What I love about Functional Medicine is that they take a whole systems approach to your health. Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is a time and a place for Western medicine, but when you are looking to improve or even better, cure a chronical illness, Functional Medicine is where it’s at. Western medicine will help manage your symptoms. Management of symptoms usually involves medications that cause more side effects than the actual disease, medications that may or may not always work or that “shut off” your body’s natural alarm system.
When something goes wrong in your body, say you get stung by a bee for example, having never been stung by one before. The first thing you notice is pain, followed by redness, some swelling, and in more serious cases you experience anaphylaxis where your throat and tongue swell, you can’t breathe, etc. Now, imagine you didn’t have any of those reactions, you just died. How would you know that something was wrong? Your body is designed to keep you alive and in doing so, it notifies you when something threatens that survival. Your body isn’t fighting itself. It’s telling you that there is something causing this reaction and that something is wrong. Western medicine would be helpful in stopping the symptoms here because the cause is obvious and stopping the symptoms usually takes care of the initial problem. Obviously, you will want to avoid bees in the future.
What happens when you have issues going on internally that you can’t see though and that don’t have an obvious cause? A leaky gut? An auto-immune? Cancer? Your body begins to send you messages that something is off just like that bee sting. They might be less obvious. It might start with aches and pains, or maybe fatigue and headaches. Maybe it’s bloating or constipation and irregular bowel movements. If the issues aren’t limiting or bothersome enough, you might blow them off, adapt, or accept them as normal. Maybe you take an Advil for your headache or laxatives for the constipation. Sure, you might feel better temporarily but are you fixing what is causing the issue? If an intruder broke into your house and set off the alarm, would you hit the alarm with a hammer and go back to bed or would you stop that intruder? If your body continues to sound the alarm through symptoms, do you want to continue to take medicine and tell your body to STFU or do you investigate to fix and find out what set the alarm off in the first place? Are you picking up what I’m putting down?
"By digging deeper, you get to the root of the problem which is where you can begin your healing."
Functional or Integrative Medicine looks at the whole picture. They will acknowledge your symptoms and then dig deeper to what is causing them so you don’t just feel better for now, you feel better now AND hopefully, for the rest of your life.
What do they typically cover? Nutrition, stress management, self-care, exercise, vitamins, sleep (not just quantity but quality) and so on and so forth. By digging deeper, you get to the root of the problem which is where you can begin your healing.
If you are feeling anything less than 100%, I challenge you to look at areas where you can improve your health. Once you are conscious of your body and any signals it’s trying to send, you can start feeling your best. I will leave you with one area to start. You can begin by journaling your nutrition and noting how you feel before and after your meals, then cut out the things that don’t make you feel good. Remember that especially now when we have little control over our surroundings, we CAN control what we eat. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” - Hippocrates
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