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Applications in Functional Medicine & Personalized Healthcare

A patient-focused guide to Applications in Functional Medicine & Personalized Healthcare, with clinical context, evaluation considerations and supporting information.

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For thousands of years now, various cultures worldwide have developed unique practices to promote physical healing and wellness therapies known as integrative medicine. These ancient and traditional approaches to healthcare have included Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine, traditional Thai medicine, acupuncture, yoga, herbal medications, meditation, and mind vs. body techniques that were holistic and usually looked beyond damage to the body by including the health of the body and spirit as well. Yet for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, western medicine ignored many of these holistic techniques and instead labeled them as tainted suspicious quackery.

Functional Medicine

Organ-based diagnosis and an individual assessment serve complementary purposes. A review discussing systems biology and functional medicine does not show that standard diagnostic categories are unsuitable for chronic care. Symptoms, medical history, examination and appropriate investigations should guide treatment, with prevention and supportive care considered alongside established medical management. [1]

In the last few decades, the emerging sciences of regenerative medicine and molecular medicine helped doctors develop a science-based understanding of how to incorporate integrative medical therapies so that they can be allowed to be applied in instances where the applications of traditional pharmaceutical-based medications failed. Old became new, and from these findings came the original concepts that helped coin the term functional medicine in the early 1990’s.

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a type of medical science that focuses primarily on interactions between the patient’s physical environment and bodily functions, such as between the endocrine, gastrointestinal, and immune systems. Functional medicine practitioners develop individualized treatment plans for the men, women, and children they treat. This paradigm shift takes healthcare with a disease-centric focus to one where we look at the relationships of the bodily systems and examine the whole person, not just a few of the isolated physical symptoms.

As technology advanced over the last 100 years, doctors became more reliant on pharmaceutical-based products, and physicians failed to understand the underlying issues and could no longer apply basic sciences in their practices. The medical industry became too concerned about categorizing the names of diseases and then implementing the appropriate drug protocols rather than spending the time needed to understand better the cause of the patient’s imbalances and underlying physiologic dysfunctions.

Functional healthcare management is like an operating system for the body that focuses on the structure and underlying causes of disease from a systemic biology perspective. It moves away from the histopathological definition of disease, which forcefully classified all medical dysfunctions into an insufficient number of descriptors.

Functional regenerative medicine operates on the notion that a person’s genome interacts with their lifestyle and environment. For several millennia, humanity has known that true wellness consists of mindfulness and daily lifestyle choices that are essential in helping to maintain optimal health and in treating illnesses and diseases. The most effective healthcare must balance organ-oriented, biomedical, cognitive, and interpersonal therapies.

Good health requires appropriately functioning biochemical and physiological processes, which operate as one process, whereas dysfunctional processes cause the symptoms known as sickness and illnesses.

The 4 Pillars of Functional Regenerative Healthcare:

Individual care can consider medical history, nutrition, activity and environmental exposures alongside appropriate diagnosis and established treatment. This does not demonstrate that functional medicine is the most efficient approach or that the body can completely regulate every disease itself. Complementary approaches should be assessed for their specific benefits, risks and evidence, and should not delay established medical care. [2]

Our stem cell institute believes that having good health is priceless and can be measured relatively easily via health checkups, body weight, and cardiovascular capacity, which lead to the goal of longevity. It is incumbent upon us to be deliberate and discerning in how we live our lives, how we use our time, how we use our energy, our attention, our finances, and most importantly, our relationships and whom we spend our time with to promote optimal long-term wellness.[3]

Spinal Arthritis - ankylosing spondylitis

Look for Mechanisms and Not Just The Symptoms

Advancements in recent biotechnologies and noninvasive screenings of cellular functions such as genomics, magnetic resonance imaging, transcriptomic analysis, biomarkers, metabolite profiling, and tests such as nuclear cardiac stress testing have provided doctors with new insight into the topology of biological networks. Before we had such technologies, complex diseases of unknown causes were labeled functional somatic disorders since the impaired biological functions were idiopathic and without any known organic or structural causes.[4]

This list of functional somatic disorders includes:

The Regeneration Center – An Institute for Functional Medicine

Regenerative medicine and MSC+ stem cell therapy are the future of healthcare and show great promise in bringing treatment modalities for people suffering from various diseases. Stem cell therapies, neural cell replacement, and tissue engineering are focused on delivering structural repair and functional restoration of the body systems and offer a radical shift from traditional surgical and pharma-based medical practices. Regenerative cellular treatment provides innovative solutions for patients looking to improve their quality of life, ranging from previously incurable congenital diseases and trauma due to spinal cord injuries, brain injuries, and heart attacks to degenerative conditions such as SLE, arthritis, DDD, Parkinson’s to Peripheral Neuropathy.

Treatment for Peripheral Neuropathy and Drop Foot

The regenerative model of healthcare we practice is predicated on a rigorous interdisciplinary approach that must be validated first by science and then translated into standardized clinical applications. Understanding the causes of disease and dysfunctions allows us to provide patient-centric care with a team of functional medicine practitioners trained for the safe and effective applications of global cellular regeneration therapies and wellness programs designed for longevity.

Traditional Disease-Centric Approach vs Our Patient-Centric Philosophy.

The benefits of regenerative functional medicine can best be seen in how we approach the process of wellness. The traditional disease-centric approach is usually reactionary in nature and appropriate for managing acute conditions that require rapid identification and medical interventions to suppress the existing symptoms and prevent further deterioration of health and cognitive decline. This approach remains essential for chronic long-term illnesses such as kidney disease, diabetes, liver disease, COPD, Emphysema, and pulmonary fibrosis, and a functional medicine assessment can be added alongside it. Long-term medication is often needed to manage these conditions safely, and any change to a prescribed medication should be made only with the prescribing doctor.[6]

This is why monitoring early signs of liver disease and other organ-specific warning changes can be useful in functional medicine assessments, without replacing standard diagnostics.

On the other hand, functional medicine is considered a patient-centric approach. It relies less on merely naming the disease and more on understanding the causes early enough to correct the underlying issue more efficiently and give the patient the best possible chance to achieve positive outcomes. Patients displaying health issues in one organ system are seen as clues to a much more profound imbalance in the patient’s condition. Instead of isolating and focusing on the symptoms, our Functional Medicine doctors use specific tests to investigate all potential factors contributing to the poor results and look at the entirety of the patient’s medical history. This approach allows our medical team to understand better the complex interactions between the environmental, lifestyle choices, and genetic factors contributing to the patient’s poor health.[7]

With the proper medical information and tests, our functional medicine practitioners can spend time with patients, understand their histories, and look for the various interactions between the subject’s biochemical markers and genetic and environmental factors that influence chronic diseases and long-term health.

The Role of Genetics in Disease

Our Functional healthcare programs recognize the fact that nearly all health problems on earth come from two main factors:

  1. Genetics & Genomic Imprinting
  2. Environment (nutrition, work environments, exposure to toxins/pollution, etc.)

For the most part, we do not have control over our genetic predispositions to particular diseases. Still, we can use the DNA data to identify genetic imprinting that led to built-in weak points to better control the influences in our surrounding environment. This awareness is a way to support the natural expression of genetics in a compelling way that we can use to manage, reduce, or prevent the occurrence of specific chronic diseases and factors such as Cardiometabolic risk. Chronic medical conditions include allergies, issues with digestion, malabsorption of nutrients, regulation of hormones and neurotransmitters, Inflammatory responses, Immune system dysfunctions, hormonal issues, metabolic issues, cognitive decline, and neurological problems. Many people live with these conditions, and lifestyle changes guided by a doctor may help some of them alongside standard medical care.

To learn more about Regenerative Functional medicine, please contact us today.

Published Clinical Citations