FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE
THE FUTURE OF HEALTHCARE
Functional medicine is the future of healthcare. Another name for functional medicine is functional nutrition. Over the years we have gone to the doctor for care and treatment of our symptoms. A Functional medicine Doctor looks at the body as a whole and tries to find the root cause of those symptoms. I always said, “if a smoke alarm would go off at night and we climb on a ladder and take the battery out of the smoke alarm to turn it off and then climb back into bed and go to sleep, does that make sense?” Basically that is the same principle of most of the healthcare that we have been getting in our country. You have a headache, so you take a pain killer. You have stomach upset, so you take in an antacid. Your bowels don’t move well, so you take a laxative. You forget what may have set that alarm (Symptom) off in the first place. In functional medicine we look at the body as a whole, not as a collection of parts that are working individually, and we do not try to balance the body chemically with drugs. I have always said, “if medication made us healthy, how much medicine do we have to put in our body to make us really healthy.”
As you have probably already surmised, symptoms are a good thing not a bad thing. It is the body’s way to tell us something is wrong. The power that made the body heals the body. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. Functional medicine goes with the principal we are going to look at the body as a whole and not use symptoms as a guide. By using cutting edge testing and safe treatment the body has the ability to respond remarkably in a short period of time. Most illnesses and diseases are chronic and have not developed overnight. Symptoms are the response many times to failing systems within the body. The sooner we address those underlying causes, the better the chance of not only recovery from illness but also in the prevention of diseases.
A great example is someone who comes to us for extreme fatigue. One patient we may discover has toxic heavy metal overload, another thyroid deficiency, another leaky gut, adrenal fatigue, hormone deficiency, obesity, low blood sugar, chronic fatigue syndrome, and you get the picture. It’s not a good plan to give this patient a drug for depression for example, or sleep aid drugs. As you can see we have to treat this individual patient on a completely unique platform. By spending one-on-one time in a individualized manner of care we can attack the cause of the healthcare need not the symptom.
This is healthcare for the future and beyond. It’s not to support the drug companies, it’s not to treat symptoms, and it’s not to worry about the conflict of one drug versus another causing side effects and costly reactions. Remember, we have 5% of the world’s population in the United States taking 74% of the world’s pharmaceuticals but we were number 36 in life expectancy around the world last year.