FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE IN Saratoga
How would you benefit from functional medicine in Saratoga? While functional medicine has finally started moving into the main stream and gaining increased attention, it’s roots within traditional Chinese and Eastern medicine have been used for centuries to heal people.
Functional Medicine in Saratoga, CA
Functional medicine as we know it today has taken the best of Eastern and Western medicine through critically important development in medical science, and promises to revolutionize medicine as we know it.
This reactionary approach will show you how to use functional medicine to address the causes of your illness, rather than focusing on the symptoms.
It is also important to stress that this is NOT what you would consider to be alternative or integrative medicine. Functional Medicine is Science-based. This would mean it takes fundamental change in the way we think about health and disease. We no longer accept a health care system that is based on medicine treating disease oriented and through functional medicine we offer a viable approach in reversing this trend. How do we accomplish this? As all functional medicine practitioners, we seek to address and identify the root causes of disease and view the body as one whole integrated system, not a collection of independent organs. We treat the whole system, not just the symptoms.
Sadly our healthcare system has stayed stagnant in its approach to health care while the state of our health has changed significantly. When doctors treat the Name of the disease and not the Cause, we must realize that we are at a time when old ideas are becoming rapidly obsolete and it’s time to offer a viable approach to reversing this trend. We now know that we can accomplish this through better understanding of patient concerns while taking into account nutritional, metabolic, environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors.
While most doctors are taught that you either have a disease or you don’t and for every ill there is a pill, with its focus on managing symptoms, as a whole it has grown less effective at treating chronic diseases. Conventional medicine tends to break down and often miss the underlying causes and more subtle manifestations of illness and grows less effective at treating the current epidemics of chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and arthritis.
Even though the traditional approach to treatment was beneficial and successful in the 1920 with a short term treatment of medication or surgery, it can no longer continue to be an option in the time when treating current chronic diseases require a better approach.
Under Why the Shift?
As a practicing Chiropractor, which is a physically demanding job, I knew I had to take care of myself. For years I’ve exercised religiously, I’ve been a runner, a cyclist, a weigh lifter and a boot camper, I’ve also tried many different diets, (vegan, vegetarian, mediterranean, and sometimes the not so healthy) to try and maintain my health. And then a couple of years ago I started to have some mild stomach pain, as months went on the pain got worse and worse. My primary doctor sent me to specialist after specialist. They poked and prodded, using every tool and diagnostic study they had. After a couple visits to the emergency room, 2 colonoscopies, an endoscopy, a MRI, numerous blood tests and finally an ultrasound, It was determined that the cause of my symptoms was a hemangioma on my liver. A benign tumor with no treatments needed or available. But that was the end of it! As if the diagnosis was supposed to be the cure. I was basically told to deal with it… I was sent home with a shrug of the shoulders. These doctors did exactly what they were supposed to do, and they did it very well, they went above and beyond what the current medical model would allow, but I was still suffering. And I realized that nowhere along the line had anyone ever even suggested that I might be contributing through my diet or lifestyle choices. I realized that the problem was that modern medicine, while excellent in finding and treating life threatening diseases, isn’t useful with treating chronic diseases. They had successfully ruled out anything that would kill me, but I wasn’t any better. There had to be someone who had an answer. There had to be some kind of a solution. My frustration and experiences drove me to look further into the state of healthcare, and drove me to look for a different and better way.
This came at about the same time as I could no longer ignore the trends I had been seeing with my own patients:
They weren’t responding to care as quickly as I had previously experienced with similar conditions.
Many were coming to me asking what I knew or could do with their chronic conditions because I was an alternative provider and they had exhausted their medical options.
These people were in trouble, they felt horrible and truly sick, but as long as their conventional lab tests were normal or could be normalized with a verity of medications, they were considered healthy by their physicians. I decided someone had to do something, and after searching for the answers to their questions, and mine and looking through study after study for some way to help my patients, I stumbled onto a new treatment model, it was called Functional Medicine, and seemed to have the answers I was looking for. I knew I could help people live a happier, healthier and longer life by using the principles already being used by Functional Medicine practitioners. So I started digging into my options into Functional Medicine training and found the Institute for Functional Medicine, the worldwide leader in Functional Medicine training. Also at the time I was introduced to and started working with one of the pioneers in Functional Medicine, Dr. Daniel Kalish. It has been critical to have colleagues from many different disciplines, including MD’s, pharmacists, naturopaths and nurses all receiving the same training. I believe my training and now experience in Functional Medicine allows me to bring my patients cutting edge healthcare. I look forward to helping more people live longer and fuller lives. I know together with my patients we can change lives, theirs and others, for the better.
Why is Functional Medicine Unique?
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With chronic diseases currently spiraling out of control, it has been become increasingly obvious that a different health care approach is both needed and warranted. Instead of treating the disease once it is already present, doesn’t it make more sense to concentrate on preventing the condition in the first place? Functional medicine is unique in that it often focuses on variations in metabolism to both identify a predisposition to developing a condition and to discover the underlying cause if already present. As mentioned previously, functional medicine practitioner's concentrate on being your health care teacher. Can you remember a time your doctor truly educating you about your health care condition? Through this avenue, functional medicine practitioners will allow you to take back control of your health. After all, you are the one suffering from the condition, shouldn’t your treatment be focused on you and not the other people who have had similar problems?
Functional medicine is also one of the few health care choices that views the body as a whole. This is important considering that every single system in your body is dependent on the next to function properly. To take this holistic approach, these practitioners consider all variables including; your personal history, genetic make up, occupational, nutritional, and social factors. All of these factors play a role in the expression of health and disease.
Finally, once the cause of your condition has been discovered, functional medicine practitioners use the best from multiple health care disciplines to properly treat the cause. For example, after a careful diagnosis following the use of various imaging and laboratory testing, many practitioners utilize a combination of dietary changes, supplements, and exercise programs.
If you are interested in learning more about the functional medicine services we offer at Vital Principal in Memphis please call our team today.