Outside the pillbox

This month our holistic GP explains how she’s adding to her repertoire of health knowledge with a new approach…
Last week yet another patient came to see me clutching a book about alternative therapies and it made me think: where has conventional medicine gone so wrong? I think it’s because it still follows a linear fashion. This was fine a hundred years ago when infections were the biggest disease burden and could be managed along the lines of ‘find the bug and kill it.

Where medicine fails

Conventional medicine trys to slot people into disease boxes,and give them the drug for the disease. But many people suffer from – cardiovascular, autoimmune and cancer, which don’t fit into boxes. Take the patient with painful joints who has blood tests which come back negative. The rheumatologist says, “I’m sorry, but right now you don’t have rheumatoid arthritis. Come back if it gets worse.” Over time the patient watches her symptoms get worse and gets re-tested. This time it’s positive and the patient is actually happy, then she discovers there is no definitive cure because it’s an ongoing disease process,and she had exactly the same chronic disease, which was ignored because it wasn’t bad enough for drugs.

A holistic view

Functional medicine is an evolution in conventional medicine that addresses the underlying cause of disease. It recognises the inter-connectedness of the body, the role of spirituality,and genetic uniqueness in the disease process. It provides patients with a framework of diet, environmental and lifestyle changes they can make to alter disease process in the earlier stages. To cure illness you you need wisdom, insight and instinct as well as cutting-edge science.

For more information on this approachvisit functionalmedicine.org