I am blessed to have trained as an MD. The advances we’ve made in medicine have helped save lives no doubt, but I don’t believe we can depend completely on western medicine for health. After a decade practicing traditional family medicine, I pivoted to functional medicine because I was tired of being reactive. Besides the few routine preventative mammograms, colonoscopies, vaccines, etc., I was taught to wait until a disease occurred before I treated it. And rightfully so…all I had in my tool belt were prescriptions and procedures and who would want to take those if they didn’t need to. But what about being proactive…keeping disease from occurring in the first place? For that, we need lifestyle changes, supplements, analysis of environment and genes and overall a step away from a “cookbook” or protocol approach to medicine…we need to personalize medicine before disease sets in.
This is exactly what functional medicine offers. Let’s look at a real time example with COVID-19. Our current approach is reactive…we waited until COVID reached the United States until we declared it a concern, we worried about PPE after we had already started to use up the supplies, we focus the treatment on ventilators and critical care, and we pushed funds to develop a medication and vaccine. These are necessary measures, but what if we ALSO took a preventative approach? What if we put all those finances and energy into making you as healthy as possible so you never get the disease? I appreciate the current efforts toward COVID-19, but it shouldn’t be the extent of prevention. We need to slow down and focus on personalized preventative medicine. I would rather we optimize our immune system, create stamina in our psyche, find our ideal weight, train our heart muscles, support our microbiome through digestive health, correct vitamin deficiencies and get our bodies as healthy as they can be. As pessimistic as it sounds, there will be another COVID-19, another challenge in our future. For some it could be another rare infection but for others it may be cancer or an autoimmune disease or heart attack or depression or financial stress or weight gain or desire to attain a new goal. Whatever the challenge may be, it will certainly come. Will you be ready?
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