A Real Answer for Chronic Disease

The majority of people have no idea how bad they feel or how significant a disruption that there is in their body until they start to feel better. Most individuals don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive issues, aches, pains, allergies, mood swings … are not just annoying symptoms but are early clues to underlying biological dysfunction that may develop into a full-blown disease over time. For example, we can detect arterial changes in teenagers that we will develop into cardiovascular and cerebrovascular (brain vessel) disease by their 50’s.

Traditional Medicine - also called Conventional Medicine - addresses illness at the end stages. If you have an acute illness, emergency, fracture, etc… then conventional acute care is the answer for you. But for the rest (which is the majority) chronic conditions are the norm. For these the answer is root cause analysis, or finding the root cause of their condition. This is the essence of Functional Medicine.

Functional Medicine - also called systems medicine or biologic medicine - is a movement on the cutting edge of an entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It provides a way of understanding all the influences on our biology that are at the root of illness and how our lifestyle and environment interact with our genes to create the imbalances or balances that are the real causes of disease.

Functional Medicine does not reduce disease to its component parts and thus into specialties. Instead, it views the entire ecology of the body and its environment. Disease is not something you ‘catch’ but is related to your genes, your diet, the environment, your lifestyle and your mental and spiritual health. Our body is a small ecosystem that is a part of a greater ecosystem. Through scientific advances in the last two decades we have been able to discover many of these relationships and Functional Medicine takes all the above into account when evaluating a person.