Functional Wellness
A Golden Opportunity to Boost Your Quality of Life
Functional Wellness - An Overview
What is Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is personally tailored medicine that looks at how aspects of your health are functioning. Conventional medicine usually finds problems only when severe disease has taken place. Functional wellness looks at the underlying causes of chronic disease rather than simply removing or masking symptoms once they arise. Functional wellness / functional medicine emphasizes true healing, treatment of the whole person rather than a disease, and a partnership between doctor and patient, with the patient carrying most of the responsibility for reclaiming their health. It also embraces the most current science and advancements in medicine that can be of assistance in the early diagnosis and remediation of chronic illness.
Functional wellness tends to emphasize non-toxic interventions, such as botanical medicine and other forms of nutritional supplementation, rather than exclusively relying on pharmaceutical agents. Under the influence of functional medicine, “old age” is not what it used to be, anti-aging is now a science, and optimized living is the “new normal” for people of every age.
Functional wellness can be both a useful complement conventional medicine and/or a much healthier alternative!
Why Do We Need Functional Medicine?
Chronic disease, as a rule, is slow to develop. Examples are diabetes, cardiovascular damage, hypertension, low thyroid, cancer, mental illness, autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, and back problems. Long-term predictions for such chronic diseases keep rising because the physical, emotional, and mental effects of stress are overwhelming us. This stress comes from poor diet, a toxic environment, drugs, accidents, nervous system impairments, emotional reactions to life, mental overload, lack of exercise, and insufficient sleep. Even falling in love is stressful (eustress)!
Diabetes is quickly becoming an epidemic, so conventional medicine is planning to target “high risk” individuals with ever-more dramatic drug interventions. Researchers, of course, hope to enhance quality of life while Big Pharma hopes to enhance profits. Yet, the physical, emotional, mental, and economic side effects of drug interventions leave us with a sobering message, one having little to do with healing or quality of life. Isn’t it time for a “sanity check”?
Functional wellness works to keep you from becoming a high-risk disease candidate in the first place. The rule is simple: prevent disease states from developing now so there’s nothing to “treat” later. But if you already happen to be riding the risk rollercoaster (typical for people over 30), you can start reversing some or most of the acquired stress damage by enabling your body to heal itself. This is very different from suppressing disease signs or symptoms with drugs, as is done with statins or thyroid medications to make lab measurements look better.
Who Qualifies For This Type of Proactive Approach?
Here’s the catch. People must qualify themselves to follow the prevention approaches of functional wellness and optimized living. Although a prevention or wellness lifestyle is highly rewarding, it is not for the timid. Such a lifestyle requires us to understand how the Big Five Stress Agents [1] mislead us and reduce our collective wellness. The problem is that most people have fallen victim to the harmful mental pattern of hoping rather than (pro)acting. They hope they will somehow fare better than others whom they know are suffering degraded lifestyles. Hope, however, doesn’t have a good track record for preventing chronic disease. But hey, hope is easy!
So, what are some of the harmful mental patterns you may inadvertently hold because of Big Five Stress Agent influences? Here are a few examples. Do any fit you?
- You’ll pop a pill as a quick fix for almost anything to improve your short-term quality of life.
- You think your doctor’s job is to take charge of your health and “fix” you when symptoms arise.
- Your physical activity has decreased with each passing year because you think you’re supposed to slow down as your calendar age rises.
- You want your body to act and recover as it did in your teens and 20s. Hint: It can’t and won’t without ongoing lifestyle adjustments.
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Please consider this: Most cancers incubate 10 years or more before they are finally detectible. An even longer incubation period applies to the metabolic abnormalities that lead to diabetes. What environmental stresses and biological imbalances occur during those incubation years to serve as such fertile ground for cancer and diabetes? It’s the job of functional wellness to answer such questions and provide tailored re-balancing programs for individuals before they find themselves needing drugs, surgery, or medical appliances.
