How to Use a Functional Medicine Practitioner

I have visited this subject in previous blogs but I have just read a very interesting case study of two patients with horrible fibromyalgia issues and I think the subject must be broached again and again. If you or anyone you know suffers from the wracking pain of fibromyalgia and the resulting exhaustion of the accompanying chronic fatigue you, too, would feel my fervor regarding the subject of functional medicine/integrative medicine. However, everyone or better said anyone with medical issues such as autoimmune disorders, cardiac issues, infertility, cancer, etc. can benefit from seeing a functional medicine practitioner, a licensed MD who specializes in functional/integrative medicine and will from here on out be referred to as a FMP.

Typically when a person visits their general practitioner or even a nurse practitioner the medical person will look at a brief medical history of the patient they see before them. They will have been given no more than 15 minutes to visit with this person and provide a diagnosis and I am told sometimes the doctor never takes their hand off the door knob. How much thinking or caring goes in to a diagnosis given on the run? The easiest path is always the path of least resistance and hardly anyone will or can resist taking a miraculous little pill, so guess what? This medical person will reach in to their pocket and pull out a pad of paper, scratch some words on it, sign it, give it to you with instructions to take it to your pharmacy of choice and send you on your way.

Do you know (or have you experienced it personally) that some people end up taking pharmaceutical products that actually counteract each other? Or that they end up with a cupboard full of pharmacy products that are costing them (or us) a bomb but they haven’t even addressed the medical issue? The case study I just read was depressing as these two women had been put on psychiatric medicines, pain medicines, acid reflux medicines, etc. (and I am not exaggerating about the etc.) and still their symptoms did not abate and both cases got much worse. They both thought they were losing their minds and the medical people they saw corroborated their suspicions instead of doing the right thing.

This is the point where you as the patient have to have done your homework. You have to understand that this physician means well but medicine is a big business now and there are bills to be paid and equipment to be used to pay those bills, so they want to use them be it in a surgical setting or elsewhere. They don’t or won’t take time to thoroughly examine your situation and if and when you start asking questions (because you have done your homework) they will get irritated and downright rude. I have heard that people are told “you aren’t a doctor” or “do not mention that name again in this office” if they ask questions or mention people like Joe Mercola. If this ever happens to you, excuse yourself, grab your clothes and leave. Go home, turn on your computer, Google “Functional Medicine Practioners” and make an appointment with the one nearest to your location.

Why? You will instantly see the difference because the first thing you will do is fill out a health history like no other you have ever filled out. I seem to remember that Dr. Rob Bruley’s was 24 pages long and included questions like “Do you clear your throat often?” or “Have you experienced any major life changes recently?” right down to the number of daily bowel movements you experience. These questions will be carefully examined by your FMP before you are even seen in the office and a course of action will only take place after you have also had at least one hour and a half appointment in their office, face to face. Don’t be taken aback by the offer of a glass of water, or even a tissue to wipe away your tears of relief. Someone is finally listening to you and they don’t even have their fingers on the door knob.

Next the FMP will try to make things better as soon as possible but this may not be an overnight solution. They may prescribe pharmaceutical products to temporarily alleviate your anxiety or pain, after all they are MDs, so they do understand that once in awhile a pill really does help. What they will do that your GP doesn’t do is try to find the underlying problem not just apply a bandaid that will eventually fail and leave you with a gaping hole again filled with aches and pains that will require one more pill with all of its side effects and conditions. You will most likely have a full blood panel ordered, a 4 stage stool test, mucosal barrier tests and heavy metal tests. You may also need an Estronex test or Cortisal/DHEA test or even an Iodine loading test. The tests requested by the FMP will depend on how you filled out that lengthy questionaire and what tests they feel will peel off the layers and expose the underlying cause of your problem. Your insurance may or may not pay for all the tests but if you are seriously ill the cost of the tests is nothing when compared to giving in and losing this battle altogether. Don’t forget there are a plethora of case studies out there where people have sought treatment, been given treatment at great expense, the treatment fails and they go bankrupt trying to pay for failed allopahtic care. Bite the bullet and pay for the tests you need it will be cheaper in the long run.

Once the tests results are back your FMP will schedule up to 3 hours of time to thoroughly discuss a plan of action. You will walk out of the office feeling drained (admittedly of money as well as emotions) but positive. Someone has listened to you, taken action and hope reigns anew. In the case of these two women in the study I read they had both suffered for years with paralyzing pain, dizziness and anxiety. They both were on some of the strongest pain meds you can take and neither one got relief without increasing the strength or adding this pill or that pill and those just exacerbated other issues. When they finally found a FMP and followed through with recommended tests they found that they were both taking zero pharmaceutical products, their pain was gone and their future rosy. Just in case you are interested, one had undiagnosed autoimmune thyroiditis and the other had a bacteria that was harbored in the mucosal lining of her intestinal tract. Both patients were treated in very different ways despite having the same issue of fibromyalgia and both had successful outcomes.

When considering this recommendation remember I am a lay person just like you, I am not a doctor. I have health concerns much the same as you do and I see a FMP because he was the only one who understood that I understood and would listen to me and work with me. He was never threatening or condescending and I can honestly say I have never seen his fingers touch a door knob for anything except to keep  our discussion private and to allow me to leave when I feel all questions have been addressed.

“Pre-Conception Healthcare”

If you are thinking about getting pregnant having a complete blood panel done BEFORE you get pregnant may be the best thing you can do to assure a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. In fact, many holistic physicians feel a complete physical should be required before you become pregnant as well as testing for metal toxicity, molds, electromagnetic fields and STD testing.

Let’s start with the most important test first. You should have your Thyroid tested. This does not mean getting just a TSH reading this means getting a complete thyroid panel including Free T3 and Free T4. Hypothyroidism in an expectant mother can lead to miscarriage of the fetus, a lower IQ of the child as they grow and potentially Down’s Syndrome.

Correcting your hypothyroid condition may be as simple as correcting underfunctioning adrenal glands (can be checked with a saliva hormone test) as according to Joe Mercola it is often the cause of an under functioning thyroid gland. If adrenal health is adequate but your T3 and T4 are not normal or your TSH is higher than a reading of 2 (normal is between 1 and 2)then you may need to take Dessicated Thyroid (Armour, Nature-Throid, Westhroid) but under most circumstances do not fall for the advice to take synthetic T4 only (Synthroid, or the generic Levothyroxine) as it has been my experience that that is a slippery slope to taking more and more thyroid medication with no possibility of resolution or improvement.

Next have your Vitamin D3 (25 OH(D)) levels tested. You should have a level near or exceeding 50 ng/ml to stay healthy and provide an environment that is healthy for the fetus to develop in. It is thought in certain circles that low Vitamin D3 levels in the mother could lead to autism in the baby and this would not be noticed until the child is nearing their third birthday.

If your levels are low it may be prescribed by your physician that you take doses up to 50,000 mg until your levels are 50 ng/ml or above. These are hefty doses and are generally only taken over a few months, a week at a time until your levels are normal. If your levels are low do not attempt to get pregnant until your levels are at least 50 ng/ml and do not take these high doses without a physician monitoring your D levels.

Toxins are a very real threat to the health of your unborn child Mercury being chief among these toxins that can harm your fetus.  There are tests for heavy metal toxicity and if you have amalgam fillings you should have these safely removed and replaced before considering pregnancy.

Should tests for metal toxicity show that you have toxic levels you need to know the metals that you have accumulated and then follow detoxification protocol including removal of silver fillings. Taking chlorella, drinking Cilantro tea or taking Cilantro tincture is an easy thing to do and will cause your body to get rid of the heavy metals. Far Infrared Sauna will also aid the detoxification process and allows the toxins to exit via your skin instead of poisoning your already challenged liver.

Dr. Deitrich Klinghardt recommends an Electro-magnetic field test before getting pregnant. This means testing the areas where you sleep and work for EM fields and protecting yourself from the affects of EMFs. He recommends turning the fuses off to the electricity in your bedroom at night, he will not allow cordless phones in the homes of his patients planning on becoming pregnant and feels strongly that exposing the unborn fetus to undue EMF stress is a huge contributor to behavioral problems in children not to mention cancers and other devastating problems. He does recommend a netting that can be put around your bed much like a mosquito netting that will stop the onslaught of EMF waves which sounds exotic to me but I can see the benefit since I have a “techy” husband who will not turn off the cell phones at night and leaves them by his side at all times not to mention the cordless phones that dot our countertops throughout the house.

It all sounds terribly difficult but it is not impossible and going in to your pregnancy with a healthy body could and will save you years and years of problems or perhaps better said, challenges with your as of now unborn, hopefully unconceived child. You really must dare to conceive the inconceivable.

PACE with Kathy Smith

I have had Kathy Smith’s DVD called Functionally Fit Peak Fat Burning (FFPFB) for sometime and enjoy working out to it immensely. It had occurred to me sometime ago that it fit very nicely in to the Progressively Accelerated exercise program that Al Sears devised and I thought it was worth a mention to those who like PACE.

Kathy Smith does it with a bit of humor as she does occasionally make mistakes that are not edited out but I enjoy a smile when I am exercising, so that is alright with me. She takes you through a stretch and warm up and then in to the exercise itself quite effortlessly. The exercises are accelerated for 2 minutes at a time for 6 different segments and following each accelleration there is a cool down that she uses to work your lower body. The total workout is 45 minutes ( longer than Al Sears suggests you need) but it flies by and you feel energized when you are done.  At the very end you can do her stretch or your own stretch. I happen to like the stretch she does on her DVD titled Power Walk for Weight Loss, so I choose to do that when I am done.

I do FFPFB every other day and mix it up with the Power Walk because she works your upper body in that program and it is shorter for those days when you don’t want to spend lots of time getting fit. It also does have you work out at different levels but it is not a PACE type of exercise.

If you  mix this exercise with 5 minutes in front of your Vitamin D sunlamp three times a week and 20 minutes in your Sunlight FIR sauna almost every day you have done everything a body needs to be healthy and you will feel fighting fit.

Functional Medicine:Do It Or Die?

I realized the other day that I haven’t been using my blog and I have been accumulating various random thoughts that are clogging my precious file space, so it is time to put it in writing and refill my gray matter with more ruminations.

People constantly ask me health questions because they know I have a keen interest in health related subjects and research topics regularly. As a result I have learned that most people really don’t get adequate care at their local medical clinic. I have a very personal case in point that I would like to share and I hope no one will feel violated as this is within my nuclear family as I would never discuss in this forum any of my clients health matters. I would especially like to appeal to the doubters among you.

Let’s call this patient Surrey (because it is fun to name characters when you are writing). Surrey cannot get pregnant and it is clearly her problem, so she recently went to her local medical clinic and was seen by a very “compassionate” and “thorough” health care professional. Surrey had the normal exams that every woman endures and she was sent to the lab for routine blood tests because she had some specific concerns that she and I had discussed, so she specifically requested that some issues be checked.

The tests came back and she was told all was normal, normal as defined by the AMA or some other esteemed group of people like the employees of your insurance company. As I mentioned Surrey is infertile and heartbroken, so rather than pursue the normal prohibitively expensive infertility treatments I asked her to see a functional medicine doctor, Dr. Rob Bruley, in Linden Hills Minnesota to see if he could do anything to just get her body working on its own.

Dr. Bruley requested more blood work. These are not weird or unnecessary blood tests but tests that should be run on each and every one of us but unless you request it or see someone more responsible like a functional medicine doctor you will never have these tests done despite their lifesaving qualities. She had thyroid tests run again, Vitamin D3 tests to check her Vitamin D levels, she had a fasting insulin and a non fasting insulin test and a more complete test of her blood cells even Celiacs disease was on the lengthy list. None of these tests were earth shattering but the news that followed certainly rocked Surrey’s world.

Remember now that she had been told her thyroid was fine just a few weeks prior to this time but after a more careful examination was complete she was found to not just have an underproductive thyroid but she has autoimmune thyroiditis sometimes called Hashimoto’s Disease. Even Dr. Bruley was taken aback by this discovery. It is unfortunately a major contributor to infertility in females.

She was also found to be very insulin resistant which is a precursor to Diabetes 2. Insulin resistance is being looked at as a number 1 contributor to infertility in young women not to mention a plethora of other health issues that plague our population at the moment. The previous blood tests had revealed no hint of this rather major health issue.

Lastly, she was diagnosed as being anemic. As I understand it her red blood cells are not readily absorbing available iron for some reason. Again this is a big problem for women who want to have offspring as it interferes with a woman’s ability to be fertile.

What is that saying to do with baseball, three strikes and you are out? Well I would say our public health care is out, out of touch, out of treatments that don’t involve a pharmaceutical product, out of the business of taking care of people’s health. And if that doesn’t scare you Minnesota’s health care has a reputation for being some of the best in the country.

Surrey still isn’t pregnant and her biological clock is ticking so loud I can hear it and I am 30 miles away. She may pursue conventional infertility treatments and I can’t blame her for that but the care she received in the office of a doctor that calls himself a functional medicine doctor (Google the word) may have extended her life. Whether she spends those extra years with children or not only time will tell.

If you still doubt the message I am trying to share on this blog site I guess I can say no more than “doubter beware” and you are in my prayers.