What is Functional Health?

Its a new way of thinking about solving the puzzle of chronic disease, looking at root causes and seeing the body as a system and a network. It’s the medicine of why, not what. Its not what disease do you have, but why do you have it?

 

It’s the science of creating health. What are the things that are detrimental to health? How do we get rid of those? And what are the ingredients for health and how do we provide those? And it’s not that big of a list. Stabilize blood sugars, illuminate food intolerances and manage stress. Balancing those things will have a positive effect on your hormones, digestion and immune system. Its all connected. We’re biological organisms and so functional wellness looks at all of your biology and all the inputs and make sense of what your personal story is and personalise an approach.

  • You can have one cause that creates many diseases or one disease that can have many causes. For example, gluten can cause everything from osteoporosis, arthritis to autism to hair loss! It can cause a million things and its one event.

  • Or you can have a disease like depression that can be caused by many things. Depression can be caused by a vitamin D deficiency, or because you have been taking anti-acids for acid reflux for years because you have the wrong diet and that causes a B12 deficiency which causes depression. Or it could be because you’re eating too much sushi which has caused mercury to build up which triggers depression. Or maybe you don’t eat enough fish and you’re Omega 3 deficient. Or maybe it’s because you eat gluten which causes inflammation in the brain. Depression is a symptom, it’s not an anti-depressant deficiency. Depression is a name for a collection of symptoms

Most diseases we commonly see today such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, are just describing the symptoms and not helpful to understand the true root cause. They are descriptive terms for a collection of symptoms that are similar to someone else’s so we name it.

The medical model isn’t working for a lot of people. Functional wellness is a different model. It’s how we need to think about the cause of disease. There’re many factors, not just one, and there are many interventions, not just one.

People are hoping for that one cure for alzheimers but it’s never going to happen. But multiple interventions of diet, lifestyle, exercise and removal of risk factors show a regression of alzheimers. Not one drug, but different modalities to optimize health.

Functional wellness reverse engineers its way back to health. Its layers. Its swimming back upstream to deal with the root causes of illness.

Functional wellness is a person who suffered migraines for 20 years, completely off medication because they stopped eating eggs which it turned out they were intolerant too. Functional wellness is a kid with debilitating ADHD who becomes a top student off all medications just by removing the processed foods and wheat in their diet. It was as simple as optimizing their nutrition and removing the toxins from the body so the brain can function properly. So many people suffer who don’t need to.

 We have normalised things like, ‘just a little bit’ of eczema. What if we thought of eczema in the same way as multiple sclerosis, because we should. They are both an autoimmune disease. All autoimmune diseases are inflammation in the body. Using creams prescribed by the medical modal to ease the eczema will only mask that symptom and if whatever the stressor is that’s causing the inflammation is not discovered and removed, then its only a matter of time before another autoimmune condition shows up. Eczema is a big fire alarm going off on a body that is in crisis. Using creams is like silencing the alarm while the fire still rages on. Functional wellness looks at removing the ignition fuel that started the fire. Spoiler alert – autoimmune diseases like eczema, is almost always down to unbalanced blood sugars because of eating the wrong things for your particular body. Working with a functional wellness practitioner will find out what your body needs and doesn’t.  

Diseases are not inevitable. Heart disease, cancers, diabetes, dementia and autoimmune conditions have only exploded in the past 100 years. Functional wellness practitioners end up with clinics full of people who have a long list of issues and a long list of medications and are still not better. None of their previous doctors have looked at the whole picture and connected the dots and drilled it down to the one true cause.

Functional wellness practitioners like me are often peoples last port of call after suffering unnecessarily for years and feeling let down by the medical model and that shouldn’t be the case. If you or someone else is tired of suffering, I urge you to work with a functional wellness practitioner, like me, the sooner the better.