Episode 188 | Jul 9, 2026

Why AI Can’t Replace Health Coaches, With Dr. Pedram Shojai

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing healthcare, but what happens to the human side of healing? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes physician, bestselling author, entrepreneur, and longtime FMCA supporter Dr. Pedram Shojai to explore how AI is transforming functional medicine, and why it will never replace the human connection at the heart of health coaching. Together, they discuss the opportunities, challenges, and exciting future of AI as a tool for delivering more personalized, root-cause care.

“AI is here to stay. There’s no doubt about it… But health coaching isn’t replaceable by AI. There are elements of the human connection that, I think, AI is quite bad at.”

Dr. Pedram Shojai

Known to many as the “Urban Monk,” Dr. Pedram has spent decades helping practitioners bridge technology with whole-person health. After becoming frustrated by the limitations of both consumer AI platforms and conventional medical AI tools, he set out to build a functional medicine AI platform designed to analyze symptoms, labs, and research through a root-cause lens. Throughout the conversation, he explains why trustworthy data matters, how AI can help practitioners identify patterns more efficiently, and why technology is most powerful when it supports the expertise of clinicians and coaches rather than replacing it.

For health coaches, this episode offers an encouraging vision of the future. Rather than competing with AI, coaches are uniquely positioned to become even more valuable as technology handles data analysis and administrative tasks, allowing more time for empathy, accountability, behavior change, and meaningful human connection. Dr. Pedram and Dr. Sandi paint a compelling picture of collaborative care, where AI enhances clinical decision-making while health coaches continue to guide clients through the real-life challenges of creating lasting change. It’s an inspiring conversation about the evolving role of health coaching in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Welcome to another episode of “Health Coach Talk.” Today, my guest is referred to as the Urban Monk. He has a bestselling book by that title. He is a film producer. He is a monk. He has worn many hats. The conversation that I’m going to have today with Dr. Pedram Shojai is about AI. Specifically, it is about something that he is developing that, I think, will be of great use to not only practitioners, but health coaches as well. He shared it with me, and I was so excited and I just said, “You have to come on the podcast. You have to share this,” because it is really going to be, I think, a game changer. So, I can’t wait to share this episode with you, with Dr. Pedram. And he is such a supporter of health coaches. In fact, at our virtual graduation last year, he was our keynote speaker, and he really just was unsurpassed in his message to our graduates in terms of the power of health coaching. So, without further ado, here is my interview with Dr. Pedram.

Dr. Pedram, thank you for being with us. Welcome.

Dr. Pedram: Always great to be with you, Sandi.

Dr. Sandi: So, let’s start out…and I hear this all the time. I hear people really being threatened by AI, that it’s going to be just taking jobs away, that it is going to be a negative force in terms of healthcare and medicine in particular. I’d love to hear your thoughts about what you think are some serious issues, but also how we should be looking at AI in a positive way.

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. We’ve been wrestling with this for a while as I do a lot on the telemedicine health coaching side. And, look, AI is here to stay. There’s no doubt about it. It is a force multiplier. It has so much leverage that it gives us. But I’ve also been a staunch advocate for the power of analog and why, in particular, health coaching isn’t replaceable by AI. And there are elements of the human connection that, I think, AI is quite bad at. And who knows if it gets better and better? But at this stage, internally, we use AI because we have so much information coming in. I want the robots looking at the labs. I want the robots flagging things for us. But then I always have an analog backstop of a doctor, a dentist in our cases, and a health coach that is there checking the robots’ work and then communicating with our humans with the best information that we can gather and glean and put together. I mean, AI is just so good at doing all that work.

But at the end of the day, we all know we should eat better. We all know we should probably sleep. All these things that are the obvious things that people just don’t do. And that’s where, I think, the human connection comes in. So, we’ve really been working hard to get everything that isn’t heart-to-heart, face-to-face, analog, beautiful coaching out of the way of our coaches so that they could spend more time being human with the humans that need them.

Dr. Sandi: This is such a good point. I was having dinner with some good friends. And they were saying…and they’re my age. So, baby boomers. Said, AI can’t be used for medicine because I was saying the spouse was just diagnosed with a chronic neurodegenerative condition and I said, well, with AI, this is where the future might lead with accessing AI is really light years away from in our day when you didn’t have access to information. And they said, no, this is wrong. Could you address that? Because I hear this frequently that AI is great for some things as a scribe, but can’t really be used in medicine.

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. I think they’re on the wrong side of history with that statement. And the radiology already, AI is crushing it. It’s dumping. And if we were to compare, say, many moderately sophisticated AI with your grumpy, dumpy main street doctor who’s waiting to retire, that guy’s thinking about his dinner. That guy’s thinking about the fight he had with his spouse. That guy is already not feeling well, fighting his own brain fog. He’s a human, and he hasn’t even been trained in upstream root cause diagnoses. And not all AI is created equal. And I think that humans are, unless they are properly trained in what we know in the last 15 years of innovations in functional medicine, science, gut dysbiosis, all…I mean, I could rattle off 15 things that…like cardiology is an immunology issue. And so, we have these dinosaurs referencing facts that have expired, really. We have folks that are not up to date. They can’t possibly stay up to date. And because they are the doctor, they’re going to say, my way or the highway. I think that’s even more dangerous than AI.

But the flip side of that, Sandi, and this is how I ended up getting further and further into looking into this is I’d have some of our doctors come in and say, hey, look at this. I was like, wow, that sounds too good to be true. That sounds really compelling. And as I would dig into it, I realize that we have a very big problem in the space of AI. One is the consumer-grade, say ChatGPT, Claude, even to a certain extent, Perplexity, but less so, the marketers get there first. So, you have folks that understand search engine optimization, now LLM SEO, which is folks that are gaming the ChatGPTs to say, hey, look here. And then they’re taking advertorial information, and making it sound like facts, and getting that into what the LLM is referencing. And so, garbage in, garbage out. So, I had someone…someone came to me with some GPT information. I was like, I’m going to fact check this. And I looked at the references and I was like, this is garbage. That’s one side.

So, then the other side is you get these kind of institutional MDs that are all about OpenEvidence. I’m like, oh, we use OpenEvidence for everything. Thank God there’s an AI for doctors. It’s lazy and it’s incomplete. And the problem I have with OpenEvidence is the majority of their data set is from a Mayo Clinic data pool, which is all using pharmacological-based medicine. So, it’s still keeping you in the matrix of the broken allopathic healthcare system and saying, okay, this is how we quickly get to the answer of which drug or which drug interaction, but has nothing to do with what we know is actually solving this chronic disease health epidemic, which is lifestyle, functional medicine, functional nutrition, all the stuff that we know better.

And so, we have garbage in, garbage out on both sides. The ivory tower guys that are still working for big pharma and then the Wild West of supplement hawks pushing information as facts for the other LLMs. And so, I got really perturbed by this, and spent almost a year creating our own internal AI system. Not that we trained in AI. What we did is we created a walled garden where we uploaded every medical textbook, every validated study from functional medicine and conventional medicine, and then created a scrubber for it to pull dozens of articles a day from PubMed and university sites, but then run it through a validation process to say, hey, the guy who published the study is the guy who paid for the study. And so, you have to do that at every turn because people don’t understand quality studies are what we have to vet for.

And so, it took us a year. I did this for my own practitioners. And then what we did is we looked at saying, okay, now that we have this walled garden and it’s safe, let’s create a root cause tool, put in your symptoms, put in your labs. Now, let’s search for the root cause within functional medicine algorithms. And boy, is it neat.

And so, it just took us a long time to do because nobody… Look. Everyone’s got a vested interest in their system working. So, the pharma guys want pharma being recommended. And then the Wild West is whoever kind of races to get the eyeballs. And so, as a practitioner with integrity, how did I have to create a safety net for my doctors, my dentists, my health coaches, my nutritionists to give advice that we could trust? We had to start from ground up and build it ourselves. And it was…it’s a lot of work, but you can’t trust what’s out there.

Dr. Sandi: For sure. And when you shared this with me, I was so excited because I think this is really groundbreaking, and it can be a new era of integrative functional root cause medicine. Really empowering. I want to say one thing. As you mentioned, Mayo Clinic. And I was thinking about that because my friends had questions about, well, we’re just… Mayo. And I realized that, for my generation, we grew up hearing our parents’ generation talk about, you got to go to Mayo because that was all they had. There was no internet. There was no access. And so, they looked at this institution as godlike. And some people still hold onto that, but, really, access to the kind of information you’re talking about levels the playing field and goes so much beyond what one center can possibly do. So, I wonder if you could address that and share more about this wonderful tool you developed.

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. Yeah. On the note of these institutions, you’re only as good as your last good day. And so, just because Mayo was top of the ranks 15, 30 years ago, doesn’t mean that subsequent generations of administrators and funding lapses… And it’s so corruptible, the human system. So, I’m not saying Mayo is corrupt. I don’t want to say that. I think they’re a great organization. But what I’m saying is humans are, and the business of medicine is corrupt because the actual stakeholders are not being put into a system that is designed to solve their problems. It’s there specifically, and it’s said it’s about managing their care. It’s about managing their problems.

There’s a very big difference between looking at things that are curative, which you’re not even allowed to say within the matrix, and things that are management. Management means a lifetime of drugs. Management means what we’re allowed to do and say based on certain criteria that are put down from the top down. I’m meeting next week…I’m doing an in-service for a big health institution. And we’re doing in-service for 17 of their doctors. And they wish they could do what we do, but they can’t. So, they’re now asking for ways to refer to us functional medicine folks because within the parameters of what they’re allowed to do, if you have this, then you take this drug. If that doesn’t work, I’m sorry, I got nothing for you. That’s incredibly frustrating for well-intentioned people that are stuck in that system. They are good people.

So, I think the system is rotten, and we live on the other side of that fence where we’re just out here. My hands are dirty. I’m just working, helping people every single day. We are in there. I’m looking at hundreds of chart notes a week. I’m dealing with people that are coming in with diseases that have been cursed upon them, these words that are just silly. You go in complaining about fatigue. You come out with a label, chronic fatigue syndrome. Thank you so much. That makes me feel so much better that you now have put a scientific explanation on what I told you I already had without any root cause analysis. It’s just insane how people just accept that and say, oh, okay, well, yeah, he says…I said I was tired. He said I’m tired.

And so, what we do on our side of the fence is we say, okay, why? Is there a tox panel I need to look at? Let’s look at your gut permeability. Let’s look at your oral microbiome. Let’s look at organic acids, all stuff that we do on the functional medicine side. None of that’s in the OpenEvidence. None of that’s in their tools. And so, I didn’t want to do this. I’m not an app developer. I got enough going on, Sandi. I had to do it for my own folks.

And then what happened was I let in 200 people and said, I’ll make you a deal. You come in, you report bugs. I want to see…you know, we just break it. And not only did it not break…you know, certain feature requests and stuff like that, which was normal. People were just crazy. They were utilizing it all the time. And then all of a sudden, I have all these people saying, listen, what…can I share this with my colleagues? And so, now, I have groups of pediatricians, groups of functional medicine doctors that are all like, you got to use this, you got to use this. And I create this internally, but all of a sudden, it’s like, holy moly, what is this thing? Why? Because no such tool exists for the functional medicine practitioner that needs a reference guide for looking at vetted studies to say, hey, help me understand the root cause of this problem. Help me understand drug supplement interactions, help me understand which supplements actually have science behind them, and help me understand what diet I can match with these problems to help solve this in a way. And don’t just tell me. Cite the references.

And so, that became something that kind of took over my life a couple months ago, where, all of a sudden, there’s this just screaming demand from practitioners to do it. And so, what we’re doing now is burning the candle. I’ll tell you, this stuff ain’t cheap. But we are now creating a site…we have it for our own doctors, like a lockbox for HIPAA compliance and all that stuff. I’ve had so many coaches and practitioners come out to me and say, please, can I use this? I had to call my dev team and say, okay, I need to now have individual practitioners having HIPAA-compliant boxes for their own patients so that they could run their patients through here in a safe way. And what started as an internal project is now becoming a thing that people won’t stop talking about. Who knew? Right? It wasn’t there. The industry needed it.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. Well, I was blown away when you walked me through the demo. Can you share an example of something that perhaps you’ve seen, someone who has a chronic condition, you put this data in, or you do the research on this tool and what the outcome might be and anything that you want to share?

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. I’ll stay in the lane that I already went in on, which is chronic fatigue. And I see this more often than I’d like, unfortunately. But the mechanism is very clear. Someone comes in and they’re tired and they feel just generally icky and they just don’t feel well. Their labs are okay. Maybe their white blood cells are a little high, but the doctor’s like, I don’t know what to do. And then they come into functional medicine folks and they’re like, help me. So, you’re like, okay, well, let’s look at X, Y, Z.

When we started plugging these people into the tool, started saying, okay, well, you know what? Let’s look at this lab. Let’s look at this. So, we started sending it through, and saying, you know what? There’s a couple of the labs we need to see. So many of these folks, Sandi, are so busy producing antibodies in cytokines, fighting their own lunch, that they’re just spending all their energy fighting the foods that they have sensitivities to.

And as we started mapping and tracking this backwards, and then finding the food… They had IgG, IgA sensitivities in particular. And as we started backtracking on that and saying, okay, whoa, we got to get off these foods and healing the gut lining, what happens then is, all of a sudden, the lights start coming back on. Because all of this energy…say you’re fighting a war on multiple fronts. You don’t have budget for school books. You don’t have budget for health and wellness.

And so, all of a sudden, the antibody activity starts to come back and the body is like, oh, my God, they’re not throwing more and more bullets this way. They start to not just feel more energy, but that general malaise and ickiness of just not feeling well starts to go away as their immune system starts to get re-primed. And then based on that, we look at the actual…we’ll load a GI map in there and say, look, here are the targeted probiotics that this individual can use to restore their gut microbiome. And within two, three, four months, now, their immune system is not on DEFCON 5.

Their energy levels are coming back. And now, their microbiome is processing correctly and modulating between friend and foe. And all of a sudden, their relationships get better. All of a sudden, their money gets better. All of a sudden, their sleep is…their auras and their whoops are saying, oh, my God, what are you doing right? You’re finally sleeping. Why? The body was under duress. Porges called it neuroception. How do you sleep when the bullets are flying? How do you function when your body is under attack? The tool has really helped us and our health coaches find these places where, yeah, I can throw generic advice and say, take fish oil, but we’re way past that now. The specificity is so much more sophisticated. It’s so much cooler.

Now, the art of coaching, the line has moved where now it’s like, look, we know what you need to do. Now, let me help you get out of your own way and negotiate dinners with your spouse or figure out how to batch cook and figure out why you’re reluctant to drink more water, the human stuff. But we know what to do. And those tools have really helped my coaches just get so much better at their jobs.

Dr. Sandi: You have expressed this so eloquently. I think you’ve really nailed it because if so many people think it’s either/or, like either human or it’s AI, and neither. And what you’ve just described is this collaboration. So, it is the human input and it is the human coaching, the empathy, the rapport building, the sense that you have a human ally to hold you accountable, plus the intelligence that AI brings. And that is a wonderful partnership. And there’s been studies where they’d ask people what they would prefer because every app, they were all developing the AI health coaches and misunderstanding what a health coach does. But when asked, do you want an AI coach or a human, it’s always the human. It’s like if you’re calling AT&T and you can’t get a human and you’re screaming representative. And so, it’s that frustration. And you tune it out. But that human element. So, that what you’ve just described is really the ideal. And that is, I think, the future.

Dr. Pedram: I agree. I think the future is right in front of us. Let the AI crunch all the stuff. Let the AI produce sexy reports and all these things that you’d give them as a doggy bag. And when you’re on that Zoom call, look them in the eyes, connect heart to heart and feel into the unspoken things that are actually where coaching is going to unlock them.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. The other thing I always say is AI can’t replace coaches doing group coaching. So, an AI can’t lead a group either virtually or in person, of course. But it’s that community, it’s the connection, it’s that heart-centered connection, which is great for heart rate variability. When they look at people in groups, they all got better HRV. I think that is the future.

You gave a wonderful graduation speech to our graduates last year. I want to thank you for that. And what do you see, looking ahead? Because you have been such a supporter, have hired so many of our health coaches. What do you see as the future of health coaching?

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. I think, first off, there’s a reason you came to health coaching. So, be the healthy beacon of light that they need you to be. First and foremost, I think everyone needs to practice what they preach and really live it because the client can feel it. The world can feel it. Just be a healthy person. And then use the tools to be exquisite at the left brain part of your job, and then take the time to really dive in the nuances of the right brain analog human components that’ll actually make you irreplaceable in the world that’s coming.

That’s where the fusion needs to be is, look, I need to understand what IgG sensitivities look like, and I need to understand what the labs are saying. Great. Now, what do we do with it? And how do we deal with the fact that freaked you out and you travel too much and all the things that then make it very hard to deploy. That’s where coaching gets so specialized and so important.

Dr. Sandi: That is so true. And I also see the emergence of health coaching, but it’s not a complete substitute because certainly there are people who need psychotherapy and people with severe mental illness that need psychiatric treatment. But not everybody needs therapy. And I’ve seen so many…I was a therapist for many years. I was a psychologist, and I’ve seen so many people basically stuck in therapy, reliving their past trauma, reliving what happened in the past as opposed to coaching is all about looking forward and making changes and going back to basics. Go out and take a walk, be out in nature, get some sunlight. What does that do to your mood, to your anxiety levels, your ability to see solutions? And so, I think, again, coaching plus AI and the medical practitioner, the doctors as what they do best, the medical detectives, but aided by this vast, growing AI source of information.

Dr. Pedram: Yeah. I don’t let any of my medical doctors or my dentists go off the farm and look at garbage input either. Every one of them has to use vetted studies. And then at that point, again, their job is to be human and be there for the human that’s seeking their help because ChatGPT is not solving problems, I mean, at scale, in chronic disease. People are getting a lot of advice. They’re still sick. Why? Because the information isn’t what’s healing them.

Dr. Sandi: So true. Well, this has just been a wonderful conversation. I’m looking forward to where we’re going with this in the future. And where can people find you?

Dr. Pedram: The urbanmonk.com. And we have been at this for a very long time. We’re actually going to split our life sciences company finally off and let my personal development brand stay at the Urban Monk because we’re just doing so much in medicine. And I’m coming up with a way to help get this tool into the hands of health coaches and doctors outside of my organization. So, when it’s time, we’ll share it with you.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. We will continue to stay connected and all of these developments. So, thank you so much for being with us today.

Dr. Pedram: Always a pleasure.