There ARE answers to your chronic condition!
How are we successful at treating these conditions?
We dig deep to get to the root cause.
Think for a moment about a problem you have had recently. As an example, let’s say you had a leaky roof.
Would you clean up the rain water, put a patch on the ceiling and consider it fixed? Of course not! You need to fix the cause. You need to repair the roof to fix the CAUSE of the problem. If you didn’t fix the cause, you would be certain to have a leaky roof problem for a very long time.
It is the same with your health. But before we talk about about the cause of your chronic health problem, lets talk a moment about what is NOT the cause of your health problem.
Your health problem is not caused by a lack of steroid medication, or any medication for that matter. It is not caused by a lack of ANY medications. Please don’t misunderstand, I am not against medication. Some people need it. But it certainly is NOT the cause of your health problem.
So what is the cause of your health condition?
Well to be honest, I don’t know.
How do we find the root cause?
This is the beauty of Functional Medicine. It is not satisfied with the traditional answers. The traditional answers like, “take this medication for the rest of your life” or “you just have to live with the side effects.” In order to explain how functional medicine does this, I need to explain what a BIOMARKER is.
When scientists are performing research, they need a way to measure what effect the intervention (usually a drug) is having on the test subject. So the scientists will measure a chemical in the blood, urine or saliva to see what effect the intervention is having. That chemical might measure how efficient your body is at making energy. This is certainly important to see if the intervention is affecting the energy metabolic pathway. It may measure how efficient the test subjects detoxification process is working.
There are many biomarkers a scientist can measure to evaluate the different metabolic pathways in the body. They are finding more all the time.
Having an abnormal biomarker does not give you a diagnosis of any particular disease. (with some exceptions) This is why insurance companies generally will not pay for this type of testing.
Organic Acids Test
The organic acids test (OAT) (which is a urine test) measures 78 different biomarkers. Some of the metabolic processes this tests measure are:
Yeast and fungal markers
Oxalate metabolism
Glycolytic cycle: metabolism of glucose (sugar)
Mitochondria metabolism: (how you body makes energy) Remember the Kreb’s cycle in high school?
Neurotransmitter metabolites: Great for mood disorders.
Fatty acid metabolism
Nutritional markers: B12, B6, B2, B5, Vit C, CoQ10, Glutathione precursor, Biotin
Comprehensive Stool Test
The more scientists learn about the amazing complexity of the human body, the more they realize the importance of the bacteria in the gut. (microbiome) These bacteria:
Produce chemicals, including vitamins needed by the body for health.
Produce short chain fatty acids for building other chemicals and used in communication between cells.
Digests fiber
Good bacteria eat toxins and poop vitamins, bad bacteria eat vitamins and poop toxins.
The comprehensive stool test measures the amount and diversity of gut bacteria. This is very valuable for developing our program which is individualized to each patient.
This tests also measures inflammation in the gut, a detoxification marker and an allergic food marker.
With this test we can tell if you have leaky gut syndrome and how bad it is.
Food allergy testing
Patients get all kinds of advice on diet. It gets very confusing for the chronic diseased patient. Should they follow vegan, FODMAP, low carb, keogenic. You get the point. Often patients feel partially better on a particular diet. But they are missing a piece of the puzzle to get them over the hump to fix their problem.
Advanced food allergy testing helps to sort out what foods are healthy for you right now. It measures IgG, IgE, IgG4 and Cd3 or complement. This is not done with a hair sample (that is worthless). It is a blood test. This is the best food allergy test.
Now we have the cause, What is the treatment?
Just as important as finding the root cause is, of course, treatment. After getting the results of your tests (and any other tests not mentioned here we think you may need) we will put together an individualized treatment plan. We will match you with a health coach to help you implement the plan.
The plan will include of course, eliminating allergic foods.
The plan includes dietary changes to support the findings of the stool test. As an example, certain types of fiber will support certain gut bacteria.
The plan will also include targeted pharmaceutical grade supplements to support metabolic pathways found to be deficient.
You will have to change your diet
You will need to work with your health coach.
You will need to have support from those closest to you.
Treatment plans are usually for 3 to 4 months.
So if you are tired of not feeling well, take control of your health. Call our office and let’s get started. There are answers to your chronic health problems.
Not all patients are accepted. We only accept patients we think we can help.
