Welcome And Guest Introduction

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:00

Welcome back to the Voices in Health and Wellness podcast, where we explore real conversations with practitioners and innovators redefining what modern care looks like. Today I'm joined by Dr. Negin Rajaipour, board certified family medicine physician, founder of Vita Rican Medical, and creative of a really powerful integrative framework known as the E3 method. Elevate, embody, evolve. Megan's work sits at the intersection of functional medicine, nervous system regulation, and trauma-informed care, bringing together both adverse childhood experiences and what she calls adverse adulthood events to really understand the full picture of a patient's health. So with that, Megan, I'd love to welcome you to the show and thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr Negin Rajaipour 0:41

Thank you so much, Andrew. I appreciate the invite. I am so grateful to be here and share my work on your podcast with your audience.

From Doctor To Patient

Dr Andrew Greenland 0:53

Thank you. Well, maybe we can start at the beginning. Can you give us a little kind of snapshot of your journey? What drew you into medicine and how you've kind of ended up doing the things that you currently do in practice?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 1:04

Absolutely. Um sorry, but something keeps popping up on my screen. So the short version that um is that I'm a physician who became a patient. So I created this framework because it came out of my own experience. And this is something that I wish existed when I was going through what the collapse that I was experiencing. So everything, Vital Region Medical, the A3 method, the resurrection algorithm, these are not business ideas. These are born from personal experience and asking the question, how to rebuild after collapse. Even though on the surface I was a very strong woman who's made it, who's successful, as a practicing physician, but internally I felt the collapse and the falling apart. So so that's basically the genesis of my work.

The E3 Method Explained

Dr Andrew Greenland 2:15

Thank you. No, it always helps to have some context, and I often find that there's a personal element to someone's journey or their inspiration for what they do. So thank you for sharing that. And I know you have a background in emergency medicine. How does that shape the way that you now approach functional medicine?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 2:31

Yeah, I mean, I realize that we do miracles in emergency setting with Western medicine, right? Um, we can stabilize a patient in shock. We can bring someone's heart back to into rhythm. Um, but when it comes to chronic care, unfortunately we fail measurably. And I think that's probably part of the reason why you are practicing functional medicine. And a lot of us are moving into those uh more integrative spaces to really understand and help patients on a different level when it comes to chronic care.

Dr Andrew Greenland 3:12

So tell us a little bit about your current practice and the current things that you're doing to help and serve clients. Where are things in 2026 for you?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 3:20

Yeah, absolutely. So right now we're in pre-launch, actually self-launch phase of by the region medical. So I've built the um the E3 model that runs basically is the driver engine of my work, uh, Elevate, Embody, Evolve. So we look at a patient as a whole, we look at their story, what is at the root of their ailments, which is usually rooted in nervous system dysregulation and their patterns. We address those in addition to the embody phase, which is basically optimizing the physiology. That's where the integrative and functional medicine comes into play. And the evolve is the identity rebuilding. So we have to build on a stable foundation. Otherwise, no matter what we treat the body with, it is going to fail because the nervous system will basically relapse into what's familiar, what feels safe, even though safe could be killing the person.

Dr Andrew Greenland 4:36

Maybe could you perhaps give us an example, talk us through maybe a typical patient journey in terms of them showing up with you, your assessment, and how things go from there?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 4:46

We look at childhood trauma. Everyone is familiar with the ACES, adverse childhood event, and its connection to all sorts of chronic issues, including cancer, obesity, autoimmune disease. We look at adverse adulthood experience, which is really poorly served in medicine. Um we think that because you're grown adult, you should be over it. You should process it, you should, you know, move through things quickly. But we discount the fact that even adulthood adverse experiences they rewire the nervous system the same way childhood adverse experiences rewire the nervous system. So that's kind of like asking the right questions instead of what's wrong with you. We ask the question, what happened to you? So that basically where we start the work. And then we look at the downstream effects of trauma on the biology. So we know the HPA access disruption, we know the cortisol elevation that wreaks havoc on the HPA axis, on the sex hormones, on thyroid function. So we go after treating all of those things, including insulin resistance. You know that from high cortisol state, um insulin resistant develops, um, resistant weight that we can't shake off, no matter how much dieting, exercising we do. Um, so that's basically how that's structured, and the sequence really matters, it's very important, um, even though everything is kind of addressed simultaneously and in parallel, but we have to make sure the nervous system is restored to a baseline of parasympathetic state, which is rest and heal state. And then everything that we do with integrative and functional to the body, then it will hold. And then everything we do to restore the identity that will hold as well. So, no matter a lot of the um personal development is rooted in behavior change, whereas the pattern is stuck in the nervous system. So, no matter how much you force the behavior, the mindset, the person is gonna relapse back because the nervous system was never addressed. So we address the nervous system.

Dr Andrew Greenland 7:39

Thank you. So, you're traditionally trained physician by background. When did you start realizing that just addressing the physical side of some of the things you were seeing wasn't really enough and you had to delve deeper into some of the things that you've been talking about just now?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 7:53

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I learned most of it because I became my own first patient. I carried a load of childhood trauma from my background. Um, I'm an Iranian immigrant to the US. I grew up in um basically at my birth, revolution happened, the uh war happened, eight years of war. So my childhood, um parental discourse and divorce. Um, everything just took a toll, but I wasn't aware of it. I thought I was okay. I was making it through, I was successful. I'm now in the US. Um you know, I went and did the military service, I went to med school, I raised two daughters, and um but underneath it all, there was always this undercurrent of suffering and pain that eventually took a toll on my body after an acute situation that came up due to my divorce as a single mom raising two daughters. So that really just opened my eyes to the importance of nervous system regulation and the role it plays in our physical health, because I had to rebuild from collapse, both on not just emotional and mentally, but also physically, because it stress takes a toll on our body, it's silent, but it's there, and then over time it just builds up, builds up to a point where your body can't sustain it anymore.

Dr Andrew Greenland 9:43

How does your approach um differ from what most functional medicine practitioners are currently doing? Because I'm guessing they're a little bit more enlightened than the average uh traditionally trained physician, but clearly you're doing something over and above what um conventional functional medicine would do as well. Well, what's the kind of difference there?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 10:01

The difference there is the elevate part of the E3 protocol and the evolve part. So the embody encompasses functional medicine, integrative medicine. We treat the physical person as a whole being, but also we address the nervous system and the identity portion of it. So, what comes next after we do all this work? We repattern the nervous system, we get the person into a safe space in their life, we address all the downstream effects of health issues that we can address through functional and integrative medicine. Now, what comes next? Who are you now? Are you your trauma? No, you're not your trauma, you're not your story. So we have to rebuild from that space. So that's the missing part of integrative and functional medicine that I think my protocol addresses.

Dr Andrew Greenland 11:03

And do you find patients are really aware of just how much trauma or nervous system dysregulation is impacting their physical health when you see them?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 11:11

You know, honestly, I wasn't even aware until I did the ACE score, until I did the AAE score, and I really looked at the impact, the burden I'm carrying. You know, I had been to therapy for years and years and years, but you know, talk therapy is very effective at intellectualizing and understanding things, but you don't get deep into truly understanding your story. It takes years and years to do that. Um, but with these tools, we can shortcut the time and really get to the bottom of what is going on at the nervous system level, what the pattern is that's running behind everything, and addressing that simultaneously addressing the physical health challenges.

Dr Andrew Greenland 12:12

Um you just mentioned these schools. So it sounds like a really helpful and objective way of trying to get some clarity over an assessment you have with a patient. Can you just tell us a little bit about more what the schools measure and how they help you with your assessments?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 12:24

Yeah, absolutely. So the adverse childhood event score that looks at basically all the childhood trauma. So if your parents divorced, if your parent was um emotionally absent, if you were bullied, uh physically abused or sexually abused, like all of those things um are being asked. And the adverse adulthood experience, which I have uh created, that looks at what happens after childhood. Because a lot of people grew up in beautiful homes. They grew up with secure parents, um, they had you know very comfortable and secure upbringing, and nothing major happened during childhood, but then they come into adulthood and they're betrayed by a friend. Um, their job of 10 years suddenly fires them, you know, after giving their life to that um profession for a long period of time and they're suddenly discarded. Um, a bad divorce happens, a betrayal by a romantic partner happens, uh loss of a child, you know, these things are all traumatic events, and so the AAE score accounts for all of this, and we look at how it impacted the person. How is it how is it impacting the sleep structure? How is it impacting um how the person shows up in leadership, how the person shows up in their life, in their relationship with themselves. So that's that's where the work is, really getting to the root.

Dr Andrew Greenland 14:10

Thank you. I don't know if you're happy to share. Would you mind sharing perhaps a somebody you're working with at the moment, obviously anonymously, just to give us an example of how this has completely changed the outcome for them? I know you shared your personal experience, and I want to de-personalize this from you, perhaps somebody you're working with at the moment, just so we can get a deeper understanding of this process.

Dr Negin Rajaipour 14:30

Right now I'm in pre-launch phase. I can speak from my own experience and tell you what I've done for myself. Um so basically, um I've been in therapy off and on for over 20 years. I had a lot of childhood trauma, military trauma. Um, I wasn't uh deployed, but I lost friends during deployment. Um I had the heavy survival guilt, which at the time I didn't understand. I was in my 20s. Um, I was in an abusive relationship where I was physically assaulted. So I was carrying a lot of trauma that I had just kind of pushed aside, right? And kept functioning, kept showing up, you know, getting through undergrad, having two children, complex complex pregnancies, um, going to med school and my marriage falling apart, and suddenly I'm a single mom. And going into residency, and that in itself is very traumatizing because you're suddenly you know responsible for people's lives, especially as an intern. Um, and these were emotions that I had pushed down and suppressed just for the sake of showing up and being who the world expected me to be. And being, you know, in the military or in medicine, you're rewarded for being able to suppress your emotions. You worked in the emergency room or you're currently practicing ER doctor. You go in, one patient, you know, they have a bad outcome or they don't make it. You literally have to, you have feelings, right? It hurts, and you have to push that aside and go talk to a patient who's pregnant and expecting, or or go deliver uh um good news about you know what your wokup showed up. So you have to be able to transcend the sadness of a tragedy within minutes, right? And go and talk to another person who's in front of you and and needs your attention equally. So these things just took a toll on me. And one day I couldn't function, my nervous system completely shut down. Um, I mean, before that I was physically struggling. I had fatigue that nothing, none of my labs could account for. Um, I had pains that body aches and things that none of my labs could account for. And trying to make sense of it all is what basically brought me here to this work. I went through my own journeys deep inner work, not just therapy, because therapy alone didn't help uncover everything I needed to uncover because I was even closed off to therapy. I wasn't showing up as an open person, as an honest person to really look at myself. I was showing up closed off. So, what really in my journey has been extremely helpful is psychedelic assisted therapy that helped me open up immensely and be able to let my ego down, let the guards down, and really look at myself from a perspective of compassion and understanding. Not to, you know, find fault with others or judge others, but to understand truly what has led me to this point in my life where I'm you know successful on the outside, everything looks good, and internally I feel dead, my body's falling apart. I am emotionally drained and exhausted. So that is also part of the evolve. Um, and I'm looking at phase two launch for an actual uh physical clinic where we can actually help patients with that level of intense inner work that is required sometimes because traumas build layers, and you can't just maybe you scratch the surface with therapy, but you you don't know what's there. You sometimes you have even forgotten the things that have happened. Your your brain is so good at survival, so good at protecting you, so good at keeping you on task, keeping you showing up, that sometimes it's not even in our conscious mind anymore. And we have to dig in.

Dr Andrew Greenland 20:06

Thank you. Um, there's a growing conversation around psychedelics, and you've just mentioned psychedelics and mental health. How do you view their role in trauma healing and functional medicine?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 20:17

I think they have great potential in trauma healing. Um, I have experienced both um ketamine, which is um legally used in the United States in ketamine clinics, and I have experience with plant medicines in legal settings, countries that is allowed under supervised guidance. These are not something you just willy-nilly take and in an effort to escape. This is deep work and requires structure, requires guidance, and what comes after is the work that really makes the difference. The psychedelic experience itself shows you where the work is. But what you do after in integration in therapy, that's where the real change takes root.

Dr Andrew Greenland 21:19

Do you think the system is moving in the right direction when it comes to integrating mind-body approaches? Because you're coming to this for as a conventionally trained physician. Obviously, you ventured into functional medicine space and now you've got your own model. But are we generally moving in the right direction?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 21:34

I think so, but it the movement is very slow. I think we need to speed it up. We need more clinical access to psychedelics, whether it's plant medicines that have been around for thousands of years, and we have data from the shaman and the medicine men and the people who have experienced these things, to our conventional drug. Drugs like ketamine, MDMA, all of these things, we need access. We need protocols, we need safety, patient education, systems where we can actually employ these things in our practices and really make a difference for our patients.

Dr Andrew Greenland 22:23

Thank you. And what are you seeing right now in terms of burnout, both not just in patients but also practitioners?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 22:30

Yeah, it's it's all related. I think burnout is rooted in trauma. Whether it's morale injury, whether it's you know chronic stress from being on call, from the training itself, from abusive environments, whether it's uh from peers or from patients. Um I think it's all related to trauma and it can be addressed not with another pamphlet or self-care guidance, but really talking about what happened to you from a non-judgmental loving standpoint, not to put the person in a place where they feel judged, they feel questioned, their integrity feels questioned. Um so that's that's basically where the work is in in regards to burnout and addressing that, and it's rampant for physicians. And I was one of them.

Dr Andrew Greenland 23:38

I'm for sure I can uh ratify that. I'm sort of working in a specialty like you've done before, which is um high intensity, high risk of burnout. So I completely get it.

Dr Negin Rajaipour 23:49

There is no space to process trauma. I remember being in a code for 45 minutes trying everything to save this person's life, and then I have to go talk to a three-year-old next door. So there is no time to process, there is no time to really sit with that. And afterwards, there is no time to integrate, really talk about what happened, and not what happened in a medical sense, but what happened to you as a person who you felt hopeless and helpless and saving a life. Now you have to go talk to the families and tell them that their loved one didn't make it, still brings tears to my eyes because I still hold all of that. This is someone's mother, father, brother, sister. We are not just robots, we are human beings being placed in situations where we have to deal with the ultimate suffering of another human being, but we are expected to perform like robots, and that's not okay. We have to open up our hearts, medicine has to open its heart to its practitioners and become a more compassionate system from a punitive system because right now burnout, physician burnout or the nurse's burnout equals punishment. They have to suppress it and perform, they have to continue performing. They have no choice because they're looked down upon by the system so that the system needs to claim its humanity and recognize that burnout is not a character flaw, is not a professional flaw, it's just the human function that needs to be addressed with the heart, not with diagnosis codes or computers and you know the the whole gamut that goes into addressing burnout nowadays.

Dr Andrew Greenland 26:18

So switching gears slightly, um thinking about your practice as a business because you are running a business. What's working really well for you right now? What are you most proud of? And I know you're in your sort of pre-launch phase, but just sort of thinking of it from a from a snapshot. What are you most um proud of?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 26:34

I am the most proud of my protocol. I think all of us as doctors, we have our credentials. But what really sets us apart is the protocols that we come up with for our patients to have the best outcomes for the patients. And if you have something in you that speaks to your soul, bring it to life, own it.

Dr Andrew Greenland 27:03

And on the other side of the coin, which are the challenges or bottlenecks which are most impactful in your work at the moment?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 27:11

So the challenges I've been dealing with right now, AI is evolving really fast, technology is evolving really fast. Every single delay I have faced so far is because of technology changes. So I'm trying to keep up and manage. So that's why it's been taking me like a year to build everything out the infrastructure, the protocols, writing the book, launching it, um, really fine-tuning everything. And on top of everything, I'm developing courses. So for patients who are still physically fit, they don't necessarily need the medical model, but they can use the trauma healing aspect of my work, which is through the resurrection algorithm and rebuilding identity after trauma and collapse.

Dr Andrew Greenland 28:17

So is AI not making your life easier as one would expect rather than harder?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 28:24

It is making it easier if you once you start learning how to implement it. So right now I'm still in the phase of like I learned one thing and then there's something else advances, and I need to keep up with that and learn that. So um, yes, AI has a lot of potential to make our life easier as long as we can keep up with it in a timely fashion.

Dr Andrew Greenland 28:55

And you've mentioned that you're working on standardizing the patient journey as part of the process. What's been the biggest challenge in doing that?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 29:04

Just I think the biggest challenge for me is really translating clinical and psychological processes into a format that patients can easily understand and can easily integrate into their life and also easily reiterate it or speak about it from their own understanding of the protocols. I think that the medical storytelling is the biggest challenge. We have all these cool drama shows and um you know medical terminology that doesn't always translate into patient understanding of exactly what is happening. So that's the meat of it, like trying to come up in and talk about things in a way that is clinically sound, but also patients can understand it. So I've been doing a lot of social media content. I think that's really important, helping people really understand what it is you do and how you can help them. And you have to say it in a way that's relatable to them. Because you know, we can get carried away with medical jargon and people don't understand a lot of times. So, like, okay, yeah, but okay, cool. But what how does that help me as a person? So bringing it really that's you know been very um, I guess my biggest challenge to learn and in communication and be able to tell the story in a way that people can relate to, apply to their life, and also seek it out if it's relevant to their experience.

Dr Andrew Greenland 31:18

So, as I understand it, you're building a telly health first model with plans for a physical clinic. How are you thinking about that transition?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 31:28

So it's it's not so much of a transition, it's a phased structured um plan. I hope to um uh launch the telehealth and the phase two within the next six months to 12 months, I would like to open doors as a place for people to actually come in and get more expanded um physical treatments, for instance, ivketamine or some of the regenerative therapies that we can offer. Um, because telemedicine, even though um it's great, we can do a lot, we can reach a broad patient base, but it has its limitations, and I can't get away by just doing telemedicine. I have to have a physical location where patients can actually come in and feel the energy, get the treatments, and we can physically support them in person.

Dr Andrew Greenland 32:39

Lovely. I also appreciate the physical location as well. I've always liked to see patients once, at least once in person if I can, if I can make that work. So I completely get that. You there's so much you lose over an internet connection or a Zoom connection. There are so many kind of physical cues that you miss with a patient, you know, skin changes, color changes, even watching them walk into the room, all those kind of things are really valuable.

Dr Negin Rajaipour 33:03

So I totally understand that you know, this is something our training doesn't teach us. Um, our presence is missed by the patient. The energy we bring in, you can try to bring that to the telehealth visit, but being in the same room, I feel like it takes it to another level.

Dr Andrew Greenland 33:28

If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business tomorrow or the wider space that you work in, um, what would that be?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 33:36

Oh my goodness, I would launch my clinic simultaneously. Yeah, and really just get into the work.

Dr Andrew Greenland 33:49

Okay, so um think about the next 12 months or so. Where would you like to be in 12 months' time? I know you've talked about your launches. Is there anything else in your grand plan for the next year?

Dr Negin Rajaipour 33:59

Yes, I would like to expand licensing uh beyond the three states currently, um, hopefully nationwide, um, having more practitioners who are trained and able to use the protocol and implement it. Um, having launched the flagship clinic in San Diego and really fine-tuning a scalable model that we can implement in other parts of the country as opposed to just having one location here. And also developing the um courses for practitioners who might be interested in using the model in their practices.

Dr Andrew Greenland 34:46

Well, I hope it all goes extremely well, and with that, I'd love to thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a really powerful conversation, especially how you're integrating trauma and physiology in a much deeper way than probably most practices. So, thank you, Negan, for joining me. Appreciate it.

Dr Negin Rajaipour 35:00

Thank you.