Do you ever feel that you are a product on a conveyor belt, when going to a doctor, or especially if you have to visit emergency room in the hospital? Simply because depending on the severity level of your health concern, you are either helped quickly and efficiently or you need to wait for a long time and you will often receive not more than 10-15 minutes from the doctor.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a high respect towards doctors as they have saved my life couple of times, but I do believe that we could do so much more in the healthcare and look at every human being as a whole and not as separate pieces in a puzzle.
I got to know about functional medicine couple of years ago through my own studies through books and really believe we should pay more attention to it. In order to help a person heal from an illness or simply cure an imbalance, we need to look at the person as a whole, understand the lifestyle, understand their current diet, their level of physical activity and most importantly their length and quality of sleep. Functional medicine looks to heal the underlying cause present in the body rather than masking the illness with medicine. With proper diagnostic testing it is possible to re-balance your bodily system with targeted foods and herbal support. And by focusing on every person as an individual it is possible to unleash body’s inherent healing ability and to reverse the disease, naturally.
FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE IS:
Focused on the patient, not on disease. Treatments are personalised based on your needs.
Holistic, treating the body as a whole and understanding the importances of all bodily connections in health and disease.
Involving you as a patient, where you are being educated, encouraged, you feel empowered and you play an active role in the whole healing process.
Investigative, treating symptoms by addressing the underlying causes, which leads to longer lasting results.
Preventative. ‘Let the food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food”. (Hippocrates)
CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE IS:
Focused on disease. It mostly treats the disease and not the patient. Patients who have similar disease get similar treatment, despite their differences.
Often limited, as it relies only on drugs and surgery, despite off their risks and complications.
Doctors centred. Yours as patient’s opinion is often ignored or simply not listened to. Patient is often discouraged playing an active role in the healing process.
Masking symptoms and is not focused on underlying cause, which might create ‘patients for life.”
Focused on body as a collection of separate body parts, for which there is a different doctor for each part.
Reactive rather than proactive, where it is focusing on managing the disease after it has already reached to a state where it might be impossible to heal.