Functional Medicine is essentially preventative medicine. Our current healthcare system places much of the emphasis on diagnosing and treating disease or overt pathology. While this system is excellent for acute symptomatic care, when it comes to chronic “lifestyle” diseases, many patients are failed by the status quo. A patient is often prescribed a drug, which has a side effect, which leads to another drug being prescribed and on and on goes, while the patient’s health continues to deteriorate.

Functional medicine serves as an alternative, assessing increased risk for developing disease and then using more gentle and effective interventions, like diet changes and nutritional supplementation, to prevent disease from developing.

How is this accomplished? Functional medicine doctors use the same basic diagnostic tools- a blood chemistry panel and a cell blood count. The difference is in the interpretation. There are two ranges for “normal” on a lab value: a pathological range and a functional range. The reference ranges provided with the lab test are the pathological ranges. Values outside of the pathological range indicate pathology or disease, or strong potential for such. Functional ranges, in contrast, are smaller ranges that are used to assess the risk for disease before it develops. Much of the research regarding these has been conducted by the well-respected American Association of Clinical Chemists’ (AACC) preventive medicine division.

The analogy I use with my patients is a stoplight. If a lab value is within the functional range, it’s like a green light. If the value is above or below the functional range, but not yet outside of the reference or pathological range, it’s like a yellow light. Outside of the pathological range, that’s obviously a red light.

Many patients are no longer content to wait for disease to develop and then spend years on pharmaceutical drugs to address the problem. More and more patients want to maintain a higher quality of life by preventing disease before it occurs. These patients seek out doctors who define health as more then just “not sick”, but rather, define health as having adequate energy & vitality, healthy digestion, sound sleep and adequate cognitive function.

How do you feel, right now?

You don’t feel well. You’re tired and achey all of the time. You knew getting older wasn’t going to be any walk in the park, but this has got to be something else- you’re too young to feel this old. No matter how well you eat, you can’t seem to stop your weight from creeping up and most days you feel like you would lose your own head if it weren’t attached. Restful, rejuvenating sleep is a thing of the past. If you don’t wake up sweating, you wake up feeling like you could sleep for another 10 hours. Your relationship with your partner or spouse is straining under the weight of your mood swings and chronic pain, not too mention the nonexistent libido. At work, its been awhile since you’ve really felt on top of your game. Your memory use to be so much better…

Worse yet, your doctor doesn’t seem to know what’s wrong. They were sympathetic at first, running plenty of lab tests in an attempt to figure out what’s wrong, but once the lab tests came back ‘all normal,’ they began to suggest it was ‘all in your head’ and perhaps you should try taking an antidepressant…

And you’re beginning to wonder if they are right. You didn’t think you were crazy or imagining these things, but friends, family members and coworkers can’t seem to understand why you look fine but complain that you feel so terrible.

If this sounds all too familiar, you’re in the right place.

You believe that good health starts with good nutrition, that Grandma was right when she said ‘you are what you eat.’ You want to feel better and you know it begins with food. But with so many contradictory opinions, where do you even start? You want to know what diet is going to work for you. And more importantly, you need something you can stick to, that’s sustainable, not some fad diet, because this isn’t about being skinny, its about feeling healthy for a change.

Are you looking for an answer beyond just another prescription?

Or maybe you’ve already made some big dietary changes and are seeing some improvement, but there is still something going on. You know you need help on a deeper level, but all your doctor can offer is a prescription drug. You know there has to be something in between. You’ve tried tons of herbs and supplements, sometimes even chasing the latest thing with such high hopes, only to find lackluster results and a lighter pocketbook. It’s so hard to know which supplement is going to be the right compromise of quality and effectiveness beforehand and you don’t have a nutrition degree to be able to decipher all the labels.

When was the last time you felt heard by your doctor?

You want a partner. Someone who will take the time to listen and make decisions about your healthcare with you, not for you. Someone who understands that the way you’re feeling is not all in your head, and what’s more, they even know how to figure out what the real problem is! Someone who will work with you to fine tune your diet in order to support your health and who knows what herbs and nutritional supplements will help and not be a waste of your time & money.

If you are nodding your head and saying “yes!” to any of this, I’m going to invite you to do one (or all) of three things:

1. Please keep reading here on my website. Go here to learn more about me or head over to my blog to read more about some of the specific conditions I work with. And please like my Facebook page so you can get more helpful tips & information from me.
2. Use the box to the right to sign up for my e-newsletter. As a thank you for signing up, I’ll send you my free report Health food or Hype: 7 UNhealth foods to ditch to lose weight & feel great! This free report will help you cut through the hype and learn which ‘health’ foods may actually be making you feel worse and struggle even more to lose weight.
3. Call my office at 845.687.6387 or email me at drchrista@hvchiropracticandwellness.com. I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation so you can learn how I can help you with your specific health concern.