Never Stop Learning:
A Back-to-School Look Through the Webinar Wednesday Archives

We are home from another Back to School for Doctors™ and, as usual, there is a lot to unpack.

There are the notebooks full of things we want to look up again. Conversations that continued well beyond the scheduled sessions. People we were genuinely happy to see. New faces we hope will be back next year. And plenty of moments when something Mark or another speaker said sent us scrambling for a pen.

But there is something else that happens at BTSfD that is harder to capture in a set of notes.

Mark often mentions the significance of this live event having its own special impact because of the fact that we are “enjoying the friendship, camaraderie, and passions that we share for this work…it just amplifies when we feel each other’s energy.”

We most definitely felt that again this year.

And now that everyone has packed up, gone home, and started sorting through what they learned, we have been thinking about the idea behind the event itself.

Going back to school.

What does that mean when you have already been studying nutrition for 10, 20, 30, or even 50 years?

We looked into the Webinar Wednesday archives to find out. What we found was a reminder that learning this material is never really finished.

Sometimes You Need to Go Back Before You Can Move Forward

BTS 2023 Review — September 20, 2023

Just days after BTSfD 2023 wrapped up in Loveland, Colorado, Mark opened the following Webinar Wednesday by calling it “A wonderful Back to School for Doctor’s class.”

That webinar gave attendees another opportunity to think about what they had just heard. And that pattern has shown up more than once in the archive. BTSfD ends, but the exploration does not. That may be one of the most useful things about a seminar like BTSfD. A good class can answer questions. A really good one gives you better questions to take home.

The longer you work with nutritional concepts and physiology, the more likely it is that something familiar deserves another look. A principle you understood one way five years ago may carry considerably more meaning after another five years of working, studying, observing, and listening. That makes “back to school” a surprisingly literal description.

We are returning to material, certainly. We are also returning to it with more experience than we had the last time. And Mark is always bringing us up to date on current studies and research that confirms what is true of Dr. Lee’s foundational body of research.

Some of the Best Lessons Begin with a Question

Q&A with Mark and Dr. Lowell Keppel — September 4, 2024

There was no elaborate presentation waiting when this Webinar Wednesday began. Mark and Dr. Lowell Keppel were on the screen together, ready for what Mark described as an impromptu Q&A session. That format says something important about continuing education. There comes a point when learning cannot consist entirely of someone standing at the front of a room delivering information. Sometimes you need to ask. Sometimes you need to hear how two experienced educators approach the same question.

Mark and Dr. Keppel have known and worked with each other since the early 1990s, and near the end of the webinar, Mark told him that working together was “…very, very complimentary to the way I like to teach and approach things.”

Dr. Keppel’s response was just as telling: “I’ve had a great mentor.”

There is a lot contained in that little exchange.

Education gets passed along through books and lectures, but also through mentorship, questions, conversations, and years of working alongside people who make us think more carefully. BTSfD gives us several days of exactly that. Webinar Wednesday keeps the conversation going after everyone heads home.

When the Questions Follow You Home

Q+A from BTS 2019 — February 19, 2020

Here is one of our favorite finds in the archive.

Months after BTSfD 2019, Mark devoted a Webinar Wednesday to questions that had come up during the event. Written answers had already been sent to attendees, but Mark wanted to return to them and review them again.

Think about that for a moment.

The class had ended. The questions had been answered. Yet they were still worth revisiting. This is where an archive like Webinar Wednesday becomes particularly useful. It gives an idea of somewhere to go next.

A question raised at BTSfD can become a later webinar discussion. That webinar may send someone back to an older presentation, a Dr. Royal Lee recording, their BTSfD notes, or a piece of historical literature. What looked like the end of a lesson becomes the beginning of another one.

And if you have ever come home from BTSfD with several pages of notes and the realization that you now have more things you want to investigate than when you arrived, you already understand the feeling.

The Fundamentals Get More Interesting with Time

Clinical Pearls from Dr. Royal Lee, Part 2 — September 3, 2025

This may be the webinar that says it best.

Mark was continuing a series built around recordings of Dr. Royal Lee. The source material was archival. The audience had heard Mark discuss Dr. Lee many times before. It would have been easy to assume that experienced practitioners had already covered the fundamentals.

Mark saw it differently:

“The higher you go in any sphere of learning, the more fundamental data gains new meaning.”

A few moments later, he explained why: “So much is built on the fundamentals.”

That idea has stayed with us.

There is a tendency to associate learning with accumulating something new: another study, another mechanism, another protocol, another product, another piece of information to apply in the clinic.

Experience can also send us backward, in the best possible way.

You hear something you first learned years ago and suddenly understand why it matters. You recognize a relationship you did not have enough context to see before. A Dr. Lee recording from decades ago lands differently because of what you have learned since the last time you heard it.

The information may be familiar. You are not the same student.

And Mark clearly wasn’t finished with those Clinical Pearls either. At the end of the presentation, he told listeners that he had “scores and scores of more examples” and invited them to mention it if they saw him at BTSfD.

The classroom keeps moving.

School Is Still in Session

This year’s BTSfD may be over, but we are not quite ready to close the notebook.

Part of that is because the friendship and camaraderie Mark has talked about over the years were very much alive again this year. Being in a room full of people who care about this work changes the experience. You hear what someone else has learned. You ask a question you had not thought to ask. You revisit something you were sure you understood.

Then everyone goes home and keeps learning.

That is another reason we keep returning to Webinar Wednesday. Across the archive, a question from one year can resurface years later. Dr. Royal Lee’s historical material can become the center of a new discussion. Mark can sit down with Dr. Keppel and let the questions lead. Fundamentals that seemed settled can acquire new meaning.

There is always another Wednesday.

Mark’s Webinar Wednesday sessions continue on the first and third Wednesday of each month, and the archive gives annual subscribers access to 149 webinars currently available, plus more added each month. If BTSfD left you with a notebook full of ideas you want to keep exploring, you already know where class continues.

Register for Mark Anderson’s Webinar Wednesday and we’ll see you at the next one.

Images from iStock/Aiman Dairabaeva (woman at the computer).