Monica Lewis with Southern Live Oak Wellness and Kaila Caldwell with Prime IV Hydration

Intro: [00:00:07] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Sandy Springs, Georgia. It’s time for Chamber Spotlight, brought to you by Southern Live Oak Wellness, providing quality mental health treatment to a population in dire need of being treated as equal. For more information, go to Southern Live Oak wellness.com. Now here’s your host.

Lola Okunola: [00:00:42] Welcome everyone to the Chamber Spotlight Podcast, brought to you by Southern Live Oak Wellness. I’m your host, Lola Okunola, and I’m excited to kick off our inaugural show. Today in this series, we’re going to introduce you to some of our new chamber members, share insights about their businesses, and explore potential referral opportunities. Our inaugural episode features two fantastic guests, each bringing their unique expertise to the table. We have Monica, a counselor and marketing director of Southern Live Oak Wellness. Kaila, the owner of Prime IV Hydration and Wellness. We’ll dive into their backgrounds, the services they offer, and explore how they can collaborate with one another, with chamber members and the Sandy Springs perimeter community at large. To start things off, let’s get to know our guests a bit better. Monica, could you tell us a bit about your background and what SLOW is?

Monica Lewis: [00:01:57] Slow is the short version of Southern Live Oak Wellness.

Lola Okunola: [00:02:02] Tell us about slow and what you do there.

Monica Lewis: [00:02:06] Yeah. Of course. Thank you for having me. And I will refer to it as slow from this point forward, because the Southern Live Oak Wellness is a mouthful. So I, like you said, am a fully licensed professional counselor. I started my career working at a psychiatric hospital, which is short term mental health help for people who are in a crisis situation and did not love it, mostly because it’s just not a length of time in which you can actually see progress. And for people to really explore what’s going on and things like that. It’s mostly for medication management and then they’re discharged to other options. And so I went to work for a residential substance abuse facility as a therapist, and really loved that because you could see a little bit more of their progress. And then when I got the opportunity to kind of get back into the mental health primary world through slow, I kind of jumped on that. And slow is just a really amazing organization. Like the owners, the founders, every member of our staff is so committed to really helping people who struggle with significant mental health. So we have clients that struggle with depression. We have clients that struggle with anxiety, with trauma, and then we also have clients that struggle with kind of more severe mental health illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar, where they have like significant mania or psychotic features. And what I love about our program is every client really does get individualized care.

Monica Lewis: [00:03:36] We offer kind of traditional therapeutic modalities, you know, group therapy, individual therapy. We do some family therapy as well. They’ll get medication management. But then we really hone in and focus on more holistic modalities that they can utilize, like meditation, like yoga. We do Reiki, those types of things as well as some more. I’m going to call them technologically advanced modalities. So we have like bio sound therapy, which is like this really cool like bed that they lay in that uses like theta waves to stimulate different areas of the brain. And we are a provider of like TMS, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is a mouthful, but it’s shown for clients who are like medication resistant towards, you know, antidepressants. It’s incredibly helpful for them because it uses magnets to stimulate the parts of the brain that are way deep down, that aren’t able to respond to the medications. And each client is kind of seen as that individual. So we look at them and what’s going on with them and make the recommendations based off that. We don’t have, like a set, like every client is going to be with us for X amount of time. And we’ve had clients who have been with us for 30 days. We’ve had clients who have been with us for six months. It just really depends on how they’re progressing, what their needs are and really like what they want for their life and their stability, and getting them on like the best path to being able to maintain good mental health once they’re no longer with us.

Monica Lewis: [00:05:12] And so that’s just a really kind of like my favorite part of us as a program. I just think that, you know, there’s so many issues in the mental health world. We’re here on an interesting day filming the podcast, because there was just a mass shooting in Maine. Yeah. And one of the initial news articles has already kind of revealed that that individual in July was at a psychiatric unit for two weeks with visual and audio hallucinations and was having some homicidal ideations to commit a mass shooting. And unfortunately, it seems as if, like the mental health care system has kind of failed in this regard. And I wish that that was rare. But unfortunately, I think a lot of times, while it’s not as severe as a mass shooting, I think a lot of times the mental health care system fails and people don’t get the adequate level of care. They don’t get the amount of time and services that they need. And a lot of that has to do with insurance companies, which is a whole nother Ted talk and tangent. I could go on, but I mean, it’s it’s one of those things that if there was a slow in every community and everybody had access to that. It just makes you think about, like, how much better we could be. Yeah, yeah.

Lola Okunola: [00:06:33] Wow. That’s great Monica. Mental wellness is so important and we’re glad to have you in our community. With that, I wanted to ask. I mean, I know we don’t have enough time to solve the problems of the world, obviously, but, like, are there things that you think we could do to prevent, like mental illness or like to at least reduce it because we’re hearing more and more about it, as you said. And it is it’s right in our faces. I mean, the effects of mental illness. I mean, it could be very dangerous. It has proven to be very dangerous. So like, what are some tips or what are some things that you could just kind of share with our listeners, you know?

Monica Lewis: [00:07:23] Yeah, I mean, obviously not everybody who struggles with mental health issues is going to commit a mass shooting. But, I mean, I think that some of the ways that we could just be better as a society with mental health in general is being more accepting of when people are struggling. I think, and it’s kind of a generational thing. Right? So like as we’ve gone through generations, it seems to be becoming more normalized for people to struggle with mental health. But there was periods of time where it was kind of like a it doesn’t matter what traumatic event happened, it doesn’t matter how you’re feeling. You’re just supposed to like, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and like, keep going. And it’s like, that’s not really an effective way to have people really, like move on. They don’t move on. They don’t heal from that. They just shove it further down and it continues to cause lifelong issues. And. I’m super excited. Kyle is here because nutrition is actually a huge part of that. And like vitamins and those types of things, because the better you treat your body, the better you like feed your body and your brain, kind of the more resilient you are to some mental health issues. There’s obviously a genetic component that nobody really can control. But I think if just in general, people were more kind to those who suffered with mental health and looked at it as something with empathy, that like, these people need to be treated with kindness and with assistance to get the help that they need.

Monica Lewis: [00:08:56] We could circumvent some of the bigger problems, like if somebody who was first starting to feel depressed, felt comfortable enough to go into therapy immediately, rather than feeling like they had to hide that and keep pushing forward. It might prevent a suicide attempt later down the line. And then a large part of that is access to resources. If you look even specifically in the state of Georgia, there’s not enough resources. I mean, 1.4 million people in the state of Georgia suffer from mental health issues. And I promise you, there’s not enough providers to see all of those people. And so that’s part of the issue as well, is like, there’s just not. Enough people going into the mental health field to serve all the people suffering from mental health. And it’s only kind of continued to get worse since, you know, the internet has taken off and now there’s like cyberbullying, which was never a problem before. And there’s all this, you know, media in your face to show you what you don’t look like or what you don’t have. And then, of course, you know, the pandemic kind of changed a lot for a lot of people as well. Yeah.

Lola Okunola: [00:10:08] Wow. Thank you so much, Monica. We’re now going to move on to our next guest, Kaila. Kaila, can you tell us about Prime IV Hydration?

Kaila Caldwell: [00:10:20] Yes. Thanks for having me. I’m Kayla Caldwell, the owner of Prime IV Wellness and Hydration, and I am located in Sandy Springs. We are a franchise, so there will be about 44 locations across the state of Georgia over the next several years. Opening up. Our location is the third location to open in the state of Georgia, so we’re really excited about that. We should be open in a few weeks early part of November. And so our core business is IP hydration. So that’s where we give you the equivalent of about two and a half gallons of water through an IV bag. And what we do is include other nutrients and vitamins in it. So it can really take the replacement or the substitute. You having to take oral vitamins on a daily basis. Studies show that oral vitamins you only absorb about 10% of the nutrients, whereas with IV hydration it’s 100% absorption. So instead of having to take your multivitamin on a daily basis, you can come and get a drip two once or twice a month. And that will alleviate you having to take those vitamins. So that’s the core of our business. In addition to IV hydration, we also have injections. So we do injections for like vitamin D, vitamin C, biotin which is good for your hair and nails. We do magnesium which is good for sleep. So sometimes speaking of health and wellness, a lot of people do have outside stressors in life and have a hard time sleeping so that magnesium, zinc, things like that can help you get a restful night’s sleep.

Kaila Caldwell: [00:12:21] So we offer that. Another thing that our location is going to offer is cryotherapy. So that’s a lot of fun. It’s super cold and it is the equivalent of taking like a 20 minute ice bath. So a lot of athletes and those who are recovering from like ten KS marathons, triathlons, they come and do the cryotherapy. So instead of having to sit in an ice bath for 20 minutes or 15 minutes, you get in this chamber for about a minute and a half. So three minutes max, and it does the same thing. So it’s really great. I would recommend it for anyone who is a super athlete or just someone who wants to try it out. So that’s another thing we’ll offer. In addition to that, we’re also going to offer peptides. So everyone has probably heard about semaglutide and how it can assist you in weight loss. And so that is also something that we’ll be offering. So we have a lot of different offerings. We also also we also offer Nad+. And Nadp+ is a rejuvenation therapy. So it allows you to kind of turn back the clock and help rejuvenate your cells. So that’s that’s a good offering. So those are the core things that we’ll be offering right now as we grow as a franchise. I’m sure there’ll be other things that will add on, but it’s just really important to stay hydrated so that you can just feel your best and perform your best in your daily activities. So that’s what we’re here to do.

Lola Okunola: [00:14:09] Awesome. It really, really sounds so awesome. Like I cannot wait for you to open. It sounds like a really valuable service. And you know, I love that both of you, Monica and Kyla are both in the wellness space. I mean you, Monica mental wellness and Kyla is more physical, but their synergies here, right? And as Monica mentioned earlier, you know some of the mental illness issues stem from, you know, not having the right nutrients. So I want us to kind of talk about how both of your businesses kind of could come together in some shape or form, like, you know, do you see any kind of collaboration that you could do or knowledge sharing anything like that?

Kaila Caldwell: [00:15:01] Yeah, absolutely. So we look to partner with similar businesses. So definitely people in the health and wellness aspect. So I’m thinking we can definitely either put together a package or a plan that we could promote to your clients that would, you know, need some type of hydration or injections or whatever services that they may know that they’re lacking. We can definitely do that. We’ve done it in the past at other locations across the nation, and they make specific trips just for other businesses, and they’ll come up with a cute name for it and just market it towards your clients. So it could be, you know, the slow drip or, you know, whatever that we want to name it. We’ve also had opportunities where we do mobile services so we could partner that way where we come to your location, maybe you’re having an anniversary event or some type of event celebration, and you want to offer injections or drips as part of the celebration. Other franchisees have done that in the past, so that’s something we can do as well. We would love for your clients to come into our location so they can get the full spa experience. That is something that sets us apart from other hydration and wellness therapies. Around town is we are a spa versus a clinic. So in a spa, from the minute you walk in, it’s we call it the one hour vacation. So we cater to your senses, whether it’s your the sense of smell. So when you walk in we have a signature scent. So we want your clients to smell that. We offer vitamin infused water for taste. We have our signature radio station. We have full body massage chairs. So the whole thing. Right. We offer oxygen. So we would love to partner with your clients and have them to come in and experience the spa, and also to come to your location and be a part of any celebration that you may be having.

Monica Lewis: [00:17:12] Yeah. No, I mean, I think that sounds amazing. It’s something I would love to be able to offer to our clients. We have kind of multiple levels of care. So in one of our levels of care it’s residential. So they’re with us for like the full 30 days. And so that one would probably be better for you guys to come to us. But I think it would be really amazing. We also have an alumni program, so we do like events with them. So we could potentially partner to do like an alumni event where we have clients get hydration and or former clients, I should say, because we do like to really focus on like all ways in which somebody can promote general like wellbeing.

Kaila Caldwell: [00:17:55] Okay. Sounds good.

Lola Okunola: [00:17:58] Wow. We’ve explored some exciting collaboration opportunities here. Now, before we wrap up, let’s discuss potential referral scenarios. So Monica and Kyla, can you share the types of referrals you’re looking for within the chamber? Monica you want to go first? Sure.

Monica Lewis: [00:18:18] I think for Southern Live Oak Wellness, like her main goal is just to be a resource for the community. So we offer residential level of care. We also offer some outpatient levels of care like day programing, half day programing, things like that. But we’re happy to be a resource. If you just as yourself or have a family member or an employee or a friend or whoever that just you notice might be struggling. Like we are always happy to be a resource, so you’re more than welcome to reach out to us. Our website is Southern Live Oak wellness.com. There’s a contact form if you just want to reach out in a gentle way at first or our phone numbers on there, and we’re happy to kind of just help navigate what that looks like, we can do an assessment to figure out maybe what’s the best path for somebody, whether that’s, you know, full residential treatment, or maybe they just need to start seeing a therapist and see if that is what is beneficial to them. But yeah, like our goal in general is just how can we help the mental health crisis and the lack of services by just being in general, like a place for people to reach out to and say, I’m not really sure what I need, but I know I need something.

Lola Okunola: [00:19:41] That sounds great. Monica. Thank you. Kayla.

Kaila Caldwell: [00:19:44] Yes. So a great referral for us is anyone who’s looking for a better way of living. So we start as early as the teenage years and we go all the way up until 100. So we are really looking for anyone who wants to feel better, look better, perform better, and they can do that through hydration. So we partner with schools, local schools, their athletic departments. So that’s for the adolescent age. We partner with senior living communities and make sure that our senior citizens are staying hydrated, and we partner with anyone in between. So really just the common people who are looking to stay well and stay healthy.

Lola Okunola: [00:20:35] Thank you Monica and Kayla for sharing your insights and potential referral opportunities. This has been a fantastic first episode of Chamber Spotlight. We hope our chamber members can connect, collaborate, and grow together. We’d like to thank our sponsor again, Southern Live Oak Wellness, for supporting this podcast. And to our listeners, if you’re interested in becoming a member of the chamber or have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Stay tuned for future episodes where we’ll continue to shed light on our chamber members businesses and create opportunities for growth and collaboration. Until then, stay connected and stay well.