Integrative Functional Medicine

Integrative Medicine focuses on a dynamic patient-provider partnership that encompasses the full spectrum of wellness: physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual & environmental components that affect our wellbeing and health. It combines the best worlds of contemporary conventional medical disciplines such as Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Gynecology with Natural Therapies that demonstrate solid, definitive, reliable, consistent scientific and clinical evidence.

People become dissatisfied with conventional medicine model where on their insurance plan they are limited to 5 to 15 minutes to see their doctor. Further, when you reach middle age years of 50 and older, deteriorating changes are occurring in their bodies. Conventional medicine treats with prescriptions and surgery. Integrative Medicine focuses on the entire body and treats to optimize systems with natural and less invasive treatments. Side effects tend to be positive, meaning you take nutraceutical for one issue and it actually improves many conditions as it has a positive impact on many physiological systems and even improvement in mental and emotional systems thereby significantly impacting the entire whole.

Many prescriptions in conventional medicine have serious side effects that patients may treat one issue but then have other issues to address. In summary, patients find Integrative Medicine practical, natural, and safer that address their health issues.

The defining principles of integrative medicine are:

● The patient and provider are dynamic partners in the healing process.
● All factors that influence health, wellness, and disease are taken into consideration, including body, mind, spirit, and community.
● Providers use all healing sciences to facilitate the body’s innate healing response.
● Effective interventions that are natural and less invasive are used whenever possible.
● Good medicine is based on good science. It is inquiry-driven and open to new paradigms.
● Utilizes Evidence-Based Therapies. Incorporates Cutting Edge Modalities in Treatment.
● Alongside the concept of treatment, the broader concepts of health promotion and the prevention of illness are paramount.
● The care is personalized to best address the individual’s unique conditions, needs, and circumstances. Practitioners of integrative medicine exemplify its principles and commit themselves to self-exploration and self-development.
● Focus on prevention and foster the development of healthy behaviors and skills for effective self-care that patients can use throughout their lives.

The patient and provider meet. The provider earnestly listens to the patient to understand who the patient is and what their goals are.

A personalized strategy considers the patient’s unique conditions, needs, and circumstances, it uses the most appropriate interventions from an array of disciplines to heal, to regain optimum health.

Integrative medicine seeks to restore and maintain health and wellness across a person’s lifespan by understanding the patient’s unique set of circumstances and addressing the full range of physical, emotional, mental, social, spiritual, and environmental influences that affect health.

Through personalizing care, integrative medicine goes beyond the treatment of symptoms to address all the underlying causes. In doing so, the patient’s immediate health needs, as well as the effects of the long-term and complex interplay between biological, behavioral, psychosocial and environmental influences, are taken into account.

Basic principles that define Functional Medicine (FM): FM identifies the underlying causes of disease, using a systems-oriented approach and engaging both patient and practitioner in a therapeutic partnership. FM views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of independent organs divided up by medical specialties. It treats the whole system, not just the symptoms.

Functional Medicine views us all as being different; genetically and biochemically unique. This personalized health care treats the individual, not the disease. It supports the normal healing mechanisms of the body naturally, rather than attacking the disease directly.
Functional Medicine is on the cutting edge of science. It is Evidence-based. Research shows us what happens within us is connected in a complicated network or web of relationships. Understanding those relationships allows us to understand the functioning of the body.
Your body is intelligent and has the capacity for self-regulation, which expresses itself through a dynamic balance of all your body systems known as homeostasis.
Your body has the ability to heal and prevent nearly all the diseases of aging.
Health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of immense vitality.

Functional Medicine asks the vital questions that very few conventional doctors ask: “Why do you have this problem in the first place?” and “Why has function been lost?” and “What can we do to restore function?” In other words, Functional Medicine finds the root cause or mechanism involved with any loss of function, which ultimately reveals why a set of symptoms is there in the first place, or why the patient has a particular disease label. Conventional medicine matches and just prescribes a drug.

Regenerative medicine is a game-changing area of medicine with the potential to heal damaged tissues, offering solutions and hope for people who have conditions that today are beyond repair. Regenerative medicine itself isn't new — the first bone marrow and solid-organ transplants were done decades ago. But advances in developmental and cell biology, immunology, and other fields have unlocked new opportunities to refine existing regenerative therapies and develop novel ones such as stem cell therapy and prolotherapy.

Rejuvenation. Rejuvenation means optimizing your body's innate ability to heal itself. Though after a cut your skin heals within a few days, other organs don't repair themselves as readily.

But cells in the body once thought to be no longer able to divide (terminally differentiated) — including the highly specialized cells constituting the heart, lungs and nerves — have been shown to be able to remodel and possess some ability to self-heal.

Replacement. Replacement involves stem cell therapy or prolotherapy that stimulates the production of new, vital cells and healthy tissue.
Regeneration. Regeneration involves delivering specific types of cells or cell products to diseased tissues or organs, where they will ultimately restore tissue and organ function. This can be done through stem cell therapy. Regenerative medicine holds the promise of definitive, affordable health care solutions that heal the body from within.