Chronic Health Issues Part I: The Shift from Acute Care

Chronic Disease is on the Rise

The prevalence of chronic health conditions is rising at an alarming rate. In medicine over the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a shift in distinction from acute care issues, like heart attacks, strokes, and trauma, to more chronic health issues, like recurrent heart disease, neurological conditions, autoimmune diseases, cancer, chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety, and other brain-inflammation health problems. The good news is that we’ve learned to better treat acute-care issues.
 
Chronic health issues are now the most common problems we deal with. For example, half of us will die of some kind of heart disease. Neurological conditions are becoming quite common even in the very young. One out of 12 people has some form of autoimmune disease, like Hashimoto’s, hypothyroidism, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, while about 20% of Americans have a positive autoantibody. One out of two Americans currently is expected to get some kind of cancer in their lifetime. Neurological conditions used to be rare, but are now quite common and include Alzheimer’s disease, autism, PANDAS, ADHD, and many more.
 

How You Can Avoid the Wave of Chronic Health Issues

In the next few weeks, I’d like to talk about this shift into more chronic health issues like autoimmune diseases, mold, chronic infection, Lyme disease, and others. My intention here is to shed light on how the most basic lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, sleep, nutritional issues, environmental conditions, chemicals, and heavy metals can not only improve your health and wellness but also help prevent some of these chronic health issues that we are dealing with on an ongoing basis.
 
We’ve learned that factors such as gut-immune function and inflammation are directly related to these problems. And so I’d like to talk about the four major categories of chronic health issues and shine a light on how you can impact your inflammation, stress, and gut to improve your health and change the trajectory of your wellness.
 
Now that we understand how gut issues – impacted by food, stress, and sleep – account for many of these chronic health conditions, we are empowered to make the small changes over time that can have big effects on our health and wellness.
 

Coming up next…

So in this series, I’ll discuss these chronic health issues including mold, chronic infections, autoimmune diseases, and finally autoinflammatory illnesses. I’ll talk about what they are and how you can take charge of your health by starting to change small things in your life to maximize your health and wellness.
 
Please share this information if you find it to be helpful.
 
Take care and be well.
 
Since 2010, Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine has been helping people to restore their health and hope with an integrative approach to conventional and alternative medicine that’s entirely science-backed. We at RIFM believe everyone is made for health. We offer a comprehensive, in-person patient membership program to ensure you get access to the care you need to thrive.