Tag Archives: functional medicine

Health Takes Guts®: Your Comprehensive Guide to Eliminating Digestive Issues, Anxiety, and Fatigue

Fix the root problem or dampen symptoms?

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We are approaching the one year anniversary of the release of my eBook: Health Takes Guts® Your Comprehensive Guide to Eliminating Digestive Issues, Anxiety, and Fatigue. In honor of that, I am going to publish the introduction of the eBook over two blog posts. Here is the first half of the introduction to my book. Enjoy!

So many people have unwanted unpleasant symptoms. Are you one of them? Do you want to stop feeling like crap? Of course, you do, but how? The way to do this is to fix the underlying cause of your problem. Treating symptoms while not searching for and treating the source of the problem is like using a bandage. Which makes more sense: taking a pain killer for a shard of glass in your thigh, or removing the shard of glass?

Conventional medicine is really good at some things. Personally, I can say that doctors have saved my life on more than one occasion. However, conventional medicine is not always useful for getting to the bottom of why certain illnesses are happening. Many conventional treatments are aimed at helping to ease symptoms and they fail to address the root causes.

Enter functional medicine and functional nutrition, which are focused on uncovering the underlying causes of symptoms in order to address and resolve the problem at its source.

When clients come to me, they tend to say the same types of things:

  • Their doctors don’t believe that diet matters
    • How can food, that stuff you put INTO your body all day every day, not matter? In fact, there is a ton of evidence that it does matter and can hurt or heal.
  • Their doctors don’t address their suffering because there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with them (this happens with: IBS, anxiety, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and so on) according to test results
  • Their doctors say there is no treatment for their problem, this illness is something to just live with, this isn’t something that can be fixed
  • Their doctors give them five different prescriptions—one for each symptom—with no attempt to address what is CAUSING the symptoms, and, of course, these prescriptions cause their own side effects.

Bloating, diarrhea, constipation, fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, pain (anywhere in body), skin rashes, hormone imbalances, and brain fog are symptoms. A symptom is an indication that something is going on in the body. A symptom is not the answer as to what is going on, it is a clue. Getting a prescription to dampen these symptoms doesn’t fix the reason why the symptoms are happening. That is like clearing smoke out of a burning room without putting out the fire.

Doesn’t putting out the fire sound like a better idea?

Well, that’s what this book is all about—resolving the problems at the root of your symptoms.

And what’s the root of most health problems? The gut.

Stay tuned for the second half of the introduction!

What You Need to Know About Functional Nutrition

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Human body with internal organs, composite by stomach, Great to be used in medicine works and health.

Conventional medicine is very effective if you have an acute problem, which needs immediate treatment. Despite all the advances in science and medicines, chronic diseases are on the rise. Most people suffer from some form of chronic problem (such as IBS, high cholesterol, Diabetes, insomnia, chronic fatigue, anxiety, ADHD, etc). Conventional medicine doesn’t seem to be able to treat these problems successfully. At best, conventional medicine doles out prescriptions to dampen the symptoms. That isn’t ‘treatment,’ and it certainly isn’t prevention. The problem? Neither the individual nor the root cause of the illness is treated.

Functional Medicine and Nutrition is an entirely different approach.

Functional Medicine Nutrition Therapy is a personalized method for getting to the root of your symptoms and restoring balance to your system. It is about promoting health, not just treating illness.

Personalized:

Everybody’s different. We each have different genes, different microbiomes (which influence everything), and different lifestyles. In Functional Nutrition, all information is taken into account: sleep, diet, stress level, activity level, energy level, mood, sunlight exposure, time in nature, and other data. Additionally, using tests that actually reveal what’s going on inside your body down to the cellular level and tests for genetic influences, diet and supplementation can be very targeted.

As the Institute of Functional Medicine explains: “The current healthcare system fails to take into account the unique genetic makeup of each individual and the ability of food, toxins and other environmental factors to influence gene expression.”

Treating the problem, not just the symptom:

If you throw drugs at a symptom, without addressing the root cause of the symptom, you are clearing the smoke but not putting out the fire. Left resolved, the cause will continue to persist, and therefore so with the symptoms. The drug will continue to be needed indefinitely (and possibly at greater and greater doses) to treat this symptom.

Chris Kresser articulates this: “In conventional medicine…they mostly focus on symptoms and diseases. If you go to a doctor and you have high cholesterol, you get a drug to lower your cholesterol…and there’s often little investigation into why your cholesterol is high in the first place. The intent is to just bring it down, and that’s generally the end of the story. In functional medicine… Symptoms are important in as much as they can give us clues as to what the underlying mechanisms might be that are contributing to the problem, but they’re not as important because when you focus on the underlying mechanisms and causes and you address those, the symptoms tend to resolve on their own, so you don’t have to worry about going after each and every symptom individually. You just address the root causes and the symptoms resolve.”

Dr. Mark Hyman, one of the leaders in Functional Medicine, articulates this point very well in the foreword he wrote for The Disease Delusion (a book written by Dr. Jeffery Bland, the father of Functional Medicine):     “Depression is not the cause of misery, it is merely the name we give to a constellation of symptoms. The actual cause of depression may vary greatly from patient to patient…knowing the name of a disease tells us nothing about its true cause; nor does it lead us to the right treatment”

Final thoughts:

Conventional medicine has its place. It has saved my life more than once. However, in other instances, it also left me disappointed. I know my clients have felt the same way before coming to see me.

Dr. Fitzgerald, another leader in the field, sums it up: “Simply, functional medicine is an individualized, systems-based, patient-centered approach to care. We look at the whole person, their environment, diet & lifestyle and genetics/epigenetics. An individual’s history is carefully mapped to a timeline, which we use to gather clues to the cause(s) and promoter(s) of disease/imbalance. Sensitive laboratory assessments help us “look under the metabolic hood” for contributing biochemical/genetic/microbial/nutrient/inflammatory/toxicity issues.”

For all these reasons, I am very excited about Functional Medical Nutrition Therapy. I am a Certified Integrative and Functional Nutrition Practitioner and have been practicing it with my clients (and on my own health) for several years.

Because patients are unique. Symptoms are not.