Episode 90 | Jul 18, 2024

AI Tools for Health Coaches, With Rakan Brahedni

Are health coaches ready to combine the power of human connection with the benefits of artificial intelligence? Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach and technologist Rakan Brahedni believes the answer is yes. On today’s Health Coach Talk, Rakan and Dr. Sandi dig into the ways AI can augment a coach’s ability to connect with clients, effect change, and manage their practice.

“If we collaborate with these technologies, brainstorm with them, get ideas from them, we can really supercharge and superpower the work we do.”

Rakan Brahedni

Human connection is a key element of effective health coaching. Ironically, Rakan sees AI as a way to extend that connection outside face-to-face coaching interactions, providing support between sessions and enhancing the overall experience. Imagine this scenario: You’ve just completed a coaching session where you prepped your client to implement a new food plan. Between now and your next session, the client is going to have questions about the changes they’re making. That’s where AI comes in, extending the coaching relationship by providing access to information and support as the client navigates these changes. Collaborations like these show the power of combining human and AI, augmenting the heart-centered, human connection with the always-on breadth and depth of AI—to the benefit of both client and coach.

FMCA alum Rakan was inspired to combine health coaching with AI shortly after completing his training. With a vast array of coaching resources and educational content at his fingertips, he needed a more efficient way to organize and access it. He realized that AI could not only help him manage this information, but also draw from it to provide tailored advice and actionable insights. Rakan began using AI as a brainstorming partner and content creator, helping him navigate complex client challenges with creative solutions. Now, he’s passionate about sharing these ideas with fellow health coaches.

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Episode Transcript

Dr. Sandi: Welcome to “Health Coach Talk.” Today, my guest is a graduate of the Functional Medicine Coaching Academy, and he is going to tell you all about the amazing things he is doing. We’re going to have a conversation about AI, which I know you’ll be very interested in hearing his perspective. So, I would like to introduce to you Rakan Brahedni. Welcome to “Health Coach Talk.”

Rakan: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having this conversation with me.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. Looking forward to it. Let’s begin. If you would share your background, how did you find FMCA and make that decision to become a health coach? And what are you doing with that training?

Rakan: So, actually my background has nothing to do with health really up until a few years ago. So, I’m a technologist by profession and have been so for many years. And it was around 2017 when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and like so many people that take the FMCA program have their own motivations to get into it, to take their health into their own hands, I did the same thing and was very empowered by the material that so many wonderful instructors at the FMCA gave us. And essentially, since then, it was just a matter of me taking care of myself and doing more for myself and along the way, trying to help other people as well.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, so many people decide to become health coaches because they are discovering that they have a condition that perhaps so the conventional medical system is not adequately addressing. And so they decide to become a health coach, and then they can give back and support others. Let’s talk about where you are geographically and what you’re currently doing and how you’re using your coach training.

Rakan: So, I’m based in Dubai. I’ve been here for more than half my life now. It’s a beautiful, fast-paced, very innovative place, but it’s also a place where people tend to get really caught up in the speed of things. It’s a very exciting metropolitan city, and like a lot of people who work long hours and try to, let’s say, really make a difference, I tend to overpower myself, and I think a lot of people in this part of the world as well, I think all over the world, tend to get sucked into this, kind of, rat race vibe, try to do a lot and then their health takes a backseat. So, there’s a huge focus in this part of the world, especially in Dubai, to really shift people’s thinking more towards health and longevity. So, it’s a really fast-growing space over here.

Dubai in particular have invested a great amount in terms of, like, really big developments in healthcare. The healthcare system here is fantastic. They make a big effort to bringing the best medicines, the best medical technologies and experts in those fields as well. So, Dubai is a great place to do anything within the healthcare space. And after I graduated from FMCA, I set up with also another graduate from FMCA a health coaching practice. So, we ran that over here for a couple of years, tried to get that up and running. It’s still very, very nascent over here. I know globally, the idea of health coaching is still an emerging thing, but it is quite unknown in this part of the world. So, what I’ve tried to do in a very small, humble way is try to just get the word out about health coaching and its potential impact on just lifestyle care and then just general health improvement. So, I know that it’s growing more so now than it was over the last few years, but I’m hoping to become a main player within the healthcare space soon.

Dr. Sandi: I admire your passion. We’ve had conversations before, and you are not alone. We have graduates in different parts of the world who have made great strides in educating people in their country, often government officials or leaders in big hospital systems. They’re talking about the power of having a health coach on a collaborative care team, because we are seeing just this epidemic of complex chronic diseases cannot be adequately treated by this acute care medical system, whether it’s in the United States or internationally. So, I applaud you on your efforts, and I think we’re just at that tipping point where we know that lifestyle matters and I’m on a mission personally, as you are, to show that health coaching is the key to helping people create lasting change by addressing these components of their lifestyle, the food they’re eating, how they’re moving throughout the day, their sleep, for example.

I hear a lot about AI health coaches almost every day. There’s another article. Apple’s developing one and Google and Fitbit, and they seem to think that it will all be taken care of. You’ll change your behavior, voila, because you’ll have an app. It’ll be your AI health coach that will be helping you, and I was wondering if you could address that and first begin by talking about how do you see generative AI really supporting people on their healthcare journey. Are there benefits? Are you excited about these new developments? I would love to hear your perspective.

Rakan: I’m very excited about this space. I mean, generative AI has been around for a number of years, but it’s only really hit the mainstream I’d say maybe a year and a half, two years ago. That’s when at least the general public has really started to get to know about ChatGPT and all these different services. Microsoft released Copilot not too long ago. So, it’s becoming, in my opinion, a very important part of how we as humans interact with technology. I mean, it’s finally given us a very easy way to communicate with technology. So, with generative AI systems, you just use natural language to ask it questions. It can generate responses, sometimes more accurately than others.

But I think specifically within the concept of taking a person’s health into their own hands and taking responsibility for a person’s health and well-being and so on, I think generative AI can really play a major role in that because it gives people access to knowledge that they might not have necessarily through something like search engines, for example. So, if you go to Google and you search, let’s say a medical condition or a symptom that you’re having or whatever it may be, you’ll get a thousand different responses. On the first couple of pages, some of them are just these fear-driven, maybe illogical, irrational responses on, like, chat rooms and forums. You don’t really have control over what you’re looking at, and you really have to sift through it to get to a conclusion.

With these AI systems, and I’m not talking about the ones that are specialized for medical knowledge, but just the general, let’s say, for example, ChatGPT, which is not trained specifically for medicine, it has been trained on such a vast amount of data that if you gave it a list of symptoms, or if you shared a medical concern, it would be able to give you a very comprehensive response based on all of this information that it has. So, what I’ve found is it can really help people cut through a lot of the noise and nonsense that’s available online and get to some pretty decent answers. I mean, it has to be taken, obviously, with some care and concern. These systems are not 100% accurate. They’re not foolproof. And also they have their own biases. But I think just the idea of people being able to have access to these systems very easily now… I mean, OpenAI has made it publicly available on their website. If you just go to chatgpt.com, you can access it for free, but it’s given people the ability now to do more than just search for results. They can actually interact and discuss and have conversations.

Dr. Sandi: Yes, and this is why I believe it is so promising because what we’re really talking about is people taking charge of their health. They don’t have to wait to see their doctor. Now, we’re not saying this is going to replace medical doctors, but we can get a lot of education and we can use this as a starting point. And then we can have health coaches who could help us sort it all out. And then the doctor is the consultant. If you need a medical opinion, obviously, if you’re having a heart attack, you want to be going to a doctor. You don’t want to be looking at ChatGPT. You want to get to the nearest emergency room, get the latest technology to support your heart health. But then when you are released from that, let’s say you’ve had a medical procedure, a heart procedure, and you are released, then you’re focusing on lifestyle change. And I think you can get a lot of information from this. And I agree. And in fact, I’ve been reading a lot of articles about ChatGPT and others like this are going to be replacing the Google search engine, which hasn’t been modified for many years. So, it is very promising.

Rakan: It is indeed. Yeah.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, but there are risks. There are dangers. What are some of the risks and dangers that you see?

Rakan: Well, I think in order to answer that, if we look at the full health care package, right, if you look at taking care of oneself as a collective effort, so we have the doctor who can never be replaced as you mentioned, right? They’re the only ones that can actually give a proper diagnosis on something. So, 100% I agree with you. If anybody has any immediate symptoms, anything that’s worrying, they should immediately go to the doctors. Don’t waste time with any of these systems. But if we look at the doctor playing a role, the nurses playing a role, the health coach playing a role, where I see generative AI playing a role is in between all of those.

So, to give you an example, I have generalized anxiety. I see a therapist for it and thankfully it’s an easy part of my life now. It’s something that I control, and I have the right support network to help me through that. But there are moments where I struggle with maybe something small and nuanced, something that comes up in the middle of the day that I don’t have let’s necessarily say access to my therapist to have a conversation about that small thing that I’m trying to work through mentally. I can have that conversation with generative AI to help me through that, to help me understand it a bit more. And I can take that into a therapy session.

Similarly, it could be done with something nutritional. I’m trying to figure out where some sort of gastrointestinal symptom is coming from. I can use generative AI to talk about what I had for lunch and what might be causing the symptom and so on. And I can have those conversations, something that you might not necessarily take immediately to a health coach. Health coaches, doctors, etc., therapists, all of these people charge money. Not everybody can afford to see them regularly or regularly enough. And very often people need those check-ins frequently in between sessions. Particularly with health coaching. So, when I was running my practice, I saw patients or clients rather, let’s say, once every two weeks. In between those two weeks, a ton happens. And usually it’s very small things. I forgot if I can have this category of food while I’m doing the elimination diet. Something came up that I didn’t realize before. So, these smaller things can be discussed with these generative AI solutions, this ChatGPT, for example, and then you can take those learnings, findings, and insights into your next session.

Having said that, I think there’s an immediate opportunity for people to overdo this and become overly reliant on these technologies. So, I recommend using them as, again, an in-between, something that you do for quick answers, maybe brainstorming, but I think because it’s a very human experience, you’re having this conversation, it’s back and forth, and these systems are built to demonstrate things like empathy and compassion, so it’s very easy to feel comforted and supported and understood by these systems. And I think eventually the more interactive they become and the more intelligent they become, the more likely it’s going to be that people form very human emotional responses to these experiences. And then maybe it would lead them to cutting out the human completely, “ChatGPT does a great job. I don’t need to go back to my health coach,” or, “I don’t need to go to my doctor for this symptom. ChatGPT told me I’m okay.” So, I think that’s the first and biggest danger is becoming overly reliant on these systems or trusting them more than they should be trusted.

And there are many others, but I think the next one that comes to my mind is the bias within these systems. So, these systems have their intelligence based on the data that they’re trained on, and they’re not trained on every piece of data to ever have existed. They are trained on a subset of the data that exists in the world. And that subset of data may be biased towards a particular cultural nuance or particular system of some kind. And with all of these different systems emerging now, the companies behind them themselves may have put something in the system to bias it one way or the other, or to prevent it from talking about one subject or another. And there’s a lot of research in this space. So, I think, again, if we look at these systems as tools, very human-like, maybe to a certain extent, very convenient, but they’re still tools. If we look at them as tools and we take what they give us with a pinch of salt, I think we’ll be okay.

Dr. Sandi: I love what you said, and you bring up a lot of good points. And really what we’re talking about is not either/or. It’s not, do I have a human health coach? Do I have an AI health coach and get all my answers and all my support from my bot, my chat, whatever device is down the road that they’re attempting to make so human-like with empathy? But at the end of the day, it’s the combination. You cannot replace that heart-centered communication between people. We’re living in an era where people are increasingly more isolated. They’re lonely, maybe working remotely. You don’t see people during the day, and we need that. That is restorative. It is how we thrive being in community, experiencing those connections.

So, if we have that, and then let’s say we’re working with a coach who is using AI or supporting that individual intelligently using AI, just as you said, it’s in those in-between sessions, for example, that is where I think it’s really going to be magical as well as combined with that, the better diagnostic capability that the medical team will have, where instead of their own opinion, looking at an x-ray, they can have the AI supporting that, and it’ll increase the accuracy. So, I think those two combined are most promising and most powerful.

Rakan: Oh, 100%. And I think now that we’re shifting to the health coaching element of this, I think this will give health coaches superpowers. I mean, when I graduated from FMCA, one thing that I was absolutely overwhelmed with was the amount of amazing material that you guys gave me. So, I left with tons and tons and tons of pages that I had to sift through. You gave me materials for clients that I could use, cheat sheets for various different elimination protocols and so on. And it’s a lot of information to remember. And with these AI systems, it’s so easy now to upload a handful of documents and actually start to have conversations with those documents. So, being able to like, say, upload them to ChatGPT and saying, “ChatGPT, I have a client who suffers from one, two, three. They’d like to do a diet to figure this out. What do you recommend?” It will look through those documents that you’ve given it and say, “Oh, well, based on all this information, this protocol or that protocol may be more appropriate, or you could try a combination of the two.”

So, that would really empower people to make the most of the information that they have. And it’s also a great brainstorming tool, like you mentioned. And I think all of us as health coaches, we’ll come to a client at some point that are very tricky. They have maybe some habits that they’re not willing to let go of. Maybe they have some background issue that they’re just not ready to discuss that’s maybe holding them back, and you’re left to figure things out on your own. You’re trying to probe and ask these right questions and so on. And it’s a difficult task when you have those types of clients. But now with ChatGPT as, like, the health coach assistant, you can say, “Hey, I have this client. This is what I’ve talked about. This is what their reaction was,” and it can actually go, “Well, did you try this or maybe you can try asking this question or play a game with that person to maybe open up their mind to whatever it may be?”

So, now you can take a health coach and give them… I mean, I’ll be careful with my choice of words, but you can almost give them, like, a supporting team. And I really think that’s the key with all of the, kind of, healthcare is… Because when I graduated from FMCA and I was still getting through my own health issues and so on, I felt very alone. I felt like I had to take on the world by myself. And what I’ve come to realize over the years is that there are so many people in my life that play a role in my health. So, my doctor included the nurses at my doctor, my family, my friends, my colleagues at work. And now I can add AI to that mix. So, if I have a concern about something, I can talk to my friend, I can talk to my doctor, I can talk to my coach or my AI assistant or whatever it may be. So, I think now we are all, all of us in this space, are more empowered than ever, I think. And we have more access to knowledge than ever before with these systems.

Dr. Sandi: I love that. It is using the AI as your assistant. Another way that I think this could be very helpful for coaches is in the area of marketing or helping you get the word out. And I’d love for you to comment on that. Let’s say you’re a health coach and you want to talk to doctors or heads of hospital systems. You want to plan a talk. And often people don’t know where to start with that. And it’s like that blank sheet of paper. How do I get started? How can you use AI in an intelligent way without taking it just verbatim whatever AI spits out but making it really your own?

Rakan: Well, I think I’ll start by saying one thing that I really appreciate about FMCA was the fact that you guys did offer us at the end of our program, a segment on the marketing side of things. So, helping us understand how to market ourselves as coaches and how to start that process. But I think for a lot of people, especially people that don’t have a marketing background or a business background, they struggle with actually taking that into the field. And particularly after they’ve taken that first step, it becomes, “Okay, well, what now? I did something on LinkedIn. I didn’t get a response. What do I do now? Maybe it didn’t work the first time around. Maybe I didn’t talk to the right audience.” So, I think it can become a hindrance to a lot of people that don’t have expertise or much knowledge in that area. But again, now, similarly with the healthcare stuff, these systems are also fantastic with helping people do business planning, strategic marketing. I mean, these systems are trained on a lot of very good information. So, you can actually have a full customized marketing plan if you need it. You can use ChatGPT or any of these systems as your co-marketer, whatever it may be. your marketing assistant. And generative AI, I mean, we’ve only talked about the text part of this now, but there are systems that can generate beautiful imagery. There are systems now that can generate video as well. There’s systems that can generate music and all based on just natural language prompts. So, you describe in your own words what it is that you want. And these systems will try to give you something close to that.

So, if you combine the whole thing as a health coach, if you get onto, like, ChatGPT brainstorm a bit about who should my target market be, or maybe you don’t even know what a target market is or where you should be starting from. You can say, “Hey, ChatGPT, I just graduated from the FMCA. I’m a coach now. Where do I start to get my name out?” And it’ll say, “Well, you should have a business plan. You should identify your audience, and you should figure out how you want to reach them and so on.” So, you can get that coaching. And once you understand what it is that you need to do, and you know what you want to do, you can use these systems to help you generate the content as well, “So, help me write an email that I can send out for a newsletter. Here are bullet points.”

And just one comment on this as well. I think similarly to how people can become very overly dependent on the healthcare side of things when it comes to AI, they can become overly reliant for healthcare advice, you can do the same thing with any of these fields. So, it could be, well, ChatGPT writes content better than I can so I’ll just let ChatGPT write everything for me. Don’t do that. I think that’s a big mistake. Always make sure that you write the first draft, get your voice in there and just ask ChatGPT to give you guidance, maybe help touch it up a bit. Maybe make it more appropriate for one audience or another. But I think if you collaborate… And again, I really believe that the keyword in all of this is collective, collaborative. Those are the keywords. If we collaborate with these technologies, brainstorm with them, get ideas from them, we can really supercharge and superpower the work that we do.

Dr. Sandi: I’m glad that you mentioned that and looked at this in terms of collaborating and working with AI, not using this just as verbatim, and you put something in, it spits it out, and then you use that. It really is an art of writing or generating an image where you educate the system. This is your assistant. You know, rewrite it. And then when it’s done, you rewrite it, you use your own words because sometimes people struggle where to start with a presentation, a pitch, or even creating learning objectives if you’re teaching something, if you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation. And it can give me a start and then you refine it because at the end of the day, it’s your production and you want to make it your own.

Rakan: A hundred percent. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Dr. Sandi: So, Rikhan, where can people find you?

Rakan: The best place to reach me would be on LinkedIn, but you can also go to madness.tech if you want to read more about the work that I do. But I would love to talk to health coaches or anybody interested in this field. And Sandi, if you don’t mind, I would like to just mention very quickly a project that I’ve been working on with the VIA and student character.

Dr. Sandi: Please do.

Rakan: So, I know that FMCA have worked very closely with them for many years. I know character strengths is a big part of our training. If I’m not mistaken, back then, at least when I was in the program, it was very early on, it was an important part of the early part of the curriculum. So, I’ve had a great privilege. I’ve been very privileged to be able to work with them over the last six months or so. I’ve been part of an advanced technologies group that they set up to look at how they could utilize AI and other advanced technologies to help people better use and develop their character strengths.

So, we are actually launching in the next few weeks, an AI character strengths coach. And the team behind that was myself, a couple of other technologists, also experts in positive psychology as well, experts in coaching. So, it was a big team effort to really figure out what is the best possible experience that we can create. And we were very careful as to what we refer to it as, whether we called it a coach or something else, how it should behave and interact with the person that it’s talking to, what its limitations are. So, we’ve taken a very careful and concerned approach to it.

But what we’re hoping is when we launch this in the next few weeks, everybody will have access to VIA’s insights and research through this conversational bot, and they could finally get immediate help and ideas as to what they should do with their character strengths, because so many people take the VIA survey, but I think, you know, unfortunately, so few really know from the start what to do with them and how to apply them and how to continue developing them. But now we’re hoping to reach even more people through this tool and others that we’ll be launching in the coming months and years.

Dr. Sandi: Well, congratulations. This is a very exciting, very important project. For those of you who are not familiar with the VIA, this is the Institute on Character, and this is the key to thriving your character strengths. These are things like courage and having humility and good judgment and self-regulation and gratitude and hope and humor. And there are 24 of them. We teach them, FMCA, because they are the key to a life well-lived. And so kudos to you for embarking on this project, and we will follow up and follow this and something I think that will be very helpful as people discover their character strengths and more importantly put them to use so that they can live a life that consisted of thriving and well-being both physical as well as mental. It’s been a delight to talk with you, and I am so proud of you and the work that you’re doing. I am just proud to call you a graduate of FMCA. So, thank you so much for being on “Health Coach Talk.”

Rakan: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.