If health is only on your radar when something is wrong you might not be valuing it as you should. Steer your crew of conscious intention, commitment, and passion to a life of health; true healing, illness prevention, longevity, and well-being. So, What’s Functional Medicine?
Functional Medicine gives you the tools you need to feel in charge of your health and to more fully understand your body. In the following article Dr. Chris explains Functional Medicine and its benefits while comparing it to Traditional Medicine.
What is Functional Medicine?
Functional Medicine is a “systems” based approach to evaluating and treating the mind and body. Functional Medicine recognizes that all the systems in the body work together and must be evaluated together to find the root cause of illness and to help the body return to an innate state of healing.
Most of us recognize illness when we have symptoms. Chronic Symptoms indicate an imbalance in one or more of the body’s systems, and may begin after a traumatic event or sustained emotional stress. This stress can cause underlying conditions that have been developing over time to worsen. Many underlying conditions start with physical stress caused by constant exposure to toxins in our environment: food, water, and air.
The mind and body’s response to stress is to produce increased amounts of stress hormones like cortisol. High levels of cortisol combined with poor dietary choices and sedentary lifestyle cause the gut to break down leading to food sensitivity, allergy, autoimmunity and more. Over time this leads to poor liver function and poor detoxification, which leads to systemic inflammation. Inflammation causes cellular death, and can result in pain, fatigue, compromised brain function, leaky gut, and poor sleep.
Traditional Western Medicine
Traditional Western Medicine is generally a “symptoms” based approach to treating illness, often with medication as the first response. The purpose of pharmaceutical medication is to help relieve symptoms, not necessarily address the underlying cause of illness. Pharmaceutical medication can give the patient a false sense of security and healing. Meanwhile the patient continues the daily activities that lead to the development of the condition in the first place until the medication can no longer hide the symptoms. Now, other more serious problems have developed and the patient slips into a worsening health state.
For the most part Traditional Medicine practitioners are not trained to consider all of the pieces and to evaluate all of the processes that have led to a chronic condition that does not respond to medication alone. They are not trained to deal with chronic illness, as much as a list of well-known diseases or symptoms that have an established protocol of treatment. When you don’t fit into one of those lists, treatment often fails.
The Benefits of Functional Medicine
True Functional Medicine utilizes patient history, physical exam, and comprehensive lab analysis to identify the root cause of illness. By carefully tracing the onset of current conditions, a Functional Medicine practitioner can help the patient understand the process that led to compromised health and begin the process of lifestyle correction to bring balance back to the mind and body. This may involve the use of supplementation, herbs, oxygen based therapies, energy medicine, exercise, meditation, dietary changes and more.
At Integrated Wellness, we focus on the history of your health as you relate your journey that led you to seek our help. This allows us to see the bigger picture and to begin the process of helping you to make appropriate changes and to use appropriate methods that will break the stress cycle, heal the gut, balance the immune system, activate and heal the liver and bring balance back to the mind and body. This results in your body healing naturally, the way that it was created to do.
So, understanding that your crew follows your orders and the vessel is at your command, what are your values and where’s your destination? As the captain of your ship we invite you to steer towards a life of health and wholeheartedness.
We hope that you will give us a try and see if our methods will help you rediscover your health. Your crew is ready, willing and able and await your command.
