Any healing modality that encourages healthier lifestyles, real foods, and toxin awareness helps bring wellness closer to home, closer to what we can do for ourselves and what our communities can use to make health a viable economic strategy.
Living Well Locally appreciates these medical approaches and relies on them for making our vision of place-based wellness possible. With this understanding, we begin exploring some of the many medical modalities that make up America’s vast and varied medical landscape.
The Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) is one organization in the rapidly growing field of lifestyle-based medicine. IFM faculty offer training modules for MDs, NPs and others already licensed in a medical specialty. Their certified practitioners seek to provide patients with safe passage between two very different medical paradigms: allopathic, pharmaceutical medicine that treats the symptoms of disease and a functional, lifestyle-based approach that seeks to resolve the root causes of dysfunction. The IFM website offers educational material, practitioner training and certification, annual conferences, a practitioner directory, and links to research and news about FM.
The heart of functional medicine (FM) is restoring healthy metabolic function. The ultimate goal is to reverse the disease process and regenerate the body’s innate ability to self-heal.
Through personalized assessment and treatment, functional physicians help patients reclaim much of what has been lost to unhealthy lifestyles, toxic environments, and highly processed foods. With multiple generations of Americans now under the influence of rapidly changing modern life, that goal is both worthy and difficult. But it is also why lifestyle-based medicine is proving itself capable of preventing and even reversing chronic disease. (See examples under LWL’s Resources Section, e.g. heart disease, dementia, multiple sclerosis.)
“Food as medicine” is a key element of a FM approach. Real foods that are nutrient-dense and toxin-free improve metabolic health by nourishing and repairing the gastrointestinal tract, popularly understood today as ‘gut health’. And by providing the mitochondria in our cells with the nutrients and information needed to power healthy function throughout the body.
Assessment tools include detailed health histories and lab testing that goes deeper than conventional diagnostics; both are used to identify the many factors that can disrupt endocrine and metabolic function. This often includes toxins found in our everyday lives, especially our highly industrialized food supply. This is why a fresh, real foods diet works in multiple ways to improve health: by removing the source, improving metabolic function, and encouraging growing methods that produce cleaner air and water. (See “Real Food is Good Medicine” here.)
As FM doctors search for causes of illness, patients learn how they’ve become sick and what it will take to heal. Doctor and patient focus together on removing the sources of damage and using lifestyle choices to help restore function. (More on this in future posts about self-care and healing journeys.)
Yet, if you google functional medicine you’ll find controversy. The loudest complaint: “FM is not evidence-based”. This is to be expected. Most physicians and researchers live in a world where well-funded research on drug therapies has provided many decades of ‘evidence-based care’; this is what they know and trust. Yet, with FM the question becomes: how do you put lifestyle, or even diet alone, under a microscope or into a clinical trial? Although hard to do, and especially difficult to secure funding for, clinical trials are now being done by leading edge FM clinicians and researchers focused on studying the intricacies and outcomes of diet and lifestyle-based approaches. Two examples: Terry Wahls, MD and Dale Bredesen PhD.
FM is largely a biochemical approach to wellness. Other modalities go beyond biochemistry and work with what many call the body's ‘biofield'. These are ‘energy medicine’ approaches and will be covered in later posts.
America's existing, insurance-covered healthcare is allopathic, i.e. treating disease symptoms rather than causes. This mainstream system has grown specialized and complex, costly and unsustainable. It has expanded the American economy, but also the national debt. Yet, when medicine can tell us why we are sick, healthcare becomes a different thing altogether. It becomes a real support for healing and a driver for economic activity of a different kind.
Living Well Locally appreciates how lifestyle-based medicine changes the way humans live their everyday lives and what this means to larger issues, like controlling healthcare costs and reversing climate change. But what we most appreciate is how resolving the root causes of poor health creates opportunities for reviving local economies, for creating place-based wellness and cultures of health that can wrap themselves gradually and gently around everyone and everything.
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