There is a truth in functional medicine that I hope will begin to change over the next coming years. This truth is that most practitioners of functional medicine came to functional medicine because they themselves or someone they loved got sick. When they opened their tool chest of tactics, strategies and techniques to treat the illness, they didn’t get better. When they sought out help from other practitioners, specialists and health centers; they didn’t get better. Functional Medicine was a last resort found out of desperation and frustration with a medical and health system designed from infectious disease and surgical interventions from warfare – not preventing chronic illness and treating complex health issues like autoimmunity, autism, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So many of our practitioners in this movement have been and may still be on their own journey to health.
For me, this scenario was ever so true. I came to functional medicine because I had been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and had been on a downward trajectory of health in my late 20s and early 30s – too young to be sick. I wanted to help my body get well through nutrition, lifestyle and stress management. I wasn’t anti-medicine but I was not willing to take medications as my only resort to treating my disease. I also was raised having never been to a doctor myself until I went to college so I had never been indoctrinated into the “pill for an ill” mentality. To say the least, I was a really crappy patient! But I am thankful every day that I was a crappy patient because it brought me to where I am today and gave me my life mission – to bring functional medicine as the foundation of primary care with the cornerstones of nutrition, lifestyle and exercise as part of every primary care experience.
Luckily over the last 11 years through the business of functional medicine I have had the experience of not only being a patient of my dream primary care experience of physicians, nutritionists, health coaches, counselors, therapists and more working together cohesively as my integrative functional medicine team. My business partner and I have actually built this model from scratch over the last 10-years and have refined and perfected it along the way. And are now helping other practitioners get the business part right so we can transform health care one with a legion of functional medicine practitioners.
You can watch my story above.
Now, this brings me back to my hope. My hope as I meet new functional medicine practitioners in our programs or at functional medicine conferences is that more and more practitioners come to functional medicine not from a place of frustration and defeat but that they come to the movement because it is right and functional medicine is the future of health care. How did you find functional medicine? I would love to hear your story!
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