Transforming Health: The Power of Functional Medicine
Reflections Integrative Health was born after working many years in the traditional medicine arena. After watching patients become hospitalized multiple times per year for the same recurring problems and their health not actually improving over the long term. In fact, most patients seemed to continually decline slowly over many years while their quality of life continued to decline during that time. Ultimately it was a continuing cycle of hospitalizations and rehab stays that did not appear to benefit them.
Traditional medicine functions to treat current conditions as patients become ill with evidenced based treatments, usually medications. It is not uncommon to see someone taking 10 or more medications as they get older. While traditional medicine is great at treating acute illnesses, it does not look at why those conditions are occurring and attempt to treat or eliminate the root cause.
During this time, it became clear that we are what we eat and how we take care of ourselves. The world continues to move at a faster pace and that pace seems to be moving faster as each year passes. With more and more people eating for convenience at fast food restaurants or purchasing preprocessed foods that are easy to grab, our nutritional intake is quickly becoming depleted. This poor nutrition is causing many health problems from including anemia, allergies, reflux, gut imbalances, weight gain, autoimmune disorders and many more health issues.
Functional medicine is a personalized, science-based healthcare approach that focuses on identifying and treating the root causes of chronic illness, rather than managing symptoms. It views the body as an interconnected system and creates customized treatment plans using nutrition, lifestyle changes, and advanced diagnostics. By analyzing current health conditions, lifestyle and environment, functional medicine aims to personalize treatment to each individual with a goal of treating conditions using the 5 R’s systemic framework. The 5 R’s include Remove, Replace, Reinoculate, Repair and Rebalance.
Mission
To provide an active therapeutic partnership where individuals are educated and empowered to take control of their own health using “food as medicine” and lifestyle interventions to decrease chronic disease.
Vision
To catch chronic illness early and reverse or prevent illness through personalized, patient centered care using nutrition, targeted supplementation and life style changes.