Functional medicine is in our name because it is the crux of what we do. We feel so passionately about what functional medicine means that we use the idea as our foremost mission: to discover what truly ails you. It is the pinnacle of what we strive for for each and every patient. Functional medicine is not a degree or a type of healthcare, rather it is a way of thinking.
Functional medicine is a system that aims to find the root cause of ailments, in fact, sometimes it is given the nickname of “root cause healthcare”. Too often in the current medical model we find symptoms being treated. Symptoms solely mitigated by medication. But the deeper reason why those symptoms manifested is never found. We have devolved a unilateral view of the body where a diagnosis is treated with a predetermined drug or set of drugs. Symptoms and causes have become convoluted in our society of prescribing one drug for every new problem. Modern medicine no longer treats a patient, but instead treats the diagnosis. We have forsaken the complexity of the body and its systems for the simplicity of one a drug, one diagnosis system.
In addition the current healthcare model doesn’t account for someone becoming unwell. The idea that you could go to your doctor every year and be given a clean bill of health until one day you are diagnosed with a “disease” is a backwards way to look at a patient. It’s like seeing someone walk toward the edge of a cliff for a mile. The entirety of the mile before the edge the guide was saying, yes right direction! Just keep walking! You’re doing great! Until, inevitably, the person walks right off the cliff. My job as your practitioner is to find your personal cliff you may be walking toward far before it’s diagnosable. I want to spin you around and have you walk away from the cliff. I personalize your plan and give you tools for your daily life that you can use to point you away from any cliff that may arise. Functional medicine necessitates that the patients themselves are willing to start on this journey. They need to want to do work at home, in the kitchen, and in their lifestyle. It is not an easy journey to turn yourself around. It takes dedication and foresight. However, if you do stick to the plan, there is no telling how much better you can feel and perform.
A diagnosis of a modern disease often is a group of symptoms instead of a causal relationship. Modern medicine is really great at treating diseases for which there is a known trigger. However, it’s trickier when a disease is diagnosed but the reason the disease arose is unknown. For instance, Multiple Sclerosis is typically found from progressive weakening of the limbs among other neurological symptoms. MS is a disease of exclusion, meaning that first you have to be sure you can’t diagnose any other disorder before finally diagnosing the neurological symptoms as MS. This could take years for some to get the right diagnosis. Plus, the reason the protective myelin sheath around the nervous tissue began to degenerate is never uncovered in a typical doctors office. There are many reasons why this could have happened. Was there for instance a traumatic brain injury that introduced the immune system to brain tissue that it should have never encountered? Or, it could have been chronic stress. Or, a leaky gut leading that led to a leaky brain. Or an ingested material or exposure to environmental toxins that led the body to mount an acquired immunity to its own tissue. Was the body mounting an autoimmune response to its own myelin sheaths, and more importantly, why?
At Gold Coast Chiropractic and Functional Medicine, we work as detectives to find where the breakdown is happening. Sometimes it could be a simple diet related issue, but many times there is a much more complicated interplay between the systems in the body. And our goal is to keep looking for the most upstream reason. There is no way to manage every single symptom effectively if you are headed into an autoimmune dominant environment. You would be taking a multitude of either drugs or vitamins trying to micromanage the levels of certain nutrients in the body. There are too many autoimmune diseases and each one causes far too many symptoms to name. However, if you are headed into autoimmune dominance, or any other named disorder, there are ways to find out why it manifested. Our why is your body’s why. Our passion, dedication, and motivation come from discovering why your mind and body are not functioning as they could be.
Dr. Marigot Vreeland