What is Functional Medicine?

Many people are beginning to recognise that allopathic medicine, with its focus on “quick fixes” supplied by the doctor, disempowerment of the patient, and disrespect for the environment, is not aligned with our best interests.

Functional Medicine might just be the answer!

Hello everybody, this is Dr Allie from the UK, and today I’m going to talk about functional medicine.

It’s a phrase that you in the states tend to have had more often than us over here. And in fact, it was Dr Wentz and USANA Health Sciences who first opened my mind to the benefits of working with functional medicine rather than traditional approach.

So, functional medicine is really a move away from the modern pharmaceutical based medicine where we are so often offered a quick fix for a situation or a state of dis-ease. Sadly, quick fixes don’t tend to fix things at all, because at the root of the problem is the lifestyle and behaviour that we are using in our lives every day. And very often the quick fixes offered by the allopathic medicine can poison the body, and even the environment.

There is evidence in the news today, that there are rivers in India that have I think five different antibiotics in them, and the environment is rife with these chemicals. See the Guardian article yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/27/worlds-rivers-awash-with-dangerous-levels-of-antibiotics.

These chemicals are created in laboratories, introduced into the human body. The human body is unable to denature them and process them properly, and then they are excreted into our waterways, which then go on to impact the natural environment. We know that the hormones, the artificial hormones in contraceptive pills and artificial HRT are affecting sex of fish even; and naturally if there are five antibiotics in the waterways. The natural bacteria that are there will become resistant to those five because the ones that survive and thrive and reproduce will be the ones that aren’t deleted by these antibiotics.

So when we think we are moving forwards with science, actually some people may feel that we’re going backwards.

In fact we are going back to grassroots scientific principles, such as the principle of medicine of “first do no harm”, and principles of root cause medicine, whereby lifestyle is key. It’s our lifestyle that contributes greatly to a state of disease, and if we can correct that lifestyle, we can create a sense of ease and, and this state of disease causes most of these chronic diseases that we are now experiencing in in our body so everybody, nowadays, over the age of 20 will know somebody who has, or has died of, cancer, somebody who has diabetes, somebody who has chronic arthritis, somebody who has heart disease.

These are the chronic diseases such as some of the chronic illnesses. Dementia as well that’s a major one. We know that 50% of us will develop dementia. We also know that 50% of us will develop cancer.

Now if you don’t want to be one of those 50%, it makes sense to look at ways in which you can optimize your body and reduce the chances of that happening. And that’s what we’re about in functional medicine. So, in functional medicine, we have a hierarchy, whereby, underlying almost all disease states, is a problem with the gut. And that’s why this 28-day challenge that we’re doing now is, this Gut Matters Challenge is so important for helping us with the founding principles, the foundations of functional medicine at the first step in improving the way we are.

After the gut, we look at things like the insulin resistance and sugar processing in the body.

Then we review, assess and work on the stress that we’re under, any stage of adrenal fatigue we may be in, and getting on to looking at the thyroid and on into sex hormones.

So, as a biological hormone expert myself and menopause expert, I know that the answer to menopause isn’t pharmaceutical HRT, which the body can’t process. It isn’t even bioidentical HRT, which is made from natural hormones that you can process because they are the same as the hormones our own body produces.

The key is going to the root cause of the disease, with a functional medicine approach. I love inspiring our clients as doctors to have a vision for their health, and put in place those lifestyle changes that will start to move them forward. Functional medicine also embraces mind body and spirit, and our mind-set is key in the way we experience the world.

So, this is functional medicine. It is all encompassing but it’s grassroots medicine, and it’s looking at the root causes of diseases.

Really, I see pharmaceutical medicine more and more as being 20th century medicine. because it was in the 20th century that pharmaceuticals and chemicals in our daily lives, grew exponentially. And we had so many developments in medicine, surgical developments as well, that took forward our understanding of the body and of disease. But now in the 21st century we are circling back to supporting the environment supporting the body with grassroots medicine functional medicine.

Why not grab a copy of my free Ebook on supporting your gut to transform your health now! Here is the link:

This is Dr Allie, I help women who are struggling with hormone balance to create the life and the health of their dreams.