Functional Medicine   Twenty-First Century Health Care
Functional Medicine is a growing field of modern health care. It offers a giant step forward in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of many of society’s chronic illnesses. Doctors practicing functional medicine are able to identify the real causes of many health conditions by using the results of scientifically documented tests.

These are not your standard medical tests but go to the next level in investigating the biochemical and metabolic glitches likely to cause a specific disease process. Based on the results of these tests, physicians are then able to develop personalized patient specific treatment protocols designed to reverse, stop or prevent the disease and its related symptoms.

Unlike the disease specific approach, which is geared to suppress the expression of symptoms, physicians practicing functional medicine are delighted to discover that many diseases have a real underlying cause that when found and corrected, can have a dramatic impact on the health of their patients.


When was the last time you really felt healthy?

The reason you may not feel your best is because you’ve developed an unhealthy lifestyle or have undergone stress and trauma. Poor diet, stress, environmental and chemical toxins, and lack of exercise, all take a toll on your natural defenses. For awhile, your body is able to cope, then the body starts to breakdown.  These puzzling non-specific symptoms may be an early warning that one or more of your body’s systems are malfunctioning.

Symptoms are Signals.

Just like the red warning light in your car that flashes when there is a problem with your engine, a physical symptom is a signal telling you that an underlying health problem needs to be corrected.  Treating a symptom without uncovering the real cause is like placing a piece of black tape over the blinking red warning light. The consequences of this action are obvious as an expensive engine overhaul.  Unfortunately, our bodies can’t be overhauled and ignoring these chronic symptoms could eventually lead to a serious illness.
Through functional medicine, physicians are able to help their patients restore normal body function, thereby relieving symptoms that may result in life-threatening diseases (such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, heart diseases, osteoporosis and many other chronic degenerative illnesses).  Unlike most well-meaning physicians that tend to focus on what drug to use to treat a symptom, doctors who practice functional diagnostic medicine give serious thought to what is causing the symptom in the first place.


Modern Diagnostic Assessments

Today, specialized laboratories using advanced testing procedures offer functional diagnostic assessments that can evaluate an individual's physiology. By comparing the individual's assessments with normal physiological ranges, doctors practicing functional diagnostic medicine can pinpoint abnormalities and contributing factors to health problems, often exposing the real causes of chronic illness and degenerative disease. This is a highly individualized process. Two people with the same diagnosis may require different diagnostic tests and therapeutic interventions to promote health and well-being. The tests also provide important data for the development of scientifically based nutritional plans to correct the mechanism of the cause of your problems.

Monitoring of Therapies

Functional diagnostic assessments provide the opportunity to monitor a wide array of therapies, including customized nutritional programs. Testing is used initially to establish an individual's baseline physiological processes and subsequently to closely monitor the results of therapies in order to make necessary adjustments in therapeutic protocols.

By identifying the underlying causes of chronic health conditions, reducing the risk of degenerative disease, and addressing an individual's unique bio-chemical composition, Functional Medicine has been considered the future of medicine.

Since we are a natural system, there usually are natural solutions to correct most health problems.  The key is to find out what is going wrong with a person's physiology and fix it.   Often dietary changes alone are all that is necessary to solve the problem.  Usually most patients require a combination of dietary changes and natural pharmaceutical supplements.  Most treatments go through a series of steps, correcting one system or problem at a time in the proper order?? to get the best result.

An example of a typical case is a 66 year old man who had digestive problems, fatigue decreased sexual performance and high cholesterol.  His medical doctor wanted to put him on statins and didn't have much to offer for his fatigue and digestive problems.  When he came into my office, I ordered a comprehensive blood chemistry panel and saliva hormone test for adrenal, male and female hormones and gluten.  I found that in addition to high cholesterol, he had high blood sugar and his liver and gallbladder weren't functioning optimally.   The hormone tests indicated he was cortisol deficient or what here???   and DHEA (adrenal hormones) were depressed, and he was high in estrogen!  In addition, he had antibodies to gluten (wheat, rye, barley etc.).  So I gave him some supplements to lower his blood  sugar and get his liver and gallbladder functioning and to lower his cholesterol.  I also gave him some supplements and creams to normalize his adrenal function.  He also stopped eating gluten   We retested him in a few months later and his cholesterol was normal.  His energy was better.  He stayed on the protocol a little longer and then we retested the hormones.  His adrenal circadian rhythm had improved and his estrogen had come down.  But we also discovered he had H. Pylori, a bacteria that infects the stomach, and he was sensitive to eggs.  We took him off eggs and gave some natural pharmaceuticals to remove the H. pylori.  Now he has energy, vim and vigor.  

You can see that there are lots of ways to get a more in depth view of the body and uncover the causes of ill health.  Advanced functional lab testing allows us to delve into the body and find abnormal biochemical mechanisms and aberrations.  These tests include:  Functional blood chemistry analysis, saliva hormone testing, comprehensive stool analysis and parasitology, functional immunology panels, intestinal permeability testing and more. 

Functional Blood Chemistry Analysis

This is an example of an actual blood chemistry panel.  I use a software program called Blood Nutrition by Apex Energetics to analyze the results provided by standard laboratories.   One thing you will notice is that up on the upper right area of the form, there are two columns:  one is titled Functional Range, and the other is Laboratory Range.  The laboratory range is the range provided by lab.  The functional range is the optimal range.  If you look carefully, you can see that we use a much tighter range to evaluate a patient’s health.  We scrutinize the results to get a true picture of the person’s physiology.


Why am I still sick even if my blood tests are normal?

Functional blood chemistry analysis is a really important tool to understand what is working or not working in person's body.  A wealth of information about how all the natural processes are functioning can be obtained through these tests.  Functional and conventional medical blood chemistry analysis are different.  With conventional blood chemistry, doctors are looking to see if a person has any markers that indicate a disease or pathology.    In functional blood chemistry analysis, we use the markers to look not only for disease pathology but also to understand what is going on with a person’s biology.  What is going on with the patient's physiology that is causing the problems?   In conventional medicine, certain markers that are high or low mean that a person has a specific disease. They look only at laboratory or disease ranges.  The problem is that these ranges don't tell the whole story.  Laboratories create their “normal and abnormal” ranges by creating a bell curve of all the patients getting their blood draw at their lab in recent months.  The markers that are in the top 2 ½ percent and the bottom 2 ½ percent are considered “outside the laboratory range”.  But the vast majority of the people getting their blood drawn at the lab are sick or unhealthy people who are there to figure out why they are sick.  So the bell curve is mostly made up of sick people rather than optimally healthy people.  Also as time goes by and the health of the population getting their blood draw changes, the laboratory ranges change.  The lab ranges are also different from lab to lab even within the same company from location to location.  Many or most of the functional (optimal) ranges we use today were the normal laboratory ranges 15-20 years ago.

In functional blood chemistry analysis, we use much stricter tolerances. And we also understand the physiology behind the markers and how the body is working based on subtle changes in blood values.  For instance the normal laboratory ranges for one of the main thyroid markers TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) is 0.450-4.50.  The optimal range is 1.8-3.0.  Someone with a TSH of 3.8 could feel terrible but would be considered normal using a conventional analysis.  Another example is Glucose (blood sugar).  The current laboratory range is 65-99.  The optimal range is 85-99.  A person with a blood glucose of 70 would be considered to have normal blood sugar, but still might have hypoglycemia symptoms. 

Another thing we look at is mechanisms and patterns.  It is important to look at groups of markers to really understand the cause of a patient's symptoms.  Typically I order a much more extensive set of tests than the standard medical screening blood chemistry.  This way we can see the patterns and mechanisms.  For instance, the standard screening test for the thyroid is often just TSH.  They might also include total T4.  I usually order at least TSH, Total T4, Total T3 and T3 uptake.  If the person has a history or signs of thyroid problems, I will also include TPO and TBG antibodies.  The reason for the difference is that conventional blood chemistry analysis is looking for two thyroid patterns and I am looking for seven different patterns.  TSH only tells us whether or not the thyroid is responding to the signals the pituitary is sending to the thyroid.  Total T4 will tell us how much thyroid hormone the thyroid is producing.  Total T3 will tell us if T4 is being converted to T3.  T3 uptake can tell if there an excess or lack of thyroid binding proteins.  The antibodies will tell us if there is an autoimmune attack on the thyroid.  Thyroid symptoms with normal thyroid markers can mean that the patient has thyroid receptor site resistance.

So you can see a lot of good information can be obtained from a good functional blood chemistry analysis.  It is essential to have the blood chemistry panel done to get a true picture of person’s health.

Stool Testing
This is a Microbial Ecology Profile stool test result for one of my patient’s from Metametrix Laboratory.  This lab uses PCR DNA testing to look for abnormal organisms in a person’s digestive tract.  It is very accurate because it uses the same technology that it is used in crime scene evaluation.  Most labs use antibody testing and visual screening to identify abnormal organisms.  This type of testing often misses infections or provides unclear information.  PCR testing will pick up the presence of any organism even if no antibodies are present or no parasites are seen under microscope.

Saliva Adrenal and Sex Hormone Testing