What is Functional Medicine?
I was honored to participate in NYC’s first Functional Forum event, where I had 12 minutes to express my thoughts and feelings about the “future of medicine”. I spoke about the experience of becoming a Functional Medicine practitioner, and also about what Functional Medicine can do for mental health. Here were some of the bulletpoints:
- Conventional medicine is limited by the application of an acute care model to the management of chronic disease, a pill-per-disease paradigm, and neglect of powerful corruption and conflict of interest in the pharmaceutical realm.
- Functional Medicine provides doctors a lens through which to look at the entire web of factors influencing health today: environmental toxins, food nutrient density, genetic individuality, and stress.
- Applying our understanding of the role of misregulated inflammation and oxidative stress to mental health opens up our appreciation of the connectedness between immune, endocrine, and neurochemical systems.
- Gut health is the most compelling place to start in restoring mental health – nutrient dense, non-toxic diet, relaxation response for optimal digestion, probiotic exposure, and mindful medication choices.
- Functional medicine brings concepts like organ reserve, biochemical individuality, toxin mitigation, informed choice, and patient-centered care to a discussion that only has two words in it at this point – sick and drugs.
Enjoy the video, here, and more to come!
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