Episode 157 | Nov 20, 2025

Becoming the CEO of Your Health, With Robin Farmanfarmaian

How do we take charge of our health in a world where information, technology, and healthcare options are expanding faster than ever? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes entrepreneur, author, and AI innovator Robin Farmanfarmaian to explore what it means for patients to become the CEOs of their own healthcare. Robin’s work sits at the intersection of patient empowerment and fast advancing medical technology, and her personal health journey brings powerful insight into how individuals can advocate for themselves and shape better outcomes.

“We are now in an age of information and we have the ability to learn about our own bodies and our own diseases and conditions. Being able to be the CEO of your own healthcare team does not mean you need to be the doctor. It means that you are the CEO of the team.”

Robin Farmanfarmaian

Robin’s story began with a devastating misdiagnosis at age 16, followed by years of surgeries, hospitalizations, and chronic pain that left her nearly unable to function. At 26, after being told to accept a lifetime of disability and high dose opioid treatment, she rebuilt her care team with clinicians who worked collaboratively. A correct diagnosis of Crohn’s disease and an evidence based treatment plan transformed her health within twenty four hours, shaping her lifelong mission to help others step into leadership over their own care. In her conversation with Dr. Sandi, Robin explains how AI is reshaping healthcare through improved diagnostics, pattern recognition, and access to up to date medical research. She breaks down the differences between generative AI, agentic AI, and the emerging tools already appearing in imaging, chart transcription, and clinical support. While AI can surface insights no human could process at scale, she stresses that it supports, rather than replaces, the human connection at the center of care.

For health coaches, Robin’s perspective reinforces a growing opportunity. Clients are navigating direct to consumer labs, wearable data, digital health tools, and a rising landscape of AI assisted insights, and they often turn to coaching because they want to become more active participants in their wellbeing. Coaches can help individuals make sense of their options, reflect on what matters most, and build the confidence and agency they need to lead their own health decisions. This episode highlights how coaches can stand alongside clients as they work to become the CEOs of their health and move toward better outcomes with both clarity and support.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: So many of us have had a health crisis and found the need to take charge of their health. Often it was by first finding functional medicine. But whether you have decided to become a health coach to help others take charge of your health or you are in that process personally, I know that you are going to really be inspired by my guest today. Let me tell you about Robin Farmanfarmaian. She is a professional speaker, an author, an entrepreneur who champions AI and other fast moving technologies to empower patients and democratize healthcare. Currently, she is the co-founder of i-GENTIC AI, agenetic AI that keeps organizations compliant with AI regulations and internal policy changes.

She’s also the co-founder of ChiroScript AI, a generative AI medical scribe for chiropractors. With over 225 keynotes in 16 countries, she has spoken for many of the key healthcare stakeholders including United Healthcare, Roche, P&G, Kaiser, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Verily, Abbott, the White House, and Boston Scientific. She’s on the advisory board of many companies including iSono Health, an AI-driven ultrasound for breast cancer detection, Companion IQ, an AI companion for post-surgical patients, seniors, and veterans, and Luxsonic, VR for radiologists. I know you are going to enjoy listening to my conversation with Robin. Welcome, Robin, great to have you here.

Robin: Oh, I’m so excited to talk to you today. It was wonderful meeting you before.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you, and you as well. So I knew I had to have you on the podcast when I heard you say that patients need to become the CEOs of their own health. So what does that look like now, and then into the future, why is this absolutely critical?

Robin: It’s absolutely critical because we’re still kind of existing in the healthcare model where only one doctor understood anything about healthcare. We didn’t have the information before the internet and all of that. And so we would go to a doctor, whatever, a couple times a year. He controlled all of our health. And then when we left the doctor’s office, we just said, okay, well, if he didn’t catch it, then it should be fine. Or if he’s not treating it, it should be fine. We are now in an age of information and we have the ability to learn about our own bodies and our own diseases and conditions. And so being able to be the CEO of your own healthcare team does not mean you need to be the doctor. It means that you are the CEO of the team, which includes you yourself as the patient, but then any other doctors, nurses, other types of functional, you know, med doctors, anything like that, you bring onto your team. They are the experts in those things. You are an expert in your own self. What are you going to actually do? What kind of behavior can you help with? What kind of tests do you want to get? That’s all now up to you. It’s no longer up to that one doctor that you see a couple times a year.

Dr. Sandi: This has been such a radical change. And you know, I grew up where it was the doctor knows best and people would say, “Well, I’m in your hands, Doc.” And we knew even back then when they started doing some outcome studies that those people who believed that had the worst outcomes. And now it’s changed. But I think in my generation, the boomers are still…I went to the doctor with a friend the other day. And she was saying that her blood pressure is high. She’s on a statin for cholesterol. And she said, “Well, the doctor said my blood pressure is kind of borderline and so is my LDL, my cholesterol.” And I said, “Well, do you mind sharing what it is?” She said, “I don’t know. The doctor knows that.” And so that was, I think, a perfect example of not being the CEO of your health, just relying on the doctor to have that information. And I’ve heard it…This is not an isolated case. I’ve heard people say, “Well, like, I don’t know my my numbers. The doctor does.” And I saw my husband, the same thing, he wrote on a card, “Everything looks good.” Well, what does that mean? Like, you know, you need to know those numbers. So can you describe your own personal experience? Because this belief came to you from personal experiences in the medical system.

Robin: Yes, unfortunately. So at the age of 16, I was misdiagnosed with ulcerative colitis. By the time I was 20, sorry, 19 years old, I had 5 major surgeries, including a total colectomy with J-pouch, meaning they took out the entire large intestine. All told, I’ve had 43 hospitalizations, 6 major surgeries, and 3 organs removed. And so by the time I was in my mid-20s, my doctors were saying I was cured because a cure for ulcerative colitis is to cut out the entire colon. So they’re like, “Oh, you’re cured, but you’re in a lot of pain, and that’s probably just from the surgeries.” You know, you’re never going to recover, kind of, from that thing. And they put me on 80 milligrams a day of methadone. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this was a horrible drug. I went back to my pain clinic as soon as I possibly could get in. And I was like, “I need off this medication.” They said, “Okay, well, next step is to, you know, surgically implant a morphine pump into your spine.”

I was like, “Are you kidding?” I was 26 at that time. I was essentially a shut in. I could barely function. And what I was hearing was that was the rest of my life. So I said, absolutely not, and I fired my entire health care team. Went home that night, dropped my own methadone dose by about 40%. So I went through pretty extreme opioid withdrawal for about a week. And then I rebuilt my care team with doctors that worked with me as a team and a colleague. Right? I ended up getting diagnosed correctly with Crohn’s disease, put on an IV medication called a Remicade. And within 24 hours of that very first dose, I went into full remission. It quite literally happened overnight.

Dr. Sandi: So you saved your life.

Robin: Yes, I would definitely not be alive if I had stayed the course with things like the morphine pump and not looking for other causes of my pain besides, you know, the surgeries that had happened years and years ago.

Dr. Sandi: You know, I know that many of our listeners are health coaches, wanting to become health coaches, and so many come to us to become functional medicine health coaches because they have a similar story where the medical community was just not serving them. They felt that they needed to become educated. They needed to be in charge. And as a result, when they saw great gains, they said, “I want to serve others now because so many people are suffering.” And the beauty of now today, we have so much information. So I remember many years ago, I used to get bad panic attacks and I was put on medication, young as my 20s, and I was put on this medication called Inderal by my primary care doctor. And so back in those days, you know, we didn’t have the internet. We had the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which I remember going to the library, it was like this big and huge, thousands of pages, and looking up this medication because at that time you didn’t have access to information, but I was determined to get that information. So I looked it up.

Wait a minute, this is a heart medication. That was why I was heaving panic…because I thought of having an heart attack. So this is not good. I don’t want this. And so I tossed it, learned biofeedback, learned other…and never had panic attacks since. But the sense of like, I could take control, and it comes with a thought that you want answers and that you can be in charge, you can take charge of your health, that it’s not up to a healthcare professional. It’s in your hands and it’s becoming easier. And so you are now focused on AI. Can you describe…So many people are confused, generative AI, agentic AI. What are these?

Robin: Sure. So to give you a little bit of background, the FDA has cleared about 1200 AI-based software programs. About 950 of those are in imaging analysis and all of them pretty much can be called an ANI system, right? And what’s sometimes referred to as artificial narrow intelligence. So if you’re, say, looking at some type of an imaging scan, a computer program can come back and say, with absolute certainty, yes or no binary response to whatever you’re testing for, say diabetic retinopathy. Now, fast forward to generative AI, while ANI optimizes, right, and it can do that one thing really, really well, generative AI has the ability to create and it comes to the table understanding context. The reason is because it’s been trained on such large swaths of the internet. It’s able to predict the next word or image in whatever you’re creating. So if you’re writing a book, every single time it’s going to write one word, it looks back statistically speaking within its training data, it says, okay, what is the next word in that sentence? So ANI optimizes. Generative AI creates. Agentic AI has the ability to take action.

Now, this is a huge leap, right? And most of the country have not yet heard the term agentic AI. And so agentic AI is definitely powered by generative AI. Now, when you’re looking at generative AI on the scale of one to five in terms of autonomy, number five being the terminator autonomous and number one being essentially like a calculator, now generative AI falls at level two. The reason is because it needs a huge amount of human oversight, right? It’s called human in the loop. And the reason is because it hallucinates, which is a term to describe the fact that it is creating new content that doesn’t yet exist based on statistics. And so it will make up entire things like fictional stories when you don’t realize that it’s giving you fiction. And so that requires a human in the loop to check everything every single time something that generative AI creates.

Agentic AI is actually a level three and even a level four autonomy, does not require that human being in the loop in order to do its job and take action. The reason is, is because as part of agentic AI, you can tell it a very specific goal and you can leave it in a constrained environment. And as long as it is goal-oriented and is in that very specific controlled environment, it does not need that human being in the loop. We can trust it to take an action, right? What does that look like in healthcare? It could be the generative AI medical scribe is transcribing the entire clinic visit. The agentic AI might be able to read that summary and then take action, send a prescription to CVS, or send a follow-up text for the patient to make their next appointment. And it doesn’t need that clinician to say, okay, yes, you need to do these very specific things.

Dr. Sandi: Wow. So, that can be a double-edged sword. I see a lot of possibilities, but it can also be pretty scary. So we think about science-fiction movies, think about health, “2001 Space Odyssey.” Is that coming true that they’re taking charge? And so, let’s say I’m in an encounter with my doctor and I don’t want that medication. And I’m given no indication that…So what would that look like?

Robin: Yes. Fortunately, right now there aren’t any agentic AI bots working inside of an EHR system. Epic, which is really one of the giants, about 42% of all hospitals run on Epic EHRs. And so, they have launched a number of new tools very recently. And they’re still generative AI. They’re not quite agentic AI yet, because that is something that we need to figure out, especially when we’re dealing with, say, prescriptions and medication, which is, of course, incredibly powerful. And so, it won’t automatically send it to CVS. But if you had said during the clinic visit, “Oh, you know what, I don’t like the side effects of that one,” or, “Yeah, I’m not going to take that,” or anything like that, and it’s just an offhand remark, the generative AI medical scribe will pick that up, because it’s a full transcription, so it will be in the notes for the agentic AI to look at and say, “Oh, the patient said they didn’t want this. Let me alert the doctor or see if there’s something else that we can give her,” right? And then secondly, even if they did fill it, right, you don’t actually have to go pick it up, right? Even if there’s medication at CVS or Walgreens, you don’t have to be like, “Oh, I’m going to go pick it up and pay for it and put it through my insurance.” You can always leave it if it’s medication that you do not want to be taking.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, so I think it holds great promise, and what I love about it, and right now with generative AI, is the diagnostic capabilities, because thinking about a doctor, you’re dependent on the patients that you see, you’re dependent on the journals that they’ve read that they…there might be studies out there that they don’t get, they don’t get those journals, they don’t get the alerts about it, and they’re not aware of. And I’ve heard a number of people, including Dr. Mark Hyman, who’s a functional medicine renowned influencer, has said that, “Yeah, this is going to be wonderful in terms of our ability to make really precise diagnosis.” I wonder if you can comment on that.

Robin: Absolutely. That’s another thing that generative AI, or AI in general, is actually really good at, is having a huge amount of data and picking up patterns within that data as compared to its training set, if you’re dealing with generative AI. And so we can pick up a lot more. If you think about the fact that most physicians in their specialties, they’re publishing…or they’re seeing 10,000 papers a day or a week going past their desk. There is no way a normal doctor can keep up at all with the amount of research that is coming out there. And so there’s a company called Open Evidence, and it’s for licensed clinicians. And it is a medical large language model where you can start to do things like this, where you can upload a whole bunch of lab results, which you can still do with ChatGPT as well. I’ve actually done that. But you can upload a whole bunch of different things into Open Evidence around, say, a patient’s case. And then it’s going to check all of the medical literature, including everything that’s coming up to date with publications, including JAMA, which is a really big deal publication for physicians. And they just recently did a partnership. So Open Evidence will take all of the current research, all of the clinical trials, all of that into one place and say, “Hey, if your patient has this, this, this, this, and this, these might be the correct clinical trials or the correct diagnostics.”

Dr. Sandi: So this has the potential to revolutionize the practice of medicine. I think it already is. And looking at what health coaches can bring, and I know there’s been a lot of studies where they’re looking at the value of that heart-centered human connection. And every company, Apple, Samsung, [inaudible 00:17:14.840], Oura, they’re all developing an AI health coach. And what we say to that is that’s a support. But really, I think it’s going to create even more demand for a real in-person human connection, particularly if it’s in groups, because AI can’t lead a group, at least at the present time.

Robin: Exactly, exactly. It’s just getting us more information. But yes, we still need that human touch in the loop. We still need to be with human beings and interact with human beings, for many reasons, from dementia prevention to just general health. But yes, you are absolutely right.

Dr. Sandi: But I can see health coaches, being one, who can help people become the…That’s what they do. They help people become the CEO of their health and go beyond. “Well, you know, you can take your data, this lab, and you could put it into generative AI and let’s see what it says.” So they’re not interpreting, but they’re helping that individual say, “Does this make sense to you? What do you think about this?” And more and more I think we’re going to see that. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the direct-to-consumer lab movement and how can that play into this role of agentic AI?

Robin: I just used a new service a friend of mine has created, and they used to call it Flow. I’d have to look up the new name. But what they did is they ordered lab tests for me and a CAT scan to detect calcium levels in my arteries, direct to consumer. And it was a direct pay. It did not go through my insurance company. It did not get sent to my doctor. I paid, I think, $300 or something like that for the CAT scan and the blood labs. And so I just did essentially a direct to consumer. Now, one of my cholesterol tests came back a little bit high and I hadn’t done a fast. And so I was like, hmm, I was just going to order a new one on myself to go and take, you know, right when the lab opened. But then my primary care doctor was like, “Oh, no, no, no, I’ll just order them for you and then insurance pays.” But like, I was going to do all of this outside the healthcare system because it’s so easy, fast, you get the lab reports yourself. I mean, I think it’s fantastic to be able to have access to getting your own labs.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, I go through Function Health, which is Mark Hyman’s company. And same thing, you get over 100 biomarkers. It’s a membership, you get it twice a year. And I started this, I was in their beta test group and this was a few years ago. And so I went to…It’s all through Quest. So I went there. They did not know what it was. They didn’t know what they were doing. I had to wait like an hour in the waiting room because they had never seen so many vials of blood before. “What is this? You mean there’s a doctor or nothing?” And so fast forward to a month ago and I did it again. I do it twice a year. And I went to my local Quest and they said, “Oh, you’re from Function Health.” I said, “Yeah, do you get a lot of people in?” “Oh, yes, we get so many people who are doing Function.” It was smooth. It was fast. And the phlebotomist said, “You know, I think you’re on the right track. I think people need to take charge of their health. They just can’t wait until, you know, their doctor ordered something. I think people should be coming in here getting their own tests.” This is the phlebotomist at Quest saying this.

Robin: Yes. Oh, I love it.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, yeah. So I think that the…and what we train health coaches to do is be the one to help people to say, “You know, here’s something that may be a red flag. You know, go to your…” They’re not interpreting, but they’re helping them navigate because the more that’s out there, there are so many tests, there’s so many options. It’s complicated. And so we need some support. We need allies and advocates. So you have worked for a lot of people, a lot of innovators across healthcare. What excites you? What breakthroughs, particularly about longevity, prevention? If you were to look ahead over the next decade or so, what excites you?

Robin: So many things. Something I worked on about 10 years ago was cryopreservation for tissue engineering. And so we know that they’re…One of the ways to dramatically extend life is to switch out your organs when they start getting old, right? Your heart, your liver, your kidneys. And so as a tangential to that, we also have to solve cryopreservation of large, you know, vascularized organs like the heart and lungs. And so I worked with BOD, DARPA, and the White House, and I got to go speak over at the White House, which was very cool.

Dr. Sandi: How was that? Yeah.

Robin: It was awesome. And, you know, all the letters were in the room, the HHS, the FDA, you know, and we raised tens of millions of dollars in grant funding from them for scientists working on tissue engineering and cryopreservation of solid organ transplants. Of course, the military is very, very interested in this because they want a huge warehouse full of body parts, right, for veterans. And so it’s really exciting because I don’t think we’re that many more years away from being able to grow your own organ using a stem cell that’s been taken from adipose tissue, right, and grown in the lab, and then maybe cryopreserved with a non-toxic molecule, and then re-warmed and brought to you like when you need it the most.

Dr. Sandi: Wow, that is really exciting to think about the possibilities. And I always think about the future is, you know, often we can’t imagine, it’s a failure of imagination. So, you know, I grew up in the day where we had landline phones and operators. So I remember, excited when we had direct dial and we didn’t have to go through the operator when we had a phone and now, who could have predicted the cell phones or the internet particularly and, you know, where we have come? So how do you balance that with…you know, we come back again and again when we look at longevity to the basics, which is, you know, eating real food and moving and particularly having a connection to community and experiencing joy in our relationships and nature, fresh air. So how do you balance that? Like those who say, “Oh, you know, we don’t need all these sophisticated tests,” or maybe, you know, just go back to those basics because that will be key in the future?

Robin: But why is it either/or, right? Why isn’t it just both? It’s absolutely 100% both. Like, you know, I have severe Crohn’s disease with, you know, a lot of my digestive system missing, and so I need to manage my health on a daily basis on a level that most people will never, ever need to do. And so 7 days a week, 365 days a year, I am in my gym. I work out every single day, regardless of how I’m feeling. I get all of my preventive medicine things. As I mentioned, I just got the calcium artery scan done to, you know, check and make sure that in 20 years my heart isn’t going to need something. And so my score came back at a zero, but I’m getting it tested at this level, right, so that I know what’s going on with my body. Stage zero, stage one, right? That is curable. You start looking at stage two, three, or four in diseases and that is no longer curable. Absolutely prevention is the number one, but catching things early is number two.

Every single year I get a mammogram and ultrasound actually of both breasts. Every single year I get as many tests as I absolutely possibly can, right? So I’m doing all of the things around diet, weight, exercise, sleep. I track my sleep every night, social connections, sun. I live in Palo Alto, so it’s quite amazing that I get sun most days of the year and fresh air. Fresh air is a really big one. A lot of people work in offices that don’t have open windows, and so they’re spending the entire day, you know, breathing in air from an HVAC system, which is probably not all that healthy, right? And so doing all the things, but then also doing all your preventive medicine stuff.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, I think that’s so true. It is a combination. It is doing what feels good, what works in terms of some real basics and then, you know, looking at how we can have the best from medical innovation and that combination is powerful. You know, and I know people…I mean, I take so many supplements. I mean, I’m 75, so this is non-negotiable. So I’m also working out every single day. You know, before we got on the call, I had a few minutes, I was doing push-ups. I will go out in the…I’ll do dead lifts later in the day. I’ll just get something in every single day. It really is critical, you know, as well as looking at food and being, you know, absolutely, like, that’s another non-negotiable.

And balance, it really is always about balance because we can’t be so focused on these good strategies that we become obsessed and then we have no joy in eating, for example, or we can’t be with others because we have to, you know, be in bed at a certain time to get our sleep. So sometimes it’s tricky because, you know, you wanna do all. But I think that the work you are doing is just so substantial. Yeah, so functional medicine is really about this…because we’ve been new adapters or early adapters of all this new technology and looking at, you know, addressing those root causes of our chronic conditions. So, as a big supporter of functional medicine. Yeah. So, you know, where do you see yourself going personally with this?

Robin: Yes. So tracking what needs to be tracked on a daily basis, right, to really make sure I have the right habits in place, especially now that I’m back to eating solid food. So I didn’t mention that earlier, but I went on a two-year liquid diet. And the reason is, is because I have a lot of small bowel obstructions from an 8-day-long bowel perforation I had when I was 20 years old. And so it left a huge amount of scar tissue in my abdominal cavity. GI surgeons all know 20 to 30 years down the road, you’re going to start getting small bowel obstructions from this, which is always an emergency situation. And it’s only treated by, first of all, no food, right? So completely stop imbibing everything. And if it doesn’t rectify itself, then it’s major surgery. You got to go into the operating room, find which ones, you know, is causing the problems.

And with that, there are so many of them that can cause the problems that I met a Crohn’s patient like myself who had had over 20 small bowel obstruction surgeries and had lost so much of his GI system that he no longer eats at all. He just has total perennial nutrition in a vein, right? So he said like, “Maybe once a week, I’ll have a quarter of a biscuit. And like, that’s all I can eat,” because that’s all that’s left of his GI system. And so I said, absolutely not. And I came up with a solution with some incredible practitioners of mine, a massage therapist and a chiropractor. And I’ve spent over $250,000 on chiropractic and massage, 6 to 9 hours a week for now 10 years. Now, within that, I had to do a two-year liquid diet because I was getting so many that I could not put solid food through myself. And you know, unlike a weight-loss diet, you cannot cheat on an all-liquid diet if you have small bowel obstructions. It will quite literally kill you.

And so after a couple of years of doing this method of breaking it all up from the outside, instead of cutting it from the inside, I started being able to eat solid food again. And today, I now can eat raw fruits and vegetables, which is incredibly…I mean, it’s unheard of. My GI doctor, every time he sees me, his mouth drops open, hits the desk, he like falls off and you stare in shock like, wow, he’s told all of his patients that have the same problem, my method and what we’ve been doing. But yeah, so now that I can eat solid food, I have to relearn, well, what should I eat? I’m so used to just living on yogurt and milkshakes, right, protein shakes.

Dr. Sandi: Well, Robin, I’m sure you’ll master it. You are the embodiment of the CEO. You are a badass CEO for your own health. And I want to thank you for being with us. How can people know more about your work and find you?

Robin: Sure. So I’m the only Robin Farmanfarmaian in the universe. So it’s quite easy to find me on my website, my LinkedIn are probably the two easiest ways to connect with me. And I would love to connect with you if you’re listening to this. So find me on LinkedIn.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. Will do. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a joy to talk to you.

Robin: Thank you.