Functional Medicine and Nutritional Therapy
Conventional medicine focuses on minimizing the symptoms of diseases. This is fine as far as it goes, nobody likes symptoms. But if all you do is suppress symptoms without fixing the cause of a problem, you might end up with a problem that keeps coming back, or one that gets progressively worse. Conventional health care is great for temporary, acute problems, but, more and more, people are experiencing lingering chronic problems that require deeper intervention.
Functional medicine recognizes that symptoms happen when organs or systems in your body aren’t working right, when the function has deviated from normal. So we pay more attention to the root causes, the areas where function has declined or broken down, and work to fix those, trusting that your symptoms will resolve when your function improves.
We use diagnostic tools like laboratory tests , both traditional and specialized, and in-office reflex techniques, to measure things like digestive function, hormone balance, detoxification ability, and nutrient status, as well as standard blood and urine parameters, to get an understanding about what is going on in your body. Our treatments involve nutritional and lifestyle interventions rather than pharmaceutical drugs, together with the various other modalities in our arsenal. With these approaches we can often help with chronic conditions like allergies, fatigue, fibromyalgia, migraines, and irritable bowel, as well as “diseases of civilization” like obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and the like.
Functional medicine uses nutrition as a major form of treatment, because it is clear to us that many chronic illnesses stem in large measure from a diet of foods we are not designed to eat, grown in soil that has been depleted and poisoned by harsh chemicals, with the foods themselves genetically modified and tainted by the varied chemicals used on them, and often processed in a way that removes beneficial nutrition to promote longer shelf life, then packs them with additives and preservatives, and ships them long distances.
Because of these deficiencies created by modern agricultural practices, the functional medicine approach augments the dietary changes we recommend with targeted professional grade nutritional supplements to help you achieve your health goals.