[INTERVIEW]
Ronda Nelson: Listen, supplement prices are up, practitioners are irritated, and some are making decisions out of that irritation rather than what’s right for the patient. Let’s talk about Standard Process and MediHerb and what actually matters here.
Well, hey friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Listen, before we jump into our saucy and spicy topic for today’s episode, I need to give you a quick heads up about something that’s changing in a really good way, starting in May.
YouTube is going to be the main home for all of the new episodes. For a long time, I have been publishing things in two places, and it’s a lot of work — podcast platforms and YouTube. And honestly, I’m ready to simplify. So instead of spreading my energy across both platforms, as of May, we’re gonna be moving all of the same content — same everything — it’s just gonna live on YouTube. So you’ll still get the same emails. We’ll still let you know if there’s anything new and exciting. This also gives me more flexibility if I wanna hop on and do some extra bonus content. And I love doing that. It just limits me a little bit on the podcast platform.
So that’s it. All still the same. We’re just gonna be moving in May over to YouTube. All the content will still stay on the podcast platform, so you can go back and re-listen to old episodes, but know that as of mid-May, we’re gonna be over on YouTube. All right, are you ready? Let’s go dive into this saucy, saucy topic.
Standard Process and MediHerb, as most of you know, have raised their prices again as of the first of the year. And so many of you are not real happy about that — and, you know, me neither. But in December, in the Facebook group, someone made a post and it had like over a hundred comments. Everybody — oh, I shouldn’t say everyone — almost everyone was mad. Some people were ready to just walk away. Practitioners were like, forget it, I’m out. Other people were like, ah, you know, I understand. And some people were kind of ambivalent one way or the other.
So today what I want to talk about is how do we navigate this conversation without it impacting the patient? I think I even said in there, ooh, this conversation’s getting kind of spicy — maybe I’ll do a podcast about it. And a couple people were like, yes, please do. So let’s just talk about it.
I get it. I understand that prices have to go up. I know that prices go up and it affects the patient. It affects my recommendation, your recommendation. And it affects what I’m able to keep on the shelf if I were a brick and mortar, because it’s more cash outlay for you to stock that inventory. It affects the patients — they’re not able to maybe afford the higher priced items. And I’m not dismissing that. I think that’s all really valid. But the conversation gets sloppy and emotional real fast, because there is a huge difference between noticing a problem and then letting your emotional reaction become the clinical strategy. And that’s what I’m gonna talk about today.
That’s what bothers me about this whole thing. We’ve made choosing supplements an emotional decision rather than a clinical decision. Because at the end of the day, it’s not about loyalty to a certain supplement company. Although — truth be told — for 20 years, that was me. I was in the camp. I wouldn’t even entertain anything other than that. I was all in, drank it all up, all the way, all of it. But when it’s over, it’s over. And you just sort of know that, right?
I don’t think some of you that are new will have context for this. You old-timers that have been hanging around with me for a long time, you know. But let me just say this: if anyone had a right — I don’t really like that word, but — if anyone had a right to be mad at Standard Process, it’d be me.
Many years ago — well, it’ll be eight years ago now — I was very loyal to Standard Process. Not just casually using their products in my practice. I was exclusively using their products. I traveled all over the country. I taught continuing education seminars for thousands and thousands of doctors. I was at their trainings. I went to Wisconsin. I did all the things — all of it. I was in hook, line, and sinker. I believed the philosophy. I loved Royal Lee. I learned about Henry Haer. I read all the things, had all the CDs back in the Michael Dobbins days — you old-timers are gonna know what I’m talking about. I was hard all in, drank the Kool-Aid, all in and so happy, fully, completely happy.
Back in that time, those of us that were in the movement — I’ll call it that — we thought they were the cat’s pajamas. And we weren’t really out looking at anybody else because we just sort of been taught that they were the only ones that had the types of supplements that they have. We were just of the mindset that they had the purest, the cleanest, that this was the only food-based supplement company worth using. And then one day — details to be spared here on the podcast — one day my relationship with them ended abruptly. And it ended in a very painful, hurtful way. I’m not gonna trash them. I’m not gonna get into the details of the story because it doesn’t matter.
But in short, something happened at a seminar. It got wildly mischaracterized. A complaint got amplified online. And within a very short time, I was done. There was no meaningful conversation with Standard Process. There was no inquiry. There was no due process, no fair process, nothing. No one asked me what happened. I was the one that came outta my mouth and no one asked. And I went from being their top most requested speaker to basically being blacklisted. I literally was on their blacklist — and I might still be, I don’t know. And it was super hurtful.
So let me tell you — if anyone has a right to be mad, it’s me. But I want you to really understand this about me: after all of that, I continued to recommend their products because I still believed they were the right products for the patient. Not because I was a big fan at the time — because they had just sucker-punched me bad. My feelings were hurt, my pride was hurt, my ego was hurt. I was, I cried for days. Days and days. Days. Took me a couple, three months to recover.
So being mad at someone isn’t a treatment strategy. Because it doesn’t impact it — you know, that’s between me and them and God. But the patient has nothing to do with it. And so over the years as the prices have gone up, and as we’ve all kind of branched out and started to look at different supplement companies and go, huh — I wonder, maybe there is something we could do different. Maybe that’s a possibility. All with the intention of doing this in the best interest of the patient.
But the prices are going up. And so if you were even on the borderline about being mad about it and then that happens, then you just go off in the weeds all mad. And I get it. A lot of the products that have gone up the most have been on the MediHerb side — and that’s understandable, but you feel it, the patient feels it, and then you start looking for other things that might be more economical for the patient that will still do a good job.
But when you’re doing a multi-supplement protocol, it kind of adds up fast. And pretty soon we’re starting to have a conversation: do I really need to do this or not? I mean, there are still practitioners that are using 100% Standard Process and MediHerb, and I’m like, you go — you do you. And I’m good with that. Some of my protocols sometimes are all Standard Process and MediHerb, everything I’m giving the patient. That’s not as common as it used to be, because as the prices have gone up and people’s discretionary income has gone down, I think we have a responsibility — and you would agree — to be fiscally responsible with their investment in their health.
Now, if I’m frustrated with the pricing, first of all, Charlie Dubois, the president of Standard Process, did not ask my opinion. As he shouldn’t. He doesn’t need to. He gets to make whatever he feels is the best decision for his company. Just like you get to make the best decision for your company. Just like I talked about with the podcast — this is the best decision for me, and someone might not like it. But I can’t run a business based on whether someone’s gonna like everything I do. You know this. Sometimes you have to fire people, sometimes you have to make cuts, sometimes you have to fire a patient because it’s the right thing to do.
So I want to take the emotional charge out of this and start looking at it from a very clinical, let’s-get-the-facts-and-make-a-decision place. That’s all. We can’t just assume they’re greedy and they don’t care and they’re just raising prices. You don’t know that for a hundred percent sure. I kind of doubt it.
You could say, well, I’m not gonna give them my money — forget it, I’m just gonna go somewhere else. And hey, you’re allowed to do that. But when you do that and you cut off your nose to spite your face — or cut off the patient’s nose to spite their face — when you know something from that supplement company is really the right thing for the patient, but you’re just like, eh, I’m mad, I’m not gonna do it — I don’t think that’s a clinically sound decision. That’s an emotional reaction. We have to separate those two. And I know some of you are gonna be mad at me, and that’s okay. I love you. I’m fine with that.
But if you’re switching companies out of resentment, that’s not being mature in the decision-making process. We’re doing it emotionally. And I could have done that. I could have totally done that eight years ago when they kicked me in the gut. I could have done that, but I didn’t — because I knew what was important to me was to do the right thing for the patient. I’m not saying none of you are doing what’s right for the patient. I’m just asking — based on what I saw in that Facebook group post, people were hot and lit — we have to ask the question: what does the patient really need?
What is the best option for the patient? Is a product from Standard Process or MediHerb replaceable with something else that might be more economical? If it’s great and it’s gonna get the same result, wonderful. And if it’s not, then I would argue — if you can’t find anything to substitute for that — then in the best interest of the patient, Standard Process and MediHerb might be where you need to be.
So let me tell you what I did with the pricing data. I went back and looked for price sheets that I had, and I was missing a couple of years — I don’t know what happened to them, but we always keep them. I had price sheets from 2022, May 2023, and then 2026. I threw all of those at ChatGPT and said, all right, here’s the thing — everybody’s mad about this. I need you to analyze this data, because that’s not my strength, but that’s what AI does really well. I said, analyze the data and give it back to me in a way I can explain it and understand it myself.
Here’s what the numbers basically said. When Standard Process — and you all know they import MediHerb from overseas — so the herbal products have always been more expensive. But now with whatever it is — transportation costs, drought, supply chain, tariffs, raw material availability, shipping freight, import costs, international trade pressure — I don’t know, and it’s not my job to know. But what I do know is that there are factors out there out of our control. Some of them Standard Process may not have to deal with on the Standard Process side — I’m talking about the MediHerb side specifically. Sometimes there are variables in there that we know nothing about.
It only makes sense that the MediHerb products would be more expensive because A, they’re coming from overseas; B, they’re herbal — not food-based, they’re herbal. You have to process the herbs. They source them from all over the world. So there’s also that international trade pressure between countries. What happens if one country shuts down and they have to source from somewhere else, but that somewhere else is more expensive? That’s gonna pass on to us. It’s not because anybody’s being greedy — it’s just the way it is. And we can’t be mad about that and then go, well, I’m not gonna do right by the patient because I’m just mad.
So when I started to look at the numbers, here’s where they panned out. On the MediHerb side, they definitely were higher. But if I split out the Standard Process products from the MediHerb ones, the Standard Process ones didn’t go up that much. The MediHerb ones did. One of the highest that went up was Tribulus — way up. Ashwagandha went up pretty good. Batonwood went up pretty much. I think Digest Forte was up 12% over 2022.
But let’s just say for kicks and grins that Digest Forte is, let’s say, $20. If it goes up 12% — did anybody wanna do the math on that? For those of you in the back of the room, let’s just round it down to 10%. That’s two bucks. It went from $20 to $22. Is that really something you’re gonna get mad about? I think sometimes we hear “price increase” and it just triggers us — when it might only be $2. That’s what an average is. Some are gonna be way low and some are gonna be higher. The ones that went up significantly across the board were the MediHerb ones. And I get it.
I want to be fair about this. I don’t think there’s a reason we need to be upset. I think we just have to have context about it. I’m not minimizing the fact that we have to make different decisions than we used to. Some products are harder to justify carrying in your inventory. And yes, we have to be more intentional about what we recommend. That’s all. That’s what it means.
I think there’s also something else underlying in this. Some of us have come to the realization that maybe we weren’t told the truth all along. For those of us that were Standard Process loyalists — some of us kind of went along with it, we were deeply trained into that way of thinking. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But when it becomes blind allegiance — which for me, honestly, it really was blind allegiance — when all of a sudden those blinders come off and you go, oh wow, there really is something else out there, you can’t be mad. I’m the one that chose to be in that. I just had to make some different choices. And I make those choices based on what works for the patient.
It’s like going to the grocery store. It’s no different. There’s a local place here in Seattle — a local market — and it is amazing. It’s like eye candy. You just wanna walk through it. It’s the best-designed store. You don’t even wanna leave. You wanna buy everything. That’s how you know they’ve hooked you emotionally. They’re probably spraying some kind of scent or something that’s making you wanna spend money. But you walk in and you think, oh, I just want all the things — and your cart’s full and it’s like $400 for three bags. Crazy expensive. But everybody loves going there. They’re willing to spend the extra money.
Whereas you have someone else who’s like, I’m sorry, I don’t have that kind of discretionary income — I gotta go to Whole Foods. And then you have somebody else who says, mm, I can’t do Whole Foods, too expensive, I’ve gotta go to Walmart. Lord have mercy. Please hope we never have that happen with a patient. But we all have to make decisions about how we spend our money — and so do we.
So it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It doesn’t have to be a big fat no to Standard Process. Yeah, I don’t love that their prices went up either. But the other companies are raising their prices too. And when we already have a little bit of a chip on our shoulder — and I kind of do, although I’m over it, I’m not mad — I wish there could be some reconciliation, because no one from Standard Process has ever been willing to even have a conversation with me. So it’s all right. I didn’t let that get in my way because I had to say, all right, when the prices started to go up, and I started to realize there were other supplement lines I didn’t know about — like Doctors Research, like Gaia, like Biotics, like Premier Research, like Systemic Formulas — they’re all great companies in their own right. They all do different things.
I think Standard Process just kind of had a — I don’t wanna say cult, I don’t mean that, I just don’t know another word for it. Like a place where we were all just standing there with our mouths open, drinking from the same faucet. We just had all the things. I think they had it good for a while, and then they didn’t. And they did some things that lost a lot of us, made some of us kind of mad — the OG people. But you have a right to think, you have a right to compare, you have a right to choose intentionally. We just always have to choose what’s right and best for the patient.
If another company has a good substitute for a product and it’ll work and it’s half the price, I’m all in. But if there’s something I can only get from MediHerb — like for instance, I just put a patient on Tribulus because I needed it. I have not found a Tribulus that works as well for what we used to call the core four, or the five-to-fourteen protocol — where we use Tribulus days five through fourteen of the menstrual cycle. I’ve tried other Tribulus products. I can’t get the same result.
I know that thing is expensive, but I tell the patient, okay, look — we are only gonna have to do this for a few months, which is true, and you’re gonna go through about one bottle per cycle. So just put that in your budget. Let’s plan for that. We’re gonna do this for three or four months, and then we’re done. Now there’s context. Now the patient’s like, oh, okay, this is expensive, but okay — I can do this. Because I gave framework around it. I gave context around it. I don’t want the patient to have to pay for something they don’t absolutely need. But when I know for a fact there’s nothing else like it — it’s like the stealth pathogen protocol, for those of you that know what I’m talking about. I’ve tried Doctors Research. I’ve tried some of the CellCore stuff. As far as what I’m trying to do with the stealth pathogen protocol, I can’t find anything that works as good. So I’m still doing it. And it’s kind of expensive for the patient, but I just frame it for them. I say, listen, this is what we have to do. This is why we’re gonna do this for three months. Here’s what your cost is gonna be for three months. I tell them exactly what it’s gonna be. This is roughly what it’s gonna average out per month. This is what we need to do, and then we’re gonna stop at three months and reevaluate — do we need to continue or not? Fingers crossed we don’t have to.
I don’t want my decisions to be based in emotion. I also cannot make decisions based on what I’m assuming about their wallet. And that is a conversation for another day. But I can’t do that — none of my business. Maybe they just went and bought a brand new $1,500 cell phone, or they just went on some big fancy vacation. But then they come into my office and they’re like, oh, it’s so expensive. I’m gonna recommend what I think is best for you. You get to choose whether you want to go along with the program or not. I will not make a recommendation based on price alone. I will always make a recommendation based on whether I think it’s gonna work. And that’s what I want you to do as well.
So for those of you that are still mad and all sad about Standard Process and MediHerb — just gotta let it go. If you can find something else that works, great — do it. I’m all in. But what does the patient need? What are you willing to do for the patient, even if it makes you a little uncomfortable because you’re mad? Get over the mad. It’s not worth it.
So here are the five questions I think we need to be asking, and then we’ll wrap it up.
Number one: Is this supplement I’m recommending the one that’s best for the patient — not the one I’m emotionally attached to, not the one I was trained on for 20 years, not the most comfortable one — is this the best one for the patient?
Number two: Is there a substitute that might cost less? Fair question. Not a cheap substitute — I’m not talking about Costco, CVS, or Walgreens. Not some watered-down version with a bunch of filler. I mean a product that’s gonna do a good job. Is there a substitute that will cost less?
Number three: Is this one of the products that’s really gonna be hard to replace? For me, Tribulus. For me, MediHerb Echinacea Premium and MediHerb Artemisinin — those are hard to replace. I’ve not yet found an echinacea that works like that one. Although I think Gaia has a good one. And then there’s always mushrooms — Real Mushrooms. But you have to ask: is this a non-negotiable product, or is there something else I can get for the patient that’ll work the same?
Number four: Can I simplify the rest of the protocol to allow the patient to have maybe one thing that’s a little bit more expensive and then cut back somewhere else? Like maybe I’ll say, okay, you need Tribulus, but I’m going to use this other product here so it makes the Tribulus balance out.
And number five: Am I making this decision because I’m irritated, or because I just have an attitude about it — or is it because I’m in a good place and I’m making the decision for the right reason? Because that clears up a lot of the nonsensical thinking. I would never switch brands just to punish a company. That doesn’t even make sense. I’m not a grudge person. I don’t think you all are either. But some of those comments in the Facebook group — I get it, I’m not judgy — I just think we have to go, okay, prices go up. That’s just what happens. And at the end of the day, we get to decide.
Sometimes there are products that are just expensive, but they work. Period. There are some enzymes that cost hundreds of dollars, and I will use them if I need to. I don’t have to use them very often, but I will if I need to. Because I know they work, and I don’t have to use them for very long. It’s kind of like taking a shortcut — you take something for six months at a lower price, versus three months at something more potent. Do the math. More often than not, the higher-priced item for a shorter period of time almost always comes out to be economically the winner. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But I just want you to think about the choices you’re making.
I know you would never intentionally choose a supplement that would be wrong for a patient. I know that. But I just want you to think about why you are making the decision that you’re making. Is it because you’re mad, or is it because there really is a better option and you don’t want to choose a higher-priced item? It’s okay.
I still think Standard Process and MediHerb products are great. Yeah, are there some that are cleaner? Absolutely — we learned that. Doctors Research is super clean. We learned this. But sometimes there are just some products over there that are tried and true. I’ve been taking some of them for 20 years and I’m not dead, so that tells me they can’t be that bad. In Clinical Academy, most of the recommendations in there — because I started Clinical Academy in early 2019, it’s been around seven years now — when I started, that was all I was using. So there are lots of Standard Process recommendations in there. But as the content has been updated over the years, new content comes out and I’m starting to blend in some of these other supplement companies because I see they work just as well. So that’s just where I am.
[CLOSING]
Ronda Nelson: I just — I couldn’t let this go untouched. I couldn’t not have this conversation because it was so saucy. So take what serves you. Chew up the meat and spit out the bones, my friend. You do whatever you feel is right for you. And if you still wanna be mad, it’s okay. We can still be friends. And if you wanna be mad at me, you can be mad at me too. That’s okay. I still love you. I’m good. But don’t forget — it’s always about what’s in the best interest of the patient.
Since 2022 to 2026, that’s four years of price data that I had, and in four years, only one product went up over 40%. I think that was Tribulus. Some of the others — like Digest Forte — 12% over four years. Really? We’re gonna get mad about that? I think we get triggered when we see “price increase, price increase,” and we go, can’t believe it — when it might only be $2. To me, that’s not worth being mad about. If it went from 2022 price all the way to 2026 price in one day, I might be having a different conversation with you. But this is a four-year spread. A gradual increase. And it should be. Have your prices gone up in four years? Yes — hopefully you’ve raised your rates in that four-year period. Has the interest rate gone up? Yep. Everything goes up. Gas is up. Food is up. Everything’s up. So why are we mad?
Okay. I’m done talking about it. If this resonated with you, send me an email — I would really love to know your thoughts, because it did get really spicy in the Facebook group. You can reach me at
Let’s see if we can de-spice this, shall we? Next week I will be back with a surprise for you. So stay tuned. See you next week.
[END]