Functional Medicine

Have you ever heard about Functional Medicine? No idea about its importance and benefits? Well, do not worry! This episode is for you!

I know it is jargon for you right now. It can be overwhelming, I know. That's why I am here. I explain why Functional Medicine is significant today and in the future. Unfortunately, we need to change our current medical system and bring it to the next level. And I believe it is the key to progress!

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Transcript

Intro
Welcome to "The Medical Insider" podcast, where we highlight real-life solutions to your health challenges, encorporate new technology and proven solutions from the past with a healthy dose of common sense while resisting the pitfalls of idiopathic classifications and economically-based medical doctrine. This is your host, Dr. Thomas Santucci. Let's get started.

Dr. Thomas
This is "The Medical Insider", the second episode. One of the things I want to share with you is our working theories. In 28 years of functional medicine and clinical expansion, we've worked out some things that are kind of the rules for being a practice. So one of the things is you can't do medicine with some kind of working belief system. Medical schools ingrain belief systems and doctors, chiropractic colleges ingrain belief systems, and acupuncture schools embed belief systems. Everybody's got a macro set of rules that they're working under. One of the things that we've done when we're trying to burst through some of the solutions is get rid of the ones that don't work and really, really emphasize that the ones that do. So, it's sort of a functional medicine for normal people section. But the first rule is everything counts. When dealing with our organ systems, you can't leave anything out. You have to evaluate all the different subsystems, digestion, Liver detoxification, cardiovascular performance, neurology, immunity, and emotions. This is the first contribution of functional medicine. For example, when dealing with energy, you just can't eat poorly, metabolize inefficiently, detoxify incompletely, or ignore the composition and quality of your food. If you want the energy systems to work very well for very long. This particular point has become a key issue that food is now considered upstream medicine, a vital component of our very existence on the Earth. At the same time, I would caution against taking any one of those things. The brain is controlling the neuroendocrine system. There are lots of theories these days that the gut-associated lymphoid tissue or the gut biome is actually a second brain. It is a second brain, but it's a second brain with probably 20 of the power of the first brain. So part of it is to consider everything but keep your priorities straight. So understanding what to worry about. What is less important is a key skill in modern health management. One of the things that the Internet doesn't do for us is it doesn't give us perspective. So a good example is the distinction of wheat versus rice in your diet is probably important. Probably very important. White rice versus brown rice arguably isn't. Even though the nutritional content of brown rice is much higher. Wheat is probably causing an autoimmune reaction in about a third of our population. Another thing that we all know now, but when I wrote this, we didn't know. The bad stuff in the news actually impacts your life. Our toxic world is having a poisonous effect on our health. Everything from the GMO grains to global warming affects us in some ways. And this now includes plastics, Styrofoam, industrial metals, food antigens, as well as toxic energy from cell phones, solar radiation, and microwaves, all of which are increasingly adding toxins to our experience. From a neurometabolic point of view, this is saying brain and liver. So, two of my favorite organs and two of the things that most people need to take a step back, get an assessment, and do something about your ability to detoxify and your ability to control organ systems. New Point. There's a huge delay in the introduction of medical research in the United States. For many reasons, it's become difficult for the medical community to quickly embrace new methods of care, even though they are well documented in the research. This has gotten worse. In the face of abysmal performance in the cardiovascular and cancer interventions, we still cling to 50-year-old notions and their pharmaceutical solutions. Statins, chemotherapy, and other harsh Pharmaceuticals still pervade our medical landscape when the current literature offers far more hopeful solutions. One of the things that we were kind of hoping for is that the research-based or the research-led actions would turn into a new reality. What's happened is really there's a doubling down. The macro kinds of statements are that we've spent 50 years and about a trillion dollars on cardiovascular research and interventions and have not improved the percentages at all. Cancer statistics are not much better. So the two main ways that people actually die in this country, we have taken a half a century to work on and haven't moved the needle at all. So one of the things that we see when we're looking at different kinds of health problems is that it is much, much more effective to fix the problem where it is, and I'm going to introduce a model on that. Health can be divided into physical, biochemical, neurologic, and energetic or psychological realities or states. Analyzing and correcting a problem in its correct state or its appropriate state is the most direct and usually the most effective solution. Not that everything can't lead to the next thing, but if it's a knee problem, you should probably fix the knee, not offer psychological counseling. That means treating physical problems at the muscle joint nerve level, not with drugs. That means treating neurologic imbalances with neurofeedback or rehab, not with drugs. That means treating biochemical imbalances with food, not drugs. So when we're looking at these multiple states, physical, biochemical, and neuroenergetic. It's always more effective to correct a problem in the state of the health from which it originated. New Point. Quantum physics, with its elegant notions of life as a giant interrelated energetic field, has begun to replace Newtonian, which is basically saying matter is solid. Understandings, just as Wikipedia and the Internet have replaced the Miriam Webster Dictionary and the Encyclopedia. Quantum physics brings the reality that there is more space and more energy in the spaces between matter than there is matter itself. We are made out of less than 1% matter and over 99% energy. The practical implications of this mean that many things, many new interventions are sound, vibration, or energy-related, and they're significantly outperforming mechanical interventions. This means that a realist in medicine includes the understanding and application of energy. Last point on this. Technology is changing the existing doctor to doctor relationships in medicine. For new breakthroughs, combining existing specialties. Functional medicine practitioners broke down these barriers by holding themselves responsible for a cross-section of organ systems. The reason that the endocrinologist is likely to miss a thyroid remediation is that he's trained to disregard the cause of the autoimmune attack and hypothyroidism. He only knows it's a destructive autoimmune disease and he tries to quell the symptoms using hormone replacement or steroids. Technology is changing existing doctor to doctor relationships in medicine. Most new breakthroughs combine existing specialties that is not something that conventional medicine does well. Functional medicine practitioners broke down those barriers by holding themselves responsible for everything that was wrong with the patient. The cross-section of organ systems. The reason that the endocrinologist is likely to miss the thyroid remediation is that he's trained to disregard the cause of autoimmune attacks and hypothyroidism. He only knows that it is a destructive autoimmune disease and he tries to quell the symptoms using hormone replacement or steroids. A broader approach would look to the existence of the other autoimmune diseases which are likely caused by this patient's triggers in combination with that individual's immune or DNA expression. This is a source of significant controversy because the introduction of newer methods doesn't allow the restrictive safe harbors of specialization in which medicine is currently organized. Lastly, some of the best solutions contain doctor and patient initiatives. The day of medicine-led health revolutions has passed. There's a popular statement in alternative medicine cycles that polio was the last great medical victory and that was in 1952. The remainder of the significant advances in public health performance has been from hygiene and nutritional improvements in the habits of everyday people. So this is really a place where from an activity of daily living point of view, from the things that you can control point of view where you have a voice. There's another place and I hope the purpose of this podcast where we take you from being a medical outsider to being a medical insider and you can begin to navigate the healthcare system.

Outro
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