Environmental inputs include the air and water in your community, the particular diet you eat, the quality of food available to you, physical exercise, psychosocial factors, and toxic exposures or traumas you may have experienced.
Genetic predisposition is not an unavoidable outcome for your life; your genes may be influenced by everything in your environment, plus your experiences, attitudes and beliefs. That means it is possible to change the way genes are expressed (activated and experienced).
Fundamental physiological processes keep us alive. They involve cellular communication; energy transformation; replication, repair, and maintenance; waste elimination; protection/defense; and transport/circulation. These processes are influenced by environment and genes, and when they are disturbed or imbalanced, they lead to symptoms, which can lead to disease if effective interventions are not applied.
Most imbalances in functionality can be addressed. Some can be completely restored to optimum function and others can be substantially improved. Virtually every complex, chronic disease is preceded by long-term disturbances in functionality that need to be identified and effectively managed — the earlier the better.
Vitality Health & Wellness physicians will always assess the patient’s fundamental clinical imbalances through careful history-taking, physical examination, and laboratory testing.
The following must be evaluated:
- Hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances
- Redox imbalances, including oxidative stress and mitochondropathy
- Detoxification, biotransformation and excretory imbalances
- Immune imbalances
- Inflammatory imbalances
- Digestive, absorptive and microbiological imbalances
- Structural imbalances at the cellular and bodily levels
- Nutritional and dietary imbalances
- Mind/body imbalances, including stress
Once an assessment has been made, the functional medicine doctor examines a wide array of interventions and selects those with the most impact on underlying functionality.
Changing how the system(s) function can have a major impact on the patient’s health. Lifestyle is a very big factor; research estimates that 70-90% of the risk of chronic disease is attributable to lifestyle. That means what you eat, how you exercise, what your spiritual practices are, how much stress you have (and how you handle it) are all elements that must be addressed in a comprehensive approach.
Functional medicine uncovers many different ways of attacking problems, providing options that are not limited to the “drug of choice for condition X.” You CAN turn your life around and look forward to a more vibrant future.