Traditional healthcare does a great job of handling symptoms – it’s reactionary in nature and may provide quick relief from what ails you. The problem, is that this quick relief often comes from a prescribed medication, which typically serves to simply mask the problem. It doesn’t “fix” anything and therefore its effects are often short-lived.
Functional healthcare serves to uncover the underlying root cause for the way your body behaves.
Headaches, asthma, allergies, insomnia… these things are all examples of symptoms letting you know that something in your body is not functioning the way it should.
At Functional Health Centers, our practitioners take a patient-centered approach, spending time with each patient, listening to your history and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic disease.
What causes most health problems?
There are three major areas of interference that can inhibit our body’s ability to heal.
1) Hormone changes from stress
When your body senses increased stress levels it produces many different hormones to resist breaking down. These hormones act as a makeshift force field. One example is adrenaline. When adrenaline is produced we experience energy and alertness. Adrenaline also controls vascular constriction or dilation that might lead to blood pressure changes or headaches. Another is cortisol, it will affect sleep cycles and how we burn fat or store energy.
When these hormones are being produced at a high level it requires a high level of nutrients to manufacture the hormones. It is possible to deplete levels of certain nutrients and experience a drop in hormones. Hormone changes, higher or lower, will impact your health.
Find out how we assess these three areas during your complimentary first visit.
2) Unseen damage to nerves
Most of us have experienced a fall or accident in life. As a result you may get a bruise or pulled muscle or maybe a bone fracture. These acute injuries repair and we forget about them. What we don’t always see is the damage to our nerves.
Sometimes when falls happen, our spines can bend or curve. You might notice one shoulder higher or your head tilts a little to one side. This might not seem significant, however these imbalances can trap or “pinch” nerves and stop them from communicating with the body. Imagine that you were running and needed more blood supply (oxygen) throughout your body. If your brain could not send a message to your heart to beat faster, you would quickly have a problem! Nerves from your brain control everything from sight to digestion to muscle contraction. If damage occurs to one or more nerves, you cannot function at 100%.
Find out how we assess these three areas during your complimentary first visit!
3) Chronic inflammation
Inflammation can occur when our normal kidney, liver, and skin function cannot eliminate all the toxins our bodies are exposed to. The body will store the excess toxins in our fat cells and produce inflammation in the cell isolating and protecting us from the toxicity. This can lead to chronic inflammation, causing health problems like recurring allergies, heart and vascular disease, even weight gain.
When our diets consist of nutrient rich organic fruits, vegetables and essential fatty acids the toxicity is cleansed from our cells. If our environment is toxic or we are lacking sufficient nutrients to cleanse our body, the inflammation will persist and interfere with our body’s ability to heal.
Find out how we assess these three areas during your complimentary first visit.