Our Philosophy

Optimal Health and Wellness is Our Goal

The standard way of doing things is not working out very well for the majority of Americans as well as for those in other westernized countries. We address the root causes, not just the symptoms of disease.

The Pharmaceutical Industry

The medical establishment is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry. This is readily visible in the amount of advertising dollars spent on the publishers of the medical journals and educational magazines, but they are also physically present and represented at every medical conference of every medical specialty.  

Many of the educational speakers at the large medical conferences are either sponsored by or are direct employees of the pharmaceutical industry. It is true that this information must be disclosed to everyone in attendance beforehand, and is also found on the first few slides of the presentation, but most clinicians pay little attention to that information and remain most interested in the educational information that follows. Well, what if that information is tainted by the influences of the pharmaceutical company?

Promoting Wellness Through Focusing on Underlying Factors

Have you, or someone you know, ever been to a medical office because of symptoms being experienced and the final answer is “there is nothing wrong with you… you are perfectly healthy”? Blood work and x-rays didn’t reveal anything. Vital signs may be normal. Maybe you are advised that it is just anxiety and provided a prescription for a pill to alleviate that. Alternatively, you may be told that it’s just a viral infection causing these vague symptoms. This maybe leads to a temporary improvement only to find that the symptoms return or worsen and yet the answer never comes. The reasons for this is that our system is not designed to address conditions before they fully manifest themselves through either a physical deformity (i.e. tumor) or abnormal laboratory findings. Very often, even subtle abnormalities are simply ignored and considered “acceptable”.

Functional & Integrative Medicine is founded on the principles of promoting wellness through a focus on the fundamental underlying factors that influence each individual’s experiences surrounding health and illness. Disease is a physical manifestation [symptoms] that results from a disruption of normal function in an attempt to maintain order within the body [homeostasis]. It results from core imbalances and can have many Root Causes. Only through addressing these can you ever truly hope to correct the imbalances. Medications treat the symptoms but they do not address the cause and, therefore, cannot cure the disease.

The Body is an Integrated System

Your whole being matters, and you are more than a collection of independent organs that interact with each other by chance.  The body is an integrated system, much like a spider’s web, where the cells throughout our body are in constant communication with each other, thereby influencing our form and function.  Nothing affects one part of your body without having an impact on other parts.

The education and approach that is needed must focus on these root causes that have resulted in the imbalances.  Our goal is to teach you how this can be accomplished and how true well-being can be achieved.  The core factors that must be addressed are lifestyle-based and include:

• Dietary Changes to address food sensitivities

• Nutrition through food and sometimes supplements

• Exercise / Physical Activity

• Stress

• Sleep quality

• Social relationships

• Toxic loads

We Give You the Knowledge to Make Better Choices

We offer the best of contemporary medical, nutritional  & evolutionary science with a thorough understanding of our ancestral heritage and archaeological history to provide the best information to you. We impart to you the knowledge that you may need to make the best choices for yourself. We cannot ignore our history as humans on this planet and how our lives have changed over the centuries, some certainly for the better but much for the worse. The education we offer is based on an Ancestral/Evolutionary approach that focuses on the way that our bodies have been designed over eons, to optimize gene expression and thereby prevent or reverse disease processes.

Disease is often not a state of being caused by a single event, but rather a disruption of our underlying physiologic function, from many different events over a long period of time, which leads to the symptoms and lab abnormalities that are then recognized as this entity we label as a “disease”. These events are referred to as “Triggers“. The things that we keep doing or possibly add to our lives to attempt to address developing dysfunction are known as “Mediators“. This is our body’s attempts to keep us alive, by adapting to this environment that we provide it with.

The body is a living and changing organism. It is constantly adapting, forever in flux. It is not a piece of machinery that rusts and corrodes over time. The conditions that lead a body toward disease and dysfunction can be undone. We have the innate ability to heal. If you provide your body with the proper environment it can regenerate itself to a proper state of being.

Simple Lifestyle Changes That Can Have a Large Impact

Each individual is biochemically unique. The standard one-size-fits-all approach has proven to be an ineffective means of addressing the chronic conditions that many of us now face, such as: Obesity, Diabetes, Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke, Hypertension, Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Depression, Anxiety, Migraines, Autoimmune Disorders, Asthma, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Food Sensitivities, Seasonal Allergies and many others.  Even conditions such as Autism and ADHD can be addressed and improved through relatively simple lifestyle measures that can have a large impact on quality of life.

The Power to Change is in Your Hands

Functional Medicine addresses the total mind, body, and spirit. It is personalized for individual needs. A genetic predisposition to a disease is not your destiny and you have more control than you may realize or have been led to believe. Chronic diseases are the results of an imbalance between our environment and our genetics.

We accept that not all diseases may be reversible but they can be ameliorated or significantly improved. One thing that I have learned through many years in Acute Care Medicine is that there is no Magic Pill. Your initial goal should be on preventing any further progression of a disease process while working to improve your symptoms and provide a greater life satisfaction and a shift toward Wellness. For the majority, in whom irreversible damage has not yet occurred, this process can be halted, reversed and sometimes even cured. It takes time to effect a change to a process that has been developing over many years or decades. You cannot reverse in a week what took years to develop.

You have an enormous potential that the medical industry will never educate you on.  This is largely due to the fact that they do not believe that this is even possible. I have been educated and trained in this modality and have been in clinical practice for over 20 years. I can assure you that this is the truth in the conventional medicine model.  In my several years of practice in Functional Medicine I have come to see things through a different lens. I have witnessed the almost miraculous changes that occur in people’s lives through the reversal of chronic conditions, symptoms that had been present for decades, discontinuation of long-term medications. I have experienced this in my own life and am on my own personal journey of health and wellness.

Ultimately, the power to change is in your hands. We offer the education to empower you to make those changes for yourself without the influence from an industry or organization. No one knows what it is like to live in your body better than you. No clinician, regardless of their skill and expertise, can deny how you feel. The answers don’t come from a prescription bottle or from a procedure to trim away fat or wrinkles. Don’t delay making changes now in hopes that things will naturally get better or simply “go away”. I can assure you that this is never the case.

We do accept that there is a time and place for pharmaceutical intervention. Modern medicine has many advantages. No one should have to suffer needlessly and if these interventions can be used to provide comfort or amelioration of symptoms then they should be taken advantage of.

• Antibiotics can save lives.
• Critical conditions must be addressed acutely and aggressively.
• Tumors may need to be cut out.
• Blood thinners may help prevent disastrous outcomes

These options should not necessarily be the first sought but, if they are necessary, they should be used for only as long as needed until you are able to make the changes that can address the dysfunction that made them necessary.