Functional Medicine is being talked about, the title is thrown around, but what exactly does it mean? “Functional Medicine determines how and why illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual” as defined by the Institute of Functional Medicine. YAY! This focus sounds exactly like what I have been telling patients for 10 years and is exactly what we try to accomplish at Big Beautiful Life Chiropractic & Wellness. Rather than treat the symptom(s), we need to get to the underlying cause. Most often, symptoms/ diseases are not linear events. It may be that one condition has many different causes and/or one cause may result in many different conditions! I often refer to this as a snarled ball of yarn, and in order to restore order and heal, we have to figure out not only how to unravel it but in what order.
Diving deep into a patient’s history is key. From my experience, there often is an “event” in one’s history that started the breakdown. This event could be physical, like getting a concussion; emotional, like having your brother die; or chemical, like having a root canal. Often times, the event triggers a breakdown in the body and one’s poor diet, poor exercise, emotional stress, toxic load, etc. further exacerbates the problem and the signs of imbalance get louder and LOUDER. Western medicine will diagnose a disease. However, if someone presents with lack of motivation, poor appetite and unexplained sadness this would be diagnosed as Depression from a medical perspective. Depression, however, is not caused by a Lexapro deficiency. Depression is just a name given to someone with those symptoms. It is not the CAUSE of them. You have Rheumatoid Arthritis, that’s why your joints hurt and look knobby and you have the bloodwork. Again, this is just a name of those symptoms or bloodwork, not the cause. When a doctor starts digging from a Functional Medicine perspective, it could be because the patient is eating gluten, developed leaky gut and has an autoimmune disease like Hashimoto’s and has low thyroid and that’s what is causing the depression. It could be because the patient has a horrible diet and has been taking Prilosec for 20 years and now has a B12 deficiency or it could be because they live in Michigan and have low Vitamin D or because they have taken antibiotics and altered their gut flora or they had a root canal and a stealthy infection developed and is silently robbing them of nutrients and poisoning them. Take one event and then start stacking others on top. It get’s tricky! The way out is to start by going through the events in one’s history.
At Big Beautiful Life Chiropractic & Wellness, Dr Jena Hullman, DC then utilizes Nutrition Response Testing and specific Chiropractic neurologic scans to gather information from the body. Testing every organ reflex in the body and noting which organs are weak or stressed is key. Determining how a person’s brain is able to send intelligence to the organs and glands of the body is another key component to helping a body go into heal/ thrive mode and get out of fight or flight/ survival mode. Opening up the drainage systems of the body has to happen, meaning the bowels are moving, the lymphatic system is not sluggish and the detoxification organs are not congested. All of this becomes part of the sequence to help people get to the underlying cause and HEAL.
In my opinion, the model that is individualized, patient-centered, science-based and empowers the doctor and the patient to work together as a team always has the best outcome. If this sounds like an approach that interests you, I encourage you to call the office TODAY and schedule an appointment. Together, we can do this! (231) 421-9189