Finding the Right Vitamins for You Is What Functional Medicine Is All About

Do I need vitamin D? How much echinacea should I take? Am I getting enough minerals? Am I getting enough calcium? Why don’t I feel good? These and other questions can be answered with functional medicine. At Wagner Chiropractic, we often use the functional medicine model as a means of getting to the cause of a condition in order to create your best natural health strategy. The Institute for Functional Medicine states:

“The Functional Medicine model in Eustis is an individualized, patient-centered, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalized treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes.

By addressing root cause, rather than symptoms, practitioners become oriented to identifying the complexity of disease. They may find one condition has many different causes and, likewise, one cause may result in many different conditions. As a result, Functional Medicine treatment targets the specific manifestations of disease in each individual.”

Functional medicine is the brainchild of Dr. Jeffery Bland, a nutritional biochemist who has pioneered evidence-based integrative medicine since the early 80s. Bland’s vision was to bring the plethora of emerging evidence and insights to clinical medicine so that it might move from the drug-based model of fighting infectious diseases to a systems-oriented, patient-focused model able to reverse a growing chronic disease epidemic.

Functional medicine recognizes that today’s most common and universal health issues are most often caused by the interaction of genetics, lifestyle and environment. Functional medicine tries to understand these interactions in order to create treatment programs individualized for each patient. This individualization must be so because no two people live in the very same genetics–lifestyle-environmental soup.

Functional medicine treats each patient as a whole person who can be supported on a journey to optimal wellness rather than as a statistic, a case, an organ system, disease or syndrome.

By evaluating a matrix of fundamental causes in the diagnostic and therapeutic process, we are able to earlier, more effectively, and even proactively intervene in a patient’s state of health to not only extend life but give a greater quality of life to our patients.

Blood tests patients get as a result of visiting a medical doctor only test for suspected conditions. You could actually be living with a condition that cannot be detected by that specific blood test, yet there is more specific bloodwork a functional medicine doctor may order that will give new information. Symptoms for that condition may be present but are not yet pronounced enough for you or your doctor to really take notice. If the condition were detected now you could get to work reversing it. The kind of blood work and advanced medical testing we do at Wagner Chiropractic can catch issues before they become a problem. They help us to detect patterns of imbalance that may result in chronic disease if no proactive intervention takes place.

When we order your blood chemistry panel, we begin at an excellent starting point where we look at functional medicine ranges versus lab ranges. This data can help us catch a trend toward a disease while there is still time to reverse it.

Once your blood chemistry panel results are back we use a computerized algorithm to take your bloodwork range back into an optimal range that makes your body run like a well oiled machine. Taking the right supplements for your body based on your specific bloodwork is what functional medicine is all about.

Endnotes:

“Functional Medicine.” Official Publication of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 10 Dec. 2006, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1783750

“Functional Medicine: An Operating System for Integrative Medicine.” Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal. U.S. National Library of Medicine, Oct. 2015, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4712869