You could really consider functional medicine as an expanded form of Lifestyle Medicine. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine defines Lifestyle Medicine as; “…the evidence-based practice of helping individuals and families adopt and sustain healthy behaviors that affect quality of life. They go on to say; “Lifestyle practices and health habits are among the nation’s most important health determinants. Changing unhealthy behaviors is foundational to medical care, disease prevention and health promotion.”

Your current level of health is significantly impacted by the choices you have made. This includes your diet, nutritional status, level of physical activity, sleep habits, how you cope with stress and relationships; etc. Many people don’t like hearing this; it can be difficult to accept responsibility not only for one’s health but the choices one has made that contributed to it.

This may not sound fair, and maybe it isn’t, but that is how life works and life doesn’t care what you think is fair. As a functional medicine doctor I am also not interested in what is fair, but I am very interested in helping motivated patients find solutions to their health problems and these solutions are going to require lifestyle modification.  If you want things to change, you need to do things differently. I am sure you have heard the saying; “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” If you want a different result (health) then you can’t keep the doing the same things in your current lifestyle over and over again. Functional medicine is the management and treatment of chronic illness; chronic meaning you have had it for some time now and will continue to have it unless intervention occurs. We are back to lifestyle again.

Acute health issues like a physical accident or brief infection are not what functional medicine deals with. It works with chronic health issues that have developed over time and will require time and changes in your current habits and routines if thing are going to get better.

The purpose of this article is not to make people feel bad about themselves; it is an effort to empower them. We could all make better choices and nobody is perfect by any means. I don’t expect my patients to know what to change, that is my job. Their job is to then take charge of their choices and implement those recommendations and build on them.

Functional medicine is the process of collecting enough information about your current state of health so that appropriate lifestyle recommendations can be made. It is then the responsibility of the functional medicine patient to take these recommendations and incorporate them into their lifestyle.

I believe you can change your life, and if you think so too, contact our Naperville office.

If you would like more information about functional medicine or Dr. Sexton go to www.napervilleintegratedwelness.com

Do your own research, inform yourself and ask lots of questions. When collecting information you MUST consider the source. There is no shortage of false, misleading, outdated, profit-driven and utterly biased information in healthcare today; even from the most respected sources and organizations.

This approach to healthcare is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent any disease. Why is this? The FDA enforces its position that these words can only be used with drugs. This approach does not use drugs.