Introduction to Natural Functional Healthcare
What is Natural Functional Medicine? Natural Functional Medicine is a personalized method of healthcare that focuses on optimizing health and considers the person first before the illness. We seek to identify environmental, genetic and lifestyle factors as well as nutritional depletions which may be keeping you in ill health. We then work with you to modify those factors to achieve a shift to an optimal healthy state of being. Using both conventional and functional lab testing with Chinese medicine diagnostics helps us to treat and prevent many chronic diseases. Natural Functional Medicine can be secondary supportive care for side effects to pharmaceuticals, adjunct support when receiving cancer treatments as well as additional care along with your “conventional” medicine treatments. Our doctors listen to what you have to say and want to investigate ways to help with your medical challenges. Each session is personalized so there are no generic treatments, they are tailored to your individual needs. If you have been struggling with your health and well-being from sleep to energy to a serious health issue, we are here to support you. Natural functional medicine helps you be more in control of your own health and healing by gaining a better understanding of how a healthy relationship with food, repairing nutritional deficiencies, and choosing a healthy lifestyle contributes to the healing of both mental and physical symptoms. If we feel that you need a different type of care, we refer you to a source for that care. We are also not the place to come for acute trauma or acute care which requires hospital stay.
Can Natural Functional Medicine help me?
We ask you to consider the question: “Are my symptoms trying to tell me something? “Why is my body not functioning properly?” “Could there be underlying issues I cannot see?” One of our colleagues calls this style of care, “unconventional medicine” in the context of conventional and unconventional medical care.
Natural Functional Medicine may help you if:
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Perhaps you have been to your “conventional” doctor where they offered you a diagnosis and a treatment plan with a pharmaceutical medication, but you are wondering if there is a less aggressive way to start.
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Maybe you have been suffering with a chronic health issue that is not resolving and have not been given a treatment or told there isn’t one. Or the treatment that you were given has not been working.
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Or you have a health issue that gets better for a period then comes back sometimes even worse?
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You want to manage your health naturally.
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At Healing Compass Natural Health Center theses are typical scenarios we hear. We work with you to find the answers and use treatments that may restore your body to its most functional state within a framework that focuses on health, the therapeutic relationship, and the whole person. Treatment plans do not include pharmaceutical medicine, which is one reason our healthcare is called Natural Functional Medicine (NFM) and not Functional medicine (FM). The tenets are the same for both but we use the treatments within our scope of Chinese medicine and functional nutrition for our patient treatment plans including the physical treatments of acupuncture and bodywork, whole-food supplements, and herbal medicine.
Some Basic Facts
Functional care emphasizes the importance of evidence-based interventions, and we question trends that have good marketing but have little research behind them. Both herbal medicine and the phytochemicals from food, have both research and science supporting them. Many of the most prestigious medical facilities use this type of care and some of the medical schools are integrating nutrition and FM into their curriculum. One of those facilities is Cleveland Clinic and here in Los Angeles UCLA for East-West Medicine and Simms Medical Center for Integrative Oncology.
Chinese medicine studies are mostly done in China and Europe and have been for decades where the financial support is available to conduct substantial studies which support treatments that cannot be trademarked or patented because they are natural and been used successfully for thousands of years.
Research exists for this type of approach. You just won’t find conventional medicine knowing about it because doctors in conventional healthcare operate from a different model, the one they learned in medical school. Medical doctors who now practice Functional Medicine began their training after medical school.
Studies that support the rationale of the Functional medicine healthcare model, are the ones that show that disease and signs and symptoms that result from them are caused by underlying mechanisms and pathologies-called the “root” cause. There is a gap between lifestyle medicine research and the way conventional doctors’ practice. The gap between emerging research in sciences, and integration into medial practice, is wide particularly in complex, chronic disease.