A HOLISTIC INTEGRATIVE APPROACH TO WIN THE WAR AGAINST CHRONIC DISEASES.
It is a fact that currently, people are in the midst of the worst chronic disease epidemic humans have ever faced in history. In India alone, billions of people die every year due to chronic diseases. Modern Medical Science reached the peak of its growth scientifically but the win over Chronic diseases is still a dream.
Then, why is our present healthcare system so ineffective?
The simplest answer is that it is not actually a system to treat chronic health conditions. A better description of what we have would be “Acute Symptom management system or disease management.” Modern medicine is amazing in many ways. It is incredible for emergency medicine and trauma care. If one met a severe accident, we definitely want him to be taken to the hospital! Our human life span is longer than ever because of this. We are starting to be able to re-attach limbs, restore sight to the blind, and in our lifetime, we may be able to fight cancer with nanorobots. But I think we can all agree that conventional medicine already failed in promoting health or preventing or treating chronic disease, which is really the biggest problem that we face today. So we need a new approach to medicine, one that emphasizes healthcare over disease management.
The main issues in the present system of Modern Medical care are
- Drugs rarely address the real problem.
To use an analogy, let’s imagine that you had a rock in your shoe and it was making your foot hurt. You could certainly take Ibuprofen or some other analgesic to reduce the pain in your foot, but would not a better solution be simply taking off your shoe and dumping out that rock?
2. Drugs don’t just suppress symptoms, they also suppress functions.
An example of this is that many people take NSAIDs like Ibuprofen to cope with arthritis or inflammatory conditions. These medications can be effective in relieving pain, but the problem is that they also reduce blood flow to cartilage. Blood carries all the nutrients and immune substances that we need for tissue repair. Ironically, taking NSAIDs can worsen the problem if they’re taken chronically because they actually reduce the tissue’s ability to heal.
3. Drugs often correct one imbalance by causing another—or several others.
The interactions between proteins are extremely complex. If a drug interferes with one protein, it will inevitably affect many others. This causes what we typically refer to as “side effects.” But if you think about it, a drug really only has intended effects and unintended effects. The problem is that the unintended effects of a drug often far outnumber the intended effects.
4. Drugs don’t take into consideration that biological systems are redundant.
The same molecule will have many different functions in the body. Histamine is a perfect example. It plays an important role in inflammation in local tissues. For example, if you have a mosquito bite or a bee sting, it is often mediated by histamine. But in the brain, histamine actually increases the function of neurons. So if you take an antihistamine to suppress an allergic rash, for example, it will also affect histamine receptors in the brain, downregulate the function of neurons, and cause drowsiness. This is, of course, why antihistamines are often taken by people who suffer from insomnia. So we need a new approach to medicine, one that emphasizes healthcare over just a symptomatic disease management.
FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE IS THE ANSWER TO TREAT CHRONIC DISEASES.
How Can I claim this? Let me first explain. What is Functional Medicine and its Concept in treating diseases especially, Chronic diseases.
Functional medicine practitioners promote wellness by focusing on the fundamental underlying
Factors that influence every patient’s experience of health and disease.
The Functional Medicine Approach to Diseases:
A Functional Medicine practitioners will assess the patient’s fundamental clinical imbalances through careful history taking, physical examination, and laboratory testing. The functional medicine practitioner will consider multiple factors, including:\
● Environmental factors
The air you breathe, the water you drink, the diet you take, the quality of the food available to you, your level of physical exercise, and toxic exposures or traumas you have experienced –all affect your health.
● Mind-body connections
Psychological, spiritual, and social factors all can have a profound influence on your health.
These areas will help the functional medicine practitioner to see your health in the context, as a whole person, not just your physical symptoms.
● Genetic makeup
Although individual genes may make you more susceptible to some diseases, your DNA is not an unchanging blueprint for your life. Emerging research shows that your genes may be influenced by everything in your environment, as well as your experiences, attitudes, and beliefs.
That means it is possible to change the way genes are activated and expressed. Through assessment of these underlying causes and triggers of dysfunction, the functional medicine practitioner is able to understand how key processes are affected. These are the body’s processes that keep you alive. Some occur at the cellular level and involve how cells function, repair, and maintain themselves.
These processes are related to larger functions, such as:
● Removal of Toxins from your body
● Regulation of hormones and neuro-transmitters
● Immune system function
● Inflammatory responses
● Digestion and absorption of nutrients and health of the digestive tract
● Structural integrity
● Psychological and spiritual equilibrium
● how you produce energy
All these processes are influenced by both environmental factors and genetic make-up.
When they are disturbed or imbalanced, they lead to symptoms, which can lead to disease, if effective interventions are not applied and the health can be restored successfully.
As I stated earlier, conventional medicine has some amazing characteristics. It is remarkable in terms of trauma and emergency medicine and acute care. But I think we can all agree that it is not very good in treating chronic diseases, which is the prime problem we face today.
Functional medicine differs from conventional medical treatment in six important ways:
- Functional medicine is investigative
Functional medicine treats symptoms by addressing the root of the problem, which leads to more profound and long-lasting results. Conventional medicine, on the other hand, tends to be more superficial. It masks or suppresses symptoms but does not address the underlying cause, and this tends to create patients for life.
For example, if you have high BP, you get on a drug to lower it, and you are basically told to take that for the rest of your life. The same is true for high cholesterol also.
- Functional medicine is more holistic
Functional medicine treats the body as an inter connected whole, and practitioners recognize that in order to treat one part, all other parts must be addressed. Conventional medicine, on the other hand, is more dualistic. It views the body as a collection of separate parts. In fact, there’s a doctor for every part of the body, and there is often very little communication between these doctors or even acknowledgement of a connection.
- Functional medicine is safer
Treatment in functional medicine have very few side effects, risks, or complications. Practitioners emphasize diet, lifestyle, supplements, and herbs, and even unrelated complaints often will improve spontaneously in treatment. Conventional medicine tends to be more dangerous. Drugs and surgery can have serious side effects and complications, including death.
- Functional medicine is patient-centered
This means that practitioners treat the patient and not the disease. We recognize the individuality of the patient, and we know that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, patients with the same condition, for example, ulcerative colitis, may get a completely different treatment based on the particular etiology or pathogenesis of their condition. Conventional medicine, on the other hand, tends to be more disease-centered. It treats the disease and not the patient, and patients with the same disease will often get the same treatment despite differences in their presentation.
In functional medicine, the patient is respected, empowered, educated, and encouraged to play an active role in his or her healing process. In conventional medicine, the patient’s opinion is often discounted or ignored, and little time is spent on education. In some cases, the patient is even actively discouraged to play a strong role in the healing process.
- Functional medicine is integrative
Functional medicine combines the best of new medical research findings and alternative treatments. It does not exclude drugs and surgery when they are necessary, but it does tend to focus more on diet, lifestyle, supplements, and herbs as the primary interventions.
Conventional medicine is more limited in its scope. It typically relies almost exclusively on drugs and surgery, despite risks. While it does pay some lip service to the importance of nutrition and lifestyle, physicians are undereducated on these topics and often do not have much time to devote to them in the typical patient interaction.
- Functional medicine is preventive
Functional medicine is guided by the ancient Chinese proverb, “The superb physician treats disease before it occurs.” Conventional medicine, on the other hand, tends to be a little more reactive. It aims to manage disease after it occurs and often does not intervene until disease has progressed beyond a certain point of no return.
In conventional medicine, healthcare providers typically approach treatment from the outside in.
Again, the focus is on suppressing symptoms (the outer ring) with drugs or surgery and managing disease (the second ring in), trying to slow the progression and help the patient to live with the symptoms. There is nothing wrong with that per se, with helping the patient to live with the symptoms slowing the progression of disease, and providing acute-stage care when these diseases get severe is necessary.
However in functional medicine, the approach is different. We are looking to prevent disease before it occurs, through regular monitoring of functions of the body .We focus on diet, nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental influences. Then to correct the pathologies that underlie disease and symptomatology. That is really a fundamentally different model to win chronic diseases.
The identification and correction of functional problems without the intervention of drugs and surgery will impart a quality life which completes the slogan “PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE”.
