When you go to the doctor
what happens?
You go to the doctor and say,
“Doctor, I’m sick.” The doctor asks you a couple of questions and then does a
whole bunch of lab tests. You come back a week later and he looks at all of the
lab tests and says, “Well, there is nothing wrong with you.”
To me, there has always seemed
something seriously wrong with that scenario. In order to believe that, you
have to assume that your patients are liars. I don’t think they are. So, I
started looking around for other ways to start evaluating people. One of which
was, guess what, listening to them. I spend a lot of time listening, which
makes some of my patients upset because that means that I am really far behind
every day.
I want to talk about Functional medicine.
Functional medicine is a
science-based healthcare approach that assesses and treats underlying causes of
illness through individually tailored therapies to restore health and improve
function. “Underlying causes,” I think are the fundamental difference between
Functional medicine and standard Allopathic care. In Functional medicine we are
very interested in what causes things, and of course, how you function. We are
interested in how your body is functioning and not necessarily just whether or
not the lab value is okay.
Functional medicine is a science-based field
There are several basic tenants
of this field that I want to go through. The first is that we have biochemical
individuality based on genetic and environmental uniqueness. We are using the
same set of science that all the other medical doctors and scientists are
using. It is just that we are looking at it differently. There is an old story
about describing what an elephant looks like. If you have 7 blind people who
are surrounding an elephant and one, who is feeling a trunk, says, “Well, it
feels like an anaconda. It’s long and skinny and seems to have an opening on
one end.” Another guy, holding onto one of the legs says, “Gee, it feels like a
trunk of a tree.” And still another guy, who is holding onto the elephant’s
tail states, “I don’t know, but it has this fuzzy tuft on the end.” They all
have this very, very different idea of what an elephant might look like.
It is the same thing, I think, with the difference between standard medical
care and Functional medicine
We are looking through a
different peephole, looking at the same set of data through different eyes.
When you start asking questions in the light of “How does the body function?”
you get a very different set of responses than if you asked the question, “Is
the biochemical test normal or not?” So, while we do use many of the same
biochemical tests, we use many other functional tests. An example of a
functional test would be a stress EKG. You can lie on a table and have an EKG
done. That will tell you how your heart is working at rest. The real question
is how does your heart work under a load, or under stress. So, you are put on a
treadmill to look for changes there. What we often do are functional tests of
the liver. We stress the liver with relatively safe but non-the-less things
that need to be detoxified, like a single pill of Tylenol or a single pill of
No-Doze, which happens to be caffeine or something such as that. We then
collect the urine, saliva, blood, and all kinds of fluids to find out what is
going on. The types of metabolites found tells us what happens to the liver
under stress. Or, we might collect urine and look at a whole bunch of adrenal
hormones, give a shot of ACTH, which sort of “gooses” the adrenal gland, to
find out that instead of the normal healthy response, which is for the adrenal
hormones to go up, they actually they go down. That would be a case of
decompensation in someone who is adrenally exhausted. So, those are the kinds
of biochemical tests that we do.
Another principle of this science-based field of Functional medicine is that
it is patient-centered versus disease-centered
Being patient-centered is that
very question of, “How do you feel?” When the patient tells you that he feels
crummy, you don’t say, “Oh, but there is nothing wrong with you.” You say, “Oh,
okay, I understand that you feel crummy, the lab tests are normal, we have to
look harder.” That is what patient-centered means. Functional medicine is not
disease-centered. It is not about rheumatoid arthritis, for instance. It is
about what is unique about this individual that allowed them to express
rheumatoid arthritis. So as you can see it is a different centeredness, a
different kind of questioning.
Functional Medicine is a dynamic balance of internal and external factors
In other words, I don’t believe,
with very few exceptions, are there single cause diseases. One person might
say, “What about strep throat? Strep throat is caused by strep.” Well, that is
true, however, why did the person get strep? What was it about their total
milieu, what was it about their life stress, what was it about their nutrition,
what was it about everything else in their life, their spirituality, their
social connections, that allowed them to get this strep? Why didn’t they have
the resistance to not get strep since the person next to them didn’t?
Functional medicine is interested in web-like connections of physiological
factors
It really is the anklebone’s
connected to the leg bone and so on. The point is that problems with chronic
stress cause depletion of the body’s ability to respond to stress, which causes
a reduced capacity to protect yourself because your immune system is
overworked, which causes you to get ill, which causes leaky gut syndrome, which
causes food allergies, which causes toxicity, which causes, which causes, which
causes. All of these things are interconnected and if we’re not looking at
these interconnected kinds of ideas, we miss the big picture and if you miss
the big picture, you miss the opportunity to really effect help. The web-like
connections are very important. In medical school we’re taught to look for the
once cause, to keep going up stream until you find the one cause. That’s a
really great way to try to fix an automobile but it turns out to be a very
simplistic way to try to deal with something as complex as a human being.
Health is seen as a positive vitality not merely as the absence of disease
Again, asking that very simple
question “How do you feel?” My intake form has 3 visual analog scales on it.
They are just lines 10cm long. The first line instructs the patient to put a
dash on the line that represents the level of pain they are having today. On
one end of the line it says zero and on the other end it says terrible pain.
The next one asks how much fatigue the patient has and the third one asks,
based on all things that affect their health, how do they rate their health,
super healthy on one end and not very healthy on the other end. Just those
three little ticks give a pretty broad look at how a person is feeling. If all
of the ticks are towards the left side of the page, you can tell that a person
is not feeling very good. They may not have a diagnosable disease, but at the
same time they are a part of the walking unwell. That is not what we are here
for. We are not here to be part of the walking unwell; we’re here to be part of
the vital and the creative.
Promotion of organ reserve
We are going to talk about organ
reserve and health span. I think that is probably the most important part of
the talk. If you imagine an 85-year-old and a 25-year-old walking down a road
and simultaneously both are hit by a bus, which one is most likely to survive?
I don’t think very many people would choose the 85-year-old. Now, I would argue
that the 85-year-old probably is less likely to walk in front of a bus in the
first place, but that is a different question. After they have been hit, there
is a clear understanding that the 25-year-old is far more likely to survive.
The reason why? Organ reserve. The 25-year-old is maybe using 25-30% of his
total regenerative capacity at any given moment. The 85-year-old maybe using
90% of his regenerative capacity at any given moment and it is that loss of
organ reserve that causes situations where you cannot cope. This leads to
disease.
It turns out that there are
many strategies that will improve organ reserve and improve health-span
You know, there is a lot of talk
out there today about life extension. I happen to be a subscriber to Life
Extension Magazine and I am a member of the Life Extension Organization. I
practice “life extension” therapies although I call them “Clinical Age
Management.” The reason why I have chosen that term is because I don’t think
that we really can, in the year 2006, extend life. I think that we can promote
health span. Well, I take that back, I think there is one way to expand your
life expectancy and that is to eat a calorie restricted, nutrient dense diet.
Which means you are eating a lot of kale, a lot of spinach and a lot of nothing
else. For many people that works, but for most, they find that to be a very
challenging diet. So, for practical reasons it becomes very difficult.
Let’s go back to biochemical individuality and talk about this for a little
bit
Patients have unique DNA. I
think that is really obvious when you look at the person next to you. DNA,
however, is a general blueprint of who you are going to be. It’s not
everything. The other important thing to understand is that the genes express
themselves differentially at different times. That means that they are plastic.
Plastic simply means malleable, changeable. We now know that taking certain
nutrients will change the expression of your genes. For instance, if you happen
to have multiple genes that code for the production of an amino acid called
homocysteine, you will likely have a very high risk for having heart disease,
strokes, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer. By taking Folic Acid, Vitamin B6 and
B12, you can dramatically reduce the expression of those genes. Another example
is the regulation of your antioxidant systems. Just like our temperature is
carefully regulated, our antioxidant systems are carefully regulated.
Unfortunately, at a certain point, if you take more Vitamin C it doesn’t do you
a whole lot more good, I wish it did, but it just turns out that it doesn’t
because it down regulates the rest of your antioxidants systems.
However, there are ways to
up-regulate your antioxidant system. One way is through exercise. Exercise increases
your metabolic set point and that is how it helps you lose weight, you probably
know that. Well, it also up-regulates you anti-oxidant set point and increases
your antioxidant capacity. That is probably the mechanisms in which hydrogen
peroxide works. Hydrogen peroxide is a controlled oxidative stress. That
controlled oxidative stress up-regulates your various genes that help you
detoxify. I want to go back and clarify that I’m not saying that you shouldn’t
take Vitamin C. I think you should. In fact, a recently published study by the
Agriculture Department shows that we have something around 30% less vitamins in
our foods today that we had in the early 50’s. I think everyone should be on a
multi-vitamin plus some extra Vitamin C, but that is a different talk. Again,
this plasticity can be exploited. If you wish to look this up you can find this
in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1992; 5S: 1244-1245. It is about
nutrition and genetic susceptibility to common disease. There are many articles
on these topics; it is just that doctors don’t read this stuff.
It is individuals, not diseases that are the target of treatment
We don’t treat rheumatoid
arthritis, we don’t treat cancer, and we don’t treat any other disease. We
treat people who are expressing these diseases. That is critically important to
keep in mind. A segment on a recent Oprah show was about a woman, who had
cancer and said that she was doing terribly. She couldn’t focus on anything but
the awful disease that she had. She realized that she really enjoyed having
massages, so, she started going for massages. She noticed that during that hour
she felt good and for the few hours after the massage she still felt good. This
allowed her to the things that brought purpose to her life again. That is what
I mean by, “It is the individual that we treat.” Who would have thought that
the most important intervention for this individual, who was already done with
chemo and the other treatments that didn’t cure her, would end up to be massage
therapy. Most physicians would say, “What a bunch of crock, that didn’t do
anything but make her feel good.” Well, what is wrong with feeling good?
Disease is a manifestation of the breakdown of mechanisms that maintain
control, resilience, and balance
Again, trying to emphasis that
the disease is not an independent reality. The disease is a manifestation of
the breakdown of this internal milieu, this internal, very complicated set of
biochemical circumstance. In medical school we learn about this thing called
the Krebs cycle, which is how you make energy in your body. They forget to
explain to you that this very complicated interaction is all happening in a big
bag of salt water called your cells. It is not this orderly chain. It is really
just molecules bumping into each other. They can bump into the next thing they
are supposed to bump into, according to the Krebs cycle, or they can bump into
something else entirely. It is only through these mechanisms of control,
resilience and balance that they bump into the right stuff. Patient centered
vs. disease centered is very important. It is what is happening to the
individual patient is what we need to focus on, not what disease they have.
Disease is a dynamic event in the life of an individual, determined by disharmonies
imbalances and pernicious influences
The goal of diagnosis is not to
identify the disease entity, except I spent 4 years in medical school and 3
years in post-doctoral study learning how to diagnose the disease entity, but
now, the goal of diagnosis is not to identify the disease entity, which has no
independent reality, but to characterize the disharmonies of the particular
case, so that they can be corrected. Are any of you are familiar with
homeopathy? That sounds pretty homeopathic doesn’t it? But, this is all born
out in science. That is by Leo Galland. Leo Galland has written a number of
wonderful books but this is particularly a good article. (Medicine in different
perspective: A Biographical Approach to Illnesses can erase the False Distinction
between Science and Humanism in Medicine). He is a proponent of patient
centered diagnosis. He asks questions like, “What were you doing when you got
sick?”
Web-like connections of physiological factors
People do not get sick from
diseases, but rather diseases reflect a disruption in the dynamic balance
between themselves and their environment. This is Sidney Baker. Again, I see
people all day long. They come in because they have some particular illness. I
seem to be picking on rheumatoid arthritis today, so let’s stick with that
theme for a minute. They come in with rheumatoid arthritis and tell me how
their joints hurt and how everything is terrible. We then go on to other
topics. I might ask them about other stressors in their life, or how they digest
things, or just any other number of topics. Then they leave the office with a
prescription to have a stool test, a urine test, eat a special diet and take
supplements, none of which might be classically associated with rheumatoid
arthritis. They are scratching their head and saying, “Yeah, but I came for my
rheumatoid arthritis.” I say, “That’s fine, I’ll see you in a month and you’ll
be pleasantly surprised.” They come back and they say, “I’m at least 50%
better, but I don’t understand because you didn’t treat my arthritis.” I say,
“I treated you and that is what I am interested in. I’m interested in treating
you because arthritis doesn’t exist outside of you.” It turns out that these
end stage diseases that we talk about, these are just symptoms. Trying to treat
rheumatoid arthritis by using a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory is no different
than putting a bandage on a bullet hole. You have a very serious problem with
your immune system and we are suppressing the inflammatory portion of your
immune system with a drug that has been shown to further degrade the lining of
your joint.
Another example would be
Parkinson’s disease. It is a terrible degenerative neurological condition that
results in shaking, lip smacking and eventually getting to a point where the
upper body moves but the lower body won’t. It’s like the lower body is stuck to
the floor. Patients try to move by leaning and falling forward. It is a
terrible disease. Well, the very drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease, which
does a wonderful job of treating the symptoms and sometimes is necessary so
that people can have a decent life, also causes further destruction of the part
of the brain that results in Parkinson’s disease. Certainly there are
nutritional interventions that can influence that inflamed brain and reduce the
tremors and all of the other symptoms without resorting to those drugs. At some
end-stage point of the disease, drugs may need to be used so the patient can
have a reasonable life-style, but in my mind it certainly isn’t the first line
of defense for these things.
I’d like to talk about antecedents, triggers and mediators.
Antecedents are things that
happen before the disease starts. They are things that you are born with
perhaps. They are things that occur maybe early on in your life, in utero or in
your grandmother’s utero…things that predispose you. I’ve talked about several
of them already, for instance homocysteine, cholesterol, etc. Many of these
things run in families. We know of twin studies. Twins that are separated at
birth and grow up in different environments don’t get the same diseases every
time, even though they may have the identical DNA for getting that disease. You
have to ask the question why? Well, it goes back again to that plasticity and
different environments, different sets of genes are expressed. If you are
living in an inner city environment, with a lot of exhaust, fumes, noise,
nightlife and no rest, it is going to be a different set of genes expressed
than if you live out in the cornfield like I do, where an exciting thing is a
guy coming in with a broken arm from falling off of a cow! I’m from
Triggers are those things that unmask those antecedents. They are things
that you live with. For instance, if you have this homocysteine and have only
average amounts of Folic Acid, B-12, or Vitamin B-6, you will over express
homocysteine and you will end up with hardening of the arteries or Alzheimer’s
disease, cancer, stoke or something like that. These triggers, again, are
things that unmask your antecedent risk factors. I think I alluded earlier to
an article last month or the month before in Life Extension Magazine. They
looked at the data of the nutritional value of food. They have references from
many years back. Every decade the nutritional value of our food goes down
another notch. It is no exception this year. It went down another notch. I was
looking at the numbers and I think phosphorous went up in one vegetable that
they checked. Well no surprise there, there is phosphorous in fertilizer. Not
present in that article, but another interesting thing to note, is that the
heavy metal content of our food is going up every year. Fertilizers are one of
the most significant sources of heavy metals in our diet. People, who say the
nutritional value of organic food verses commercial food isn’t different, are
clearly wrong in my view. I don’t know how they come to that conclusion. We
know from anthropologists that the caveman diet, because it was centered, not
in grains, but in fruits, vegetables, roots and tubers, probably contained a
significantly higher RDA value than the currant pyramid diet.
This
current pyramid diet is based in grains and unfortunately in the SAD diet, the
Standard American Diet, that grain is typically white flour. I’m very concerned
about that, because now we have a diet that is based in grains that are altered
in many ways and are raised, not for their nutritional content, but for their
ease of harvest, resistance to disease, or some other reason that has little or
nothing to do with nutrition. Consequently, when you do the math you get about
1 RDA out of the diet. The caveman diet would probably give you 3-5 RDA. When
you look at animals that produce Vitamin C on their own, they make between 3-10
grams of Vitamin C. The RDA for humans is 60mg. Not only do we have these
really low requirements, but these requirements are also going down. They
recently changed the RDA for a vitamin downward. When asked why, they responded
that they did some analysis on the diet, it was below this number, and no one
seemed to be sick, so it was lowered. I find that interesting. I am concerned
about the way things are done.
Mediators.
Mediators
are things that the body makes that try to rectify the consequences of the
antecedents and triggers. Unfortunately these sometimes get into feed-forward
loops instead of feedback loops. Feedback loops try to regulate each other.
Feed-forward loops are loops that spin out of control. If these mediators spin
out of control you can get, for instance, high levels of inflammatory chemicals
called echinoids in your body. These eicosanoids result in inflamed joints or
inflamed brain, liver or whatever, resulting in some kind of disease symptom.
We call that disease, we give it some name, and we give it a drug, never
thinking for a moment that it might have been triggered by something that was
unmasking an antecedent in your life. Functional medicine tries to understand
antecedents and intervene at the trigger level. Medicine understands mediators
and intervenes at the symptom level. That is one of the fundamental differences
between the two disciplines.
There are a number of diagnostic and treatment protocols that exist. I use a
number of them. They incorporate and assess the unique risk factors present by
virtue of a patient’s individual DNA interacting with the end products of his
or her lifestyle, diet, environment, and thoughts. Several people of talked
about this. For instance, there is a book out called Biomarkers. Biomarkers
tries to look at several specific things that decline with age and what can you
do to prevent that decline, or if it has already declined, what can you do to
gain it.
In this concept of web-like connections, how we look through this web is
very complicated
Let’s
look at something just a little more simple than a web. Let’s look at a bicycle
wheel for a minute. A bicycle wheel has all of these spokes. One spoke may
represent your respiratory system, the next might be your detoxification
system, the next your adrenal axis, the next GI system, the next your
cardiovascular system and so on. Now, you can break a couple of those spokes
and you can still ride, sort of. You may be sort of wobbly! As an example, my
wife is a bike rider and last summer she broke 3 spokes at one time. The tire
turned into an “S” shape. It would no longer spin; it was too wide to go
through the bike’s forks. There are 36 spokes on a bike wheel, 3 spokes broken
and it became a useless tire. That is how interconnected these things are. It
is not a stand-alone system.
In
Functional medicine, what you have to do is grab a spoke and walk it down to
its end. If you don’t find a problem, well okay that’s one spoke, lets grab
another. We walk down the next, and then the next, until pretty soon you find
one with a problem. Maybe you say, “Well, it’s not broken. It is just a little
bent.” So you do some things to try and straighten it out. While you are doing
that you move on and look at the other spokes. For many patients who have these
sort of chronic, difficult to treat kinds of illnesses such as Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lymes or whatever, may not have
any broken spokes at all. They may have a lot of spokes that are just bent. If
you do the standard, non-functional, non-stress kind of tests, you don’t find
anything because they aren’t broken. They are just bent a little bit. At rest
they may be fine. I think that is a fundamentally important idea. Just because
you find one little bent spoke isn’t a reason to stop looking, you have to keep
looking, keep looking, keep looking.
My average patient has been seen by their doctor, by their specialist, by
the local specialist, by the
Then, they come to me. My first
thought is, what am I supposed to do?! What I came to understand is that all of
those people are asking the same set of questions. It is important to
understand that I am not some genius, hidden out in the cornfields of
The findings in these patients were very interesting. They clearly had this
poisoning. They had all of the symptoms, which resulted in Multiple Chemical
Sensitivity. For those of you who do not know what Multiple Chemical
Sensitivity is, it has been described as the allergy to the 21st century. You
are allergic to everything. You are sensitive to everything. Bus fumes,
perfume, if you go into a soap store you have a big reaction. One of my
diagnostic questions for Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is, “What happens when
you go to the grocery store and walk down the soap isle?” People with Multiple
Chemical Sensitivity will tell you they haven’t done that in about 5 years,
because every time they do, they get sick. I became interested in why these
people were so unable to cope with any stress. I eventually started looking at
their adrenal glands. This was a group of people, 100% of them, when you
collected a 24 hour urine and sent it off to the lab to look at cortisol and
all of the different hormones that come from the adrenal gland, then give the
patient ACTH, an adrenal stimulating hormone, their adrenal gland hormones went
down on the subsequent test. The average person’s hormones would go up. What
happening to them was, under any kind of stress what so ever, their adrenal
function would deteriorate. Just get to by on a day-to-day basis, their adrenal
gland had to work at over 100% output. It was working at 100% maximal output
just to walk down the street and have a normal day. If anything else more
strenuous than breathing came along, they would end up decompensating. This is
another example of web-like interactions.
A rich literature exists on the genetics and epidemiology of aging and
chronic illness
We know
that we can modify how we age. There is just no question about it at this
point. In fact, it has been shown in a number of studies that probably as much
as 50-80% of your health, after the age of 40, is determined by your lifestyle,
whether or not you smoke, whether or not you eat your vegetables, whether or
not you exercise, and so on and so forth. This is because it changes the genes
that are expressed. That is very important to keep in mind. Right now the most
common vegetable consumed is the potato. It wins out because it is served in
the form of french fries. Think about a french fry. Most of them are made in
fast food restaurants that change their oil once per week. They start out with
oil that is hydrogenated. The reason they hydrogenated the oil is because it
doesn’t go rancid. It lasts longer. The problem is, hydrogenated oil is a
trans-fatty acid. Trans-fatty acids are absolutely the worst things for you.
So, we are eating potatoes as our vegetables. Everyone says, “Yeah, I had a
serving of vegetables today. I had french fries.” Well, guess what the second
most common vegetable in the United States is? Ketchup. We live in a culture
that when your child goes to school, they count the ketchup as one of the
vegetables. I grew up thinking it was a condiment. This is, however, what is
happening.
“Much of aging is a loss of organ reserve. As we lose organ reserve, our
biological age increases, making us more susceptible to disease.”
These are the words of Dr.
Fries. He is a professor of geriatrics at Stanford University. This was
published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is probably the most
prestigious medical journal in the world. So, these are not just my ideas.
These are the ideas of people who are leaders in the area of Allopathic medicine.
This man’s ideas, however, are essentially ignored.
Again, we can modify how quickly we lose organ reserve and undergo biological
aging through changes in lifestyle, environment, and nutrition. As much as 75%
of our health and life expectancy after age 40 is modifiable on the basis of
these changes. Who says so? Well, the journal Lancet says so. (Alternative
projections of mortality by cause 1990-2020: global burden of disease study.
Lancet. 1997;349:1496-1504)
The combination of the environmental effects on both gene expression and
post-translational modification of cellular material gives rise to symptoms of
aging that are well recognized in clinical medicine. What I am telling you is
that, women who smoke, who have sub-optimal liver detoxification ability, have
a tremendously greater chance of getting breast cancer than women who smoke and
detoxify normally. Women who smoke and detoxify normally do have a much greater
risk of cancer than women who don’t smoke. But, it is interesting to me to compare
these two sets of smokers.
Now, why do these smokers who have a poor liver detoxification have a much
higher risk of breast cancer? Well, there are things in all smoke, including
barbequed meat and things like that. These things are pro-carcinogens. If you
cannot detoxify them, they cause cancer. In the case of women, the most common
cancer is breast.
Alcohol, aging, and liver disease
How
many people have seen an alcoholic and thought, “Wow, that guy is really
looking young. He is looking good.” It doesn’t work that way. If you drink, you
wreck your liver. If you wreck your liver, you don’t detoxify. If you don’t
detoxify, you age. How about a poor diet? You know, I have a very complicated
system for assessing the nutritional status of my patients. I say, “How many
servings of vegetables do you eat on an average day?” Most people’s response to
that is, “A day?” They don’t eat vegetables everyday. That blows my mind. Then
I ask a slightly more complicated question, “How many servings of vegetables do
you eat in a typical week?” They usually respond with usually more than one per
week. Which I think is astounding. I point out that the government, which I
believe grossly underestimates the need, suggests that we have 3-5 vegetables
and 2-3 fruits every single day. If you think about that for a minute, if
somebody said to the average group at people, “You can have between 3-6 Cokes
per week.” Everyone would instantly say, “I can have 6 Cokes!” But, when we
say, “You can have between 3-5 vegetables and 2-3 fruits.” Every one says, “Get
your 5 a day.” That is what is advertised, 2 fruits and 3 vegetables. What is
wrong with that way of thinking? We drink as much as possible of the crappy
stuff and as little as possible of the good stuff. That is the way nutrition
goes in this country. We are the richest country in the world. We have
abundance beyond compare and we squander it.
So, it is very important to think seriously about what goes into your body
I would
suggest that if you are in the grocery store and you are a family of four, you
need 5 fruits and vegetables per person per day. 4x5=20 fruits/vegetables per
day, 20x7 days = 140 pieces of fruits and vegetables for one week. If you have
your cart, your cart is full as soon as you’ve gone through the fruit and
vegetable isle. You are done! There is no room for Twinkies, no room for
Ho-ho’s, there is no room for Coke. You are done! If you think about your diet
in those terms, suddenly your diet changes in a really big way. If you do go
ahead and do the pyramid, which I don’t suggest, or I suggest you cut off the
grain part, make it shorter and put it above the fruits and vegetables. I don’t
think grains are bad, it just don’t think they should be the fundamental part
of your diet. Then, use the grains in several loves of really good, multigrain,
whole grain bread, the kind that feels like a brick when you pick it up. Don’t
use the light colored, squishy stuff that they have the nerve to be able to
call that “wheat bread” because it has some tiny amount of wheat in it. If you
start to looks at these things, you begin to understand why everybody is sick.
I want to talk about some graphs for a while.
The
first graph we call the “Native” curve. We have wellness up the left side and
age across the bottom. From age 0-20 we have the Development stage, from age
20-40 the Vitality stage, from 40-60 the Degeneration stage, from age 60-80 the
Morbidity Stage, and onto ages 80-120. The age of 120 is considered to be the
maximum lifespan. The line on the graph increases sharply in the Development
Stage and peaks at age 20 with a very slight downward drift towards age 40.
From age 40, the curve falls more quickly to age 60, drastically drops down to
age 80 and to the bottom by age 120.
What happens in modern medicine is this
We can
look at a person in the beginning of the Morbidity stage and diagnose that they
have arthritis. If we intervene here, we are going to make the curve in the
morbidity stage just a little less steep. That is modern medicine. We know that
the person has osteoporosis, cancer, or whatever and we give medications,
chemo, or surgery to make the curve just a little less steep.
The idea behind Functional medicine is this
Why are
we waiting to intervene way out in the late Degeneration phase or the Morbidity
phase where the disease has manifested itself? Why don’t we intervene much,
much earlier? Let’s take the example of osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is a
disease, generally found in women, sometimes in men, of softening of the bone.
It is a loss of the mineralization of the bone. It is generally felt that if
you live long enough, you are going to get osteoporosis. Well, we know
something about osteoporosis. We know that at about age 35, in the middle of
the Vitality stage, women have their maximum bone density. But, insurance
companies won’t pay for bone density scans until around age 60. If we did a
bone density scans on 35 year old women and found those women who had lower
than normal maximal bone densities, we could intervene right there and prevent
them from losing bone, fracturing a hip as they age, ending up with pneumonia
after that, followed by being in the ICU and dying. With early intervention we
could place these women on absorbable forms of calcium and lots of foods with
calcium in them. You know, calcium is nice, but bone isn’t just a rod of
calcium. Bone is a dynamic tissue that has lots of stuff in it. Some of which
we don’t know all of yet.
So, supplements are great, but
it is important that you get the good food. When you get all of the good stuff
and then you recheck their bone density again, when insurance will pay for it,
and guess what, they have good bone density. Now, they aren’t fracturing their
hips, they aren’t crushing their spine, they aren’t in unrelenting pain from
their bad backs etc. There are thousands of examples that which can be
implemented today. This isn’t Star Trek, we aren’t talking about inventing some
new science, we are talking about things we know about right now. We can start
intervening right here, right now and that is what we do in Functional
medicine.
The result? Our hope is while playing tackle football with your
great-grandchildren, you go to bed that evening and you don’t wake up. That to
me is a far more interesting way to go than finding out, way down the road,
after years of feeling crummy, it was because you had the pre-clinical stages
of rheumatoid arthritis and emphysema, and you were treated with all kinds of
drugs that made you swell, took your energy away and hurt your heart. Later,
your conditioned worsened and you ended up in a nursing home and then you died.
That just doesn’t sound like very much fun to me. That’s just not how I want to
go!
The goal? Let’s put more life in
your years.
Our goal is to help you achieve
the highest levels of health, vitality and years of disease free living your
body can attain and maintain.
To do that you must take charge
of your life and educate yourself to be able to make the best informed health
care decisions possible.
We can help!