laura Frontiero

It is. You know what else helps is having people get small wins right away and having them start to feel better. It doesn’t take big, expensive treatments and procedures and drugs. I mean, there’s so many things we can do to help people start to feel better. Once you start to feel better, you want to feel even more of this. You start seeking, what’s the next thing I can do? What’s the next thing I can do? I think there’s an art to that as well, to really listen to a person and find out where’s the pain point and where can we help you the most right in this moment so that you have the energy and you feel good about what you’re doing and you want more of it, and then you’ll be able to go deeper.

Dr. Kevin Conners

What was the turning point for you? In the Midwest, we don’t have Kaiser Permanente. Every time I hear somebody say that, all I think of is think of is the furor.

Laura Frontiero

It’s a big company.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Kaiser Permanente… you were in the practice of standard medicine. What changed your mind? Why did you flip?

Laura Frontiero

That is an interesting question. Sometimes it’s a question that there’s so much to it that I’m always careful about how I answer that because I don’t want to be sued for slander. But let’s just say that I was not enamored with the way that we were treating people. There were other ways that we could help people.

At one point, I would say mid to late 2000s, maybe 2010 and beyond, people started to ask me, is there a natural way that I can solve this? Is there a way that I can get better without this prescription? And of course, the standard answer is no, there isn’t a way. You now have this disease or this diagnosis, this is the treatment for it. So we need to give you this drug. We’d spend very little time talking about food or sleep or moving the body. We spent no time talking about underlying chronic infections hidden around the body. We spent no time talking about environmental toxicants. We spent no time talking about traumas to the body, emotional traumas, and very little time talking about stress. I think a blanket statement would be, well, you just need to lower your stress. But how? What do you do there? How is that going to affect my body?

At one point during this time in the early 2000s, I started hearing rumblings about the gut microbiome, and I was wondering, what the heck is that? You can remember that it hit the scene in 2000 is when we really started studying it. By 2010, it was becoming more mainstream. We were actually seeing ads on TV about probiotics, and we were starting to hear and see more about gut health. That was really where the journey started for me, is I learned about this thing called the gut microbiome, and I went down a rabbit hole studying that. Then I was bringing this information back to my colleagues in my practice, and nobody knew what I was talking about. Ironically, I started listening to health summits. The ironic thing is that now I’ve produced six of them. But back then, I didn’t even know what a health summit was. I I was listening to health summits, and I was listening to all these functional medicine doctors and practitioners talk about things that I’d never learned before. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you learn it, you can’t unlearn it.

My eyes were opened to a whole world of what was possible that I could never give my patients in the Western space. So when they came to me and they said, what natural thing can I do? It got to the point where, no joke, I would say, okay, I’m going to share this with you. I’m going to share some resources with you where you can go learn more, but I’m not going to write this in your medical record or your chart. If it comes back to me that I told you to do this, I will deny it. I literally had this conversations with people where I said that.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I totally believe that. I’ve heard that, going to seminars. I remember doing my first fellowship in integrative cancer therapy back in the early 2000s. There were a lot of medical practitioners in my fellowship. When I sat with them at lunch, they were like, oh, my gosh, I’m learning all this stuff. This is fantastic, but I can’t even use it. I’m like, what? What are you talking about? Well, oh, yeah, I can’t do any of this in my practice. I would get fired. It’s a monopoly. It’s a business. These guys weren’t in private practice at this point in time. Hopefully, a number of them have taken that knowledge and moved into private practice. But they had what they said, and you hear it a lot, it’s the golden handcuffs. They had $400,000 in student loan debt still that they had to pay off. There’s no way that they could go into private practice and try to help people at the level of learning that they were gaining. It’s sad.

Laura Frontiero

I want to introduce something to the audience that they might not know of. There’s something called a CPG, a Clinical Practice Guideline. This is created by health organizations. They have CPGs for every single health problem you could possibly have, from an earache to a heart attack. There’s a CPG, a Clinical Practice Guideline for everything. We are to follow the Clinical Practice Guideline.

In the Clinical Practice Guideline, you’ve got X, Y, and Z treatments and prescriptions and procedures and things that need to be done. Then when the health company is audited by organizations that accredit health companies and that give them higher-level Medicare reimbursements, they have to go in and be audited, and they need to be proven to have followed these clinical practice guidelines. We have peer audits of our charting of our treatment plans to make sure that we’re following the clinical practice guidelines, and you don’t waver off of that. I mean, that’s crazy.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah, you get sued, or you get license revoked.

Laura Frontiero

Yeah. Or you’re going to lose your job, right? I will tell you, this is nuts. I walked away from my golden handcuffs in November of 2022. I left a million dollars of my pension on the table. So I had to be prepared. So if I would have stayed another five years, I would have been able to keep that money. And I could not, with good sound of mind and conscience, stay there for another five years.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the mandatory COVID vaccines. This was where I just went, I cannot do this anymore. Kaiser led the charge in firing practitioners and nurses and physical therapists and pharmacists and technicians and medical assistants. I had colleagues who were fired. I had colleagues that were faced with either get the vaccine or be fired. At the very beginning of this, as soon as I I got an inkling that this was coming down the pipe, I protected myself. I went immediately to an attorney, and I had them help me draft a letter of religious exemption. I tried to submit it to Kaiser Human Resources, and they would not take it from me. This was before the mandate actually went into play.

This was when grumblings of it were happening. I thought to myself, oh, this is coming without a doubt. I literally forced it on HR executives. I emailed every executive in Southern California human resource from LA County down to San Diego County, and I forced them to take it, take my letter. Then later on, we went through the whole process of the mandatory vaccine… They allowed us to fill out a little form on the HR website saying why we declined a vaccine and you could have a religious or medical exemption. So many people submitted exemptions that then backfired, and they said, oh, no, this is all fake. You guys are all faking it. You’re not really religious. You don’t really have a medical exemption. They rescinded it and they started telling us, we’re not going to accept your exemptions, and then they went back to the table. I had a temporary acceptance of my religious exemption, and then they made me go back and they made me fill this whole form out again on HR. They made many of us do it. That second round is when they started firing people.

It was willy-nilly. Some people were accepted, some people were denied, the majority of people were denied their exemptions. The way I answered that on that HR sheet, instead of answering their questions, what I said was, see letter submitted by my attorney on such and such a date, and I made it through. I got my exemption, and I stayed there for less than a year, and then I left. I left that million dollars of my pension on the table, knowing that I worked here for 21 years and I can’t be here anymore, and I can’t take that with me.

Dr. Kevin Conners

That was a ginormous leap of faith for you.

Laura Frontiero

Yes. It’s interesting. I was building my functional medicine practice side by side, while I was working for Kaiser, I was building my business on the side. Once I stepped out of Kaiser and put 100% of my focus on my business, my business grew four times its size in one year, and I replaced my Kaiser income and I’ve replaced at least a third of that money that I left on the table for retirement. I was able to put that into retirement funds within a year of leaving. That is how many people out there in the world need the information and the help that we are giving.

There is no shortage of clients. It’s a good thing that I wasn’t in scarcity and thinking I could never do this on my own. They were golden handcuffs. They were shackles. I also left my Cadillac insurance on the table, so I’ll never get that. If you stay and you retire, in addition to Medicare, you also get the Cadillac Kaiser insurance as a former employee. I left that on the table, too. The value of that is huge because you want that for emergencies. I’m not anti-western medicine. It has wonderful benefits. It’s a great thing to have when you need it. But I left that, too. I’ll never look back.

It was the best decision ever, and I just had to really trust myself and do it with fear. Honestly, just step away with fear in my heart and just trusting that I can do this.

Dr. Kevin Conners

People don’t realize that commitment. They get mad at their doctor, maybe rightfully so, because a lot of them have some knowledge, but they don’t have the courage to do what you did. They just don’t. Then you just have to find somebody that does. You have to. Those are the people that are watching this.

What is your practice like now?

Laura Frontiero

Yeah, well, now I get to do what I really want to do, which is real prevention, right?! Now I work with people around the world on a virtual basis. We have a virtual practice where we really look at the underlying root causes of what causes chronic inflammation and inflammatory diseases in the body and what causes middle-age deficiency syndrome. This is a condition of low energy, brain fogginess, a cluster of digestive symptoms, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, food intolerances, whatever it is for people, and then moodiness, this swinging in and out of it, anxiety, depression.

I say it’s middle-age deficiency syndrome because it’s caused by deficiency in the immune system, deficiency in mitochondria function, deficiency in gut well-being, deficiency in nutrients because you’ve got so many infections and toxins in the body that your body can’t even absorb the nutrients that you’re taking in. It’s all about this whole cluster of deficiency that’s happening in the body that tends to hit us somewhere in our 40s and onward. If you’re listening and you’re like, But I’m 80 and I still feel like that, it’s because you didn’t solve it when you were in middle life, and probably it started at that point.

We really like to get underneath the real causes. I find that in integrative or functional medicine or natural medicine, oftentimes practitioners are not focusing on true root causes. A lot of times you’ll hear experts talking about how it’s an adrenal problem, it’s a thyroid problem, it’s a hormone problem, it’s a gut problem. Actually, all these things are important, and yes, they are problems, but underneath that is something deeper. This is where you and I really found common ground when we first met was, underneath all that, what’s happening?

There’s really four big buckets, what I would call, of problems that are underneath the middle of the health spectrum problems, like adrenals, thyroid, gut, and so on. And underneath that is chronic hidden infections all over the body, so I want you to think about the mouth, the sinuses, the appendix, the thyroid, any of these areas in the body we can get infections, the urinary tract. These infections can cause all kinds of problems. We’re talking about parasites, fungus, bacteria, virus.

Then in the second bucket would be all the environmental toxicants that we don’t ever talk about in conventional Western medicine. So this is everything from mold mycotoxins to heavy metals to the phthalates and parabens and endocrine disruptors that are in your skin hygiene products and your cleaning products. This is volatile organic compounds coming off of your furniture and flooring and your paint on your walls. This is toxins like herbicides and pesticides coming into our food source. This is radioactive elements that are in the water source. This is the metals that are being showered on us from the air. I mean, there’s just nonstop toxins.

Dr. Kevin Conners

It’s ubiquitous.

Laura Frontiero

It is, and there’s no escaping it. So you better come up with a plan to clear the bulk of it and then continue to clear it out the rest of your life. It’s like you never just spring clean, deep clean your house and then never dust it again. So, yeah, most of us need a deep spring cleaning at least a couple of times a year. Then we just need to keep dusting along the way because the toxins are never ending. It’s just going to get worse.

Then the third bucket would be nutrient deficiencies. Now, yes, we have farming practices that are depleting our soils of nutrients. Yes, people are eating more processed food than ever. But it’s even deeper than that. Nutrient deficiencies occur because of the chronic infections. They skim off the top, they steal, they take your nutrients from you. Then those toxins we were just alluding to, they block cell receptor sites in the body for nutrients to even get into the cells so that the mitochondria can do their job and make your energy. So if the B vitamins can’t get in the cell, if the magnesium can’t get in the cell, if the CoQ10 can’t get in the cell, you can’t make energy and you can’t heal.

Then the fourth bucket would be traumas and stress. I’m talking emotional and physical traumas. These leave a physiologic mark on the body. They leave a scar on the body that oftentimes will block our ability to heal. We don’t spend near enough time on this. Even in functional medicine, we don’t spend enough time on this.

Most of the world, I think, has been conditioned to want a pill or can I biohack my way out of this? Can you just give me some red light or a sauna to solve this?

Dr. Kevin Conners

People even seek a functional medicine doctor to do that, too. They think, I’m just one vitamin away from feeling better.

Laura Frontiero

Yeah, and sometimes it’s just the deeper trauma work that needs to be done, the actual releasing of that from the body. Of course, there’s so many ways to do that.

But now what I do is I look at all these four buckets of problems, and I really help people solve at the root. Here’s what happens, and I know you know this in your own practice, when we start to solve these things, the gut microbiome gets better, the adrenals get better, the thyroid gets better, the hormones get better.

Dr. Kevin Conners

And you’re not really treating those things.

Laura Frontiero

Right. Sometimes you need to do little tweaks. I would say before you do a big, like, adrenaline reset, first do these underlying things and see what happens.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Get to the cause first.

Laura Frontiero

Yes. You might not need to do so much. My world and my life look very different today than it did the first part of my career. I always say, Kevin, I am so grateful for my years in Western medicine. I have no regrets. I always say I had to do that to do this. I had to experience that to help people the way I do. Just having the knowledge and the experience of all those years in Western medicine just helps me understand people better and helps me understand what they need. It’s a gift. It truly was a gift to spend all those years there. Now I just get to spend the next… I feel like I got a decade left in me, maybe another 10 years. Then I get to retire and ride off into the sunset.

Dr. Kevin Conners

You’re way younger than I am. You got at least another 30 years.

Laura Frontiero

Kevin, how old do you think I am? Let’s talk about that for a second. It’s not safe to guess a woman’s age.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I’ve never had a woman ask me to guess that. Well, I I would say you’re probably about 37.

Laura Frontiero

Okay, but if I worked for Kaiser Permanente for 21 years, that would-

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah, but you started when you were seven.

Laura Frontiero

Yes, so that’s not possible, right?

Dr. Kevin Conners

No, you were a child prodigy.

Laura Frontiero

No, I wasn’t. I turned 51 last month.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well you look great.

Laura Frontiero

That’s part of it, right? It’s healthy living, right? It’s taking good care of your body from the inside out. I will say my mama gave me some good genetics also, but I’ve protected what she gave me. That started early on.

Dr. Kevin Conners

I’m 112 this year.

Laura Frontiero

That’s pretty amazing. Yeah, life is good. Life is really good with what we’re doing now.

I mean, you and I both know that the world is faced with some pretty scary things right now. We have the antidote, but people need to be ready and willing to seek it, and to ask for it and to be willing to understand some things about what’s happening.

I asked you if it was safe for me to say this before we came on. You said, yep, this is my community, and they know it. I’m clear there’s a mass extermination process on the Earth right now, and we get to be part of the antidote for that.

I had to see everything I saw to be able to do what I do today.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Yeah. Well, you have to go through that pathway. You have to have your eyes opened to the evil and go through those struggles in order to really see it, and also be able to know the way out.

The Bible is very clear that you grow stronger through your pain and through your perseverance, through suffering is how you learn obedience and how you learn gratitude and goodness, and love and joy and peace and patience.

You said you had to go through your stuff working through practice of medicine. I tell my patients the same thing. Look at cancer as a blessing. A lot of people have a really hard time understanding that, but I think I understand that you have to go through grief and anger maybe because you have this disease, but you have to come out on the other side and say, that was a blessing. Now, I can take my experience and be a blessing to other people because of that. If I didn’t go that struggle of that disease or that financial turmoil or that relationship turmoil, if my life was just so beautiful, hunky-dory, then what do I have to offer the rest of the world?

Our purpose is to offer ourselves and our experience to others. Look at all your struggles as a blessing.

Laura Frontiero

Oh, my gosh. I have chills all over my body when you say that. I can tell you throughout this journey where I decided to leave Kaiser, and it was the scariest thing I ever did because I left my safety on the table. I really had to ask God, is this what you want me to do? Is this what I’m supposed to do? I will tell you every day, and even now when I’m running group programs and I do it week after week after week. It’s very predictable. I know how the experience is going to go. But I’ll tell you, every week before I get into my classes with my clients, I have a little moment of fear inside of me. Am I going to be everything they need for me to be today? Am I going to hear them? Am I going to help them? Are they going to walk away from this class or this office hours? Are they going to feel supported and have the tools? I really have to give it up to God every single time. I just have to trust that whatever I am meant to say, do, be, it will come through me in that moment.

So what I’m trying to say is every day, the fear is there. Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Can I do it? And every day, I just to lean in and surrender that God has a plan. Sometimes the way that God has shown me the way has been so painful, so hard, sometimes. That’s just what it is. We all have to go through that and be grateful for it. I’m grateful for every one of the hard times. I can look back at them and say, that made me stronger. That made me able to do what I do today.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Right. Your struggles either drive you away from God and away from healing, or they drive you toward God and to become a more dependent person upon your creator. That’s what the goal is, and ultimately to bring Him glory.

Well, thanks for being here with us. You have a summit coming up. It’s a great I know a lot of people will listen to this long after the summit, too, but you could always go back and get information on that. We’ll have that down in the notes here.

You practice in California. You made mention of that. Tell us a little bit more about your practice, how people would be able to get a hold of you.

Laura Frontiero

I’m physically located in California, but I see people from all over. As long as you’re in the United States, Canada, Europe, we’re good- and in the UK. Those are the countries that we serve right now, and I say all the European countries. You can find me at LauraFrontiero.com. You can find me on Instagram @laura.frontiero. The summit that we have coming up, the Silent Killers Summit, that you can get access to. If you’re listening to this after that’s already wrapped up and completed, come find me over on my website. I’d be happy to help people out.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I just love your passion for people. It really comes out. You see that much more often with functional medicine doctors because obviously they are not in the system that pays them well and gives them a lot of “atta boy”, and it’s more of a struggle. It’s refreshing when you see somebody who just really, really loves people, and all they want to do is help people, and they made sacrifices in order to do that. I just appreciate you. So thanks for being here!

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