Functional Medicine Approach

Creating Wellness should not be a complex project. You do not have to be a scientist to appreciate the whole intricacy of a human physiology for this task. What you do need to understand is that our existence is merely based on fundamental principles assigned by vital forces with perfect balance in mind. Our physical presence is comprised of simple elements, organic and inorganic. Throughout the evolution, these elements were put together into sophisticated network of organs and systems that adapted to the environment to create living beings.

Creating wellness is easier than you think. You need to discover how to apply the principles of nature into your daily routine. This routine comes in a combination food and lifestyle that governs interrelation of external and internal environment leading to health. Every day, many people are tricked into consuming poisons and expressing negative emotions that eventually deplete health and create illness.

Most of the times, changes in this balance are subtle and might take a long time and ignorance before anything is physically noticeable. When a person starts experiencing symptoms, that means that physical changes already happened that eventually might lead to dis-ease If no remedial action takes place. Unfortunately, current healthcare model doesn’t take into consideration the factors that create imbalance and disregards laws of nature. Learning to identify root cause of imbalance will help to attain health again.

Use available Functional Medicine approach to take guess work out of the way. While not all functional testing might be necessary, there are some that critically important to evaluate nutritional, infectious, immune, hormonal and metabolic status. Understanding and correcting these components will help create a healing path and well-being.

Functional Medicine is a patient-centered approach that uses system-oriented model that involves patients and practitioners to address underlying causes of disease. This is an innovative way practicing modern medicine that supports needs of current healthcare. Functional Medicine uses personalized approach that helps to achieve the highest expression of health. This method helps to address the whole person and not just isolated set of symptoms. We are committed to helping patients resume their lifelong pursuit of health and well-being. Atlant Health – Chiropractic and Functional Medicine office is conveniently located in Midtown East New York City.

Here are the steps of the Functional Medicine approach and its integration for best results.

• Please remember, this is not an overnight fix and requires a lot of detective work and patience. Always start with testing. Guessing and following recommendations from google and blogposts for any condition is unacceptable and will lead to failure. Although some conditions/diagnosis have similar symptoms, most likely they have different root causes, which need to be carefully investigated. The tests are chosen based on the history of complains. Comprehensive blood work is a necessary first step to check status of general well-being and identify physical imbalances involving specific organs and systems. Here is a link to a file with most markers necessary for the first step:

https://atlantchiropractic.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/FBCA-Atlant-Health-New.pdf

Here is the article about why Functional Medicine is considered a better way to uncover underlying issues that lead to health imbalances and why we need to pay attention to functional ranges rather than lab ranges:

https://atlantchiropractic.com/why-functional-medicine-rocks/

Although blood analysis is the first step of this investigative route, it only provides as with a snapshot of what is happening in the body at this particular moment. Blood only functions as a carrier of chemicals in the body through the complex network of blood vessels and does not always represent what is happening on the cellular level. Therefore, further steps might be needed.

Most blood markers needed for this comprehensive analysis are covered by insurance. Please contact our office to find out if we can order those for your, or you need to reach out to your primary care practitioner.

• Next necessary step is to perform mineral analysis testing through HTMA (Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis). This test helps to uncover fundamental imbalances of minerals and heavy metal toxic loads, since these can result in multiple underlying health issues. Understanding mineral connection to health is one of the most important steps to healing and recovery. Biochemistry happens inside the cells, not in the blood or urine. Minerals are most important cofactors for all chemical reactions that our life depends on. “Trace elements (minerals) are more important than are the vitamins, in that they cannot be synthesized by living matter. Thus, they are spark plugs in the chemistry of life, on which the exchanges of energy in the combustion of foods and the building of living tissues depend.” Henry Schroeder, MD. Balanced minerals lead to good health. Imbalanced minerals lead to disease.  Please read my blog post about HTMA

https://atlantchiropractic.com/hair-tissue-mineral-analysis/

Trace Minerals is the lab utilized for hair tissue analysis:
https://www.traceelements.com/Default.aspx

• For more complex and longer present chronic conditions, we suggest performing Organic Acid Test (OAT). In addition to HTMA, OAT helps to investigate further how the body functions on a cellular level, going into deeper understanding what are the reasons for these physical imbalances. Some of them could be related to gastrointestinal imbalance, mold or yeast toxicity, specific nutritional deficiencies, mitochondrial dysfunction, detoxification pathways and many more. For Organic Acid Test we use Great Planes Laboratory. Please check this link for more info:
  https://www.greatplainslaboratory.com/organic-acids-test
• When “hormonal symptoms” such as changes in metabolism, appetite, puberty, fertility, sexual performance, growth, PCOS are present, DUTCH (Dry Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones) test is highly recommended to evaluate endocrine system function. Endocrine system is responsible for the most imbalances in the body and interaction between other organs. Hormones are the signaling molecules (aka body’s chemical messengers) produced by glands. The test is performed via urine collection by Precision Analytical Lab. Please check this site for more information:
  https://dutchtest.com/info-dutch-complete/

Most times, we can extract a lot of info through the steps outlined above. Sometimes with more persistent conditions and severity of symptoms, additional testing might be warranted. Data collection and analyzing might take about one month before we schedule our first visit. Please not OAT, HTMA and any other tests are not covered by insurance.

Due to personal beliefs or preferences, some patients like to start with Bioenergetic Screening, or even take this route instead of Functional Medicine testing and approaches outlined above. Bioenergetic Medicine is a very powerful adjunctive therapy that helps to “hack” into the human body on energetic level. Since most health conditions start on an energetic level before turning into a physical manifestation, this approach is very powerful. I wrote couple of posts to clear some info. You can read those here:

https://atlantchiropractic.com/bioenergetic-and-functional-medicine/
https://atlantchiropractic.com/bioenergetic-medicine-asyra-system/
https://atlantchiropractic.com/about-bioenergetic-medicine/