At the beginning of a patient’s Functional Medicine journey, there’s a lot of testing and monitoring of the effects of changes in order to create a customised treatment plan that works towards the best possible outcomes for them as an individual. But it’s not just about the improvements we can make in the first few months. Functional Medicine is designed to be a sustainable approach to health that sets patients up for not just better health, but optimal health on a long-term basis. Here’s how and why.
How Do You Get Started With Functional Medicine Treatment?
The foundation of Functional Medicine is using food as medicine, taking a holistic approach to health and treating patients as people with individual treatment plans. These foundations inform how you get started with Functional Medicine Treatment.
Testing
When you first become a patient at our Functional Medicine clinic, we have a set process we take you through to evaluate your health and figure out what is causing issues and what could promote healthy functioning. We start with Functional testing to track your nutritional and metabolic status including minerals, vitamins and protein sufficiency.
Elimination and reintroduction
For most patients we will start by guiding you through the process of the elimination diet. Our ethos on elimination is about supporting you to ‘crowd in’ new and helpful food in order to help you eliminate the less helpful foods and ingredients. This process is about adding all sorts of anti-inflammatory foods to heal the gut. From there, we gradually reintroduce potentially problematic foods to see their effects on you. This will determine what you eliminate from your diet on a more permanent basis and what you nourish yourself with regularly.
The foundations of health
We also use this introductory period to advise you on other factors of health including your quality of sleep, stress levels, supportive movement and how to avoid common toxins and support natural detox processes for environmental pollutants that disrupt the body’s healthy functioning and can exacerbate symptoms.
Personalised treatment plan
Reviewing your results and response to initial treatment, we can start to determine your custom treatment plan. This includes a bespoke food plan, recommended nutritional supplements and any strategies for improving sleep, reducing stress levels, finding your pace with movement and supporting detox. This individualistic and holistic approach allows patients to take massive strides in their health even if they have really struggled to make any progress before.
Ongoing Functional Medicine Support
The support isn’t over once a patient has been given their first individual treatment plan. We monitor our patients on an ongoing basis. This ensures the effectiveness of their treatment in the long term, getting the best possible results with minimal restriction.
Implementation strategy
We work with our patients to figure out an implementation strategy that is going to work for them considering their health status as well as their lifestyle choices and preferences. It’s better that patients gradually implement changes than get overwhelmed and don’t feel able to do anything at all.
Patients work with our Functional Medicine trained Nutritional Therapists to turn their treatment plan into a realistic and enjoyable nutritional plan. They can provide recipes, recommend sources of high-quality food and give guidance on healthy eating. We encourage patients to experiment with food and cooking to find out what works best for them.
Food tolerance
If a patient has struggled to tolerate quite a few foods in the reintroduction phase, and it isn’t due to food allergies or sensitivities, we will try to get as much as possible back in their diet to promote nutrient diversity.
By building the body’s ability to process the food, it may be able to tolerate it later down the line. For example, a patient may struggle to tolerate caffeine or histamine, so we’ll initially put them on a low-histamine diet. Then we’ll work on their ability to process histamine through food with the hope that, in the future, they will be able to tolerate healthy higher histamine foods (such as avocado, tomato and fermented foods).
Refinement and adaptation
The detailed testing and monitoring we do every 6 to 12 months indicates adjustments that would improve individual patient health even further. Despite following their treatment plan, most of the time a patient could still be deficient in certain minerals, prompting us to adjust their diet or supplementation.
Ongoing monitoring also accounts for changes in the body’s needs. For example, the hormonal changes of menopause would impact the hormone-supporting food, supplements and other strategies we suggest to a patient.
Over time, we refine the effectiveness of custom treatment plans and make necessary adjustments to meet current bodily needs. A Functional Medicine approach meets you where you are every time.
What Makes Functional Medicine Sustainable?
By nature, Functional Medicine is an approach to health that prioritises sustainability. It’s set up to support long-term health improvements because of the following factors.
Root cause
In Functional Medicine, we treat health issues at their root cause. This means we look beyond the overt symptoms of poor health and look for the underlying cause at a molecular level. As a result, we can treat whatever is going on in the body that is causing a disruptive symptom, eliminating the symptom and preventing its reoccurrence because its initial trigger has been dealt with. The root cause approach minimises ongoing and recurrent health issues, keeping the body in the healthiest possible state and giving patients the opportunity to reach optimal health.
Food focus
Food is incredibly powerful in health and well-being. If we eat the good stuff, we nourish our bodies and enjoy amazing benefits that support our ongoing health. For example:
- Bright-coloured fruit and vegetables such as blueberries, strawberries and carrots are full of phytonutrients which have antioxidants. These have restorative and protective properties that give the body the fuel it needs to prevent damaging health conditions.
- Olive oil is associated with lowered heart disease because it contains polyphenols which can reduce inflammation.
As Functional Medicine focuses on food, it helps people get the natural sources of nutrients they need to function optimally throughout their lives.
Natural
As much as we can, we use food as medicine and top up with high-quality supplements when needed. That means that patients can stay on their treatment plans for years without any concerns about negative side effects. It becomes second nature and part of their routine. They just change what they buy at the supermarket and what they cook. It’s fueling, healing and supporting the body in the way it was designed. Our approach is to use medication only when needed and food when possible because of how effective and sustainable it is.
Promotes optimal health
We don’t just react to issues our patients report. We are proactive. Everything we advise and prescribe is with the intention of making the body as healthy as possible to eliminate and avoid issues in the present and in the future. That’s why we focus on gut health so much. If your gut isn’t happy, you aren’t. It’s so important because the gut’s processing extracts the nutrients from food needed to fuel the body’s various other processes. We look at how to take care of the body’s systems best so that patients can feel as good as possible for as long as possible.
If you give the body what it needs, it tends to fix itself. That is the art of sustainable health. There are some established principles of optimal health. When we explore an individual’s needs, we can implement known principles with maximum impact. We refine and adapt personalised treatment plans over time to continuously bring patients closer to a state of optimal health with an approach orientated around root causes, food and natural solutions. If you’d like to begin your sustainable health journey with Functional Medicine, become a patient of the clinic or join our next cohort of the Functional Foundations Programme.
