Are we providing Healthcare or Sickcare?
What we call Healthcare in America is actually “Sick-care”.
In the past few years there has been an awakening in medicine. Doctors and patients have started to figure out that the cycle of disease, medications, and then chasing the side effects of those medications, can’t continue. We can’t treat patients, much less get to know them, in an 8 minute office visit.
There has to be a better way.
This has led to the growth of “Functional Medicine” as a specialty. A physician specializing in Functional Medicine treats the whole patient from the standpoint of Wellness and Prevention. If you have high blood pressure, it is certainly not due to a deficiency of Metoprolol (a typical blood pressure med).
Functional Medicine looks for the root of the problem. Just giving a patient a prescription for a drug to bring down their blood pressure does nothing to make the real problem go away, it is only a Bandaid, and makes us all feel better for the moment. Your high blood pressure could be a magnesium deficiency, or maybe you have a “leaky gut” and some of the foods you eat are literally “leaking” into your blood stream causing inflammation, maybe your hormones are not balanced, or maybe you just had 4 cups of coffee that day. High blood pressure is a symptom, a sign of a problem in the body- just as a fever is one of the signs of infection.
We are in a world full of chemicals and toxins that have never been seen before in the history of mankind. We live sedentary lives, not out of laziness, but out of necessity. We no longer push plows, we push computer keys. Are we any less hardworking? Our stress level today is through the roof - how can this constant cortisol load not tear down our bodies?
Today’s food is calorie rich, but nutrient poor. We have a multi-billion dollar weight-loss industry, yet we are fatter than ever. Do you really need a doctor to tell you that losing weight might be good for you, and then leave the room without helping you, without making a plan? There are aisles and aisles of supplements at our stores, but how do we make sense of these?
Again, Functional Medicine addresses the need for supplements, and helps a patient decide which ones are important for them. By looking at the whole patient we can figure out why they are over-weight, and find real answers, not just talking points. No stone is left unturned, including life style, genetics, toxic burden, and even emotional stress.
Getting to the “root” of a medical problem seems like common sense, yet it takes time to re-think what we have been taught by traditional medicine and the media. It takes effort to go back and look at the biochemistry of the body and think about what piece of the puzzle could be improved upon to make a patient well- from the inside out. This is a paradigm shift.
This is the future.
