Does your body feel more like a blessing or a burden?

Are you satisfied and happy with your current level of health? Do you feel good or does your body hurt? Do you have the energy you would like to have? Are you satisfied with the way your body looks, moves, and feels? Are you concerned about chronic health issues and how they are affecting you now or may affect your quality of life in the future? 

Are you the happy occupant of a well-functioning body?

If you are not satisfied with your current state of health or if you have concerns about your future health, then functional medicine is a great place to start your journey to wellness. 

Functional medicine is modern healthcare that is designed to identify the root causes of your health issues. It does not rely on the use of medications to change the way your body works and to suppress undesirable symptoms. Instead we employ the use of diet, nutrition, and other aspects of lifestyle modification to help you body function the way that it should. 

What is causing the problem? 

Ok, but now what do we do? 

Once the root causes of your health problems have been identified, we create a plan to fix these problems. This might include changing your diet, providing nutrients you are deficient in, addressing stress management, exercise, sleep routines, healing the digestive system, supporting liver detoxification, reducing inflammation, balancing hormones, improving blood sugar regulation…we create a plan to reverse problems that are causing your health issues. 

This is what we do!

At Naperville Integrated Wellness, we specialized in identifying root causes of health problems. The cause of your health problems can be due to diet, nutrition, chronic infections, stress, structural problems (muscle or joint imbalance), neurological, hormone, immune, digestion, detoxification, inflammatory or other root causes. 

Functional medicine is actually a blend of specialties. A functional medicine doctor needs to understand how all of the various systems of your body work and how they affect each other. Your body must be treated as a whole and not as a series of unrelated parts! 

Let’s use migraines as an example: 

If you have migraines you might go to a neurologist and they will probably give you a drug (like Imitrex/sumatriptan) that affects how serotonin works in your body. The neurologist probably won’t ask you a lot of questions about your diet, test your nutrient levels, address hormone imbalances; etc. The focus is only on manipulating a single chemical in your body called serotonin. 

Now let’s look at how a functional medicine specialist would think about migraines

We would want to know when they started and any known triggers, etc. Then we would want to collect objective data that would explain why you are getting migraines. Maybe you have a hormone imbalance or your body does not break down histamine well or you have adrenal fatigue and as result are prone to episodes hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) or you have a structural/muscle imbalance between the muscles of the jaw and the base of the skull which cause migraine-like headaches or you are deficient in magnesium or other nutrients and as a results your blood vessels go into spasm and trigger a migraine…you might even have a combination of these problems. Migraines are basically defined in medicine as headaches caused by changes in the tone of blood vessels in the head and a nerve called the trigeminal nerve (this is the “pain-causing” nerve in migraines). 

Your body works as a whole…not a pile of unrelated parts 

We apply this same method of investigation and assessment to all health problems we encounter. We don’t fixate on a single system or a single chemical in the body. We must look at your body as a whole if we want to bring health and balance back to a functional state. Neurologists work with nerves, endocrinologists work with hormones, cardiologists with the heart and blood vessels, dermatologists work with the skin, gastroenterologists work with the digestive system…so who is going to work your body as a whole? 

Only functional medicine specialists look at the whole body and how the various systems work together. When the various parts work well together, you will have health. When the parts don’t work well together you will have health problems and disease. 

Are you happy with it? 

Are you satisfied with the way your body is working, how it looks and how it feels?  If not, then you need to do something different. 

You need to make changes if you want to see changes. 

If what I have said here today makes sense and aligns with your personal viewpoint on health and disease then you might want to consider the help of an experienced functional medicine doctor.

The purpose of functional medicine is: 

Understanding how the body works, knowing how and where to investigate health issues, knowing what to look for, understanding the significance of what is found and creating a plan of action to reverse and correct the root cause the health problems.

My wish for you…health, happiness and a better quality of life! 

If you would like more information about functional medicine and integrative medicine or Dr. Sexton go to napervilleintegratedwellness.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. This article is for information purposes and is not a substitute professional healthcare services. Contact our office for more information.