By Dr. John Rees, D.C., C.F.M.P.

In the first blog, we covered the tremendous financial cost of American health care and in many respects the poor results obtained. We also covered how Functional Medicine has sprung up from the frustration of not only patients, but of Traditional Medical practitioners unsatisfied with results. In the second blog, we talked about some of the basic differences between traditional and functional medicine. We discussed two main points.

• The emphasis Functional Medicine places on finding out why a person gets sick.
• A significantly different definition of health that goes beyond lack of disease into the need for optimal functioning and vitality.

I also gave you my own thoughts that disease begins in human beings from a combination of two reasons:

• Something in the patient’s environment is poisoning them.
• Something that is vital to optimal functioning is missing.

In my practice, the basis of our treatment is removing the poisons and restoring essential nutrients to a patient’s life. The results are truly dynamic when this is accomplished.

One of the hallmarks of Traditional Medicine has been the organizational structure of specialization. In his book, “The Disease Delusion”, Dr. Jeffrey Bland includes a quote about specialists. “They know more and more, about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.” I love that quote. This artificial way of dividing up the human condition into a specialty were an incredibly brilliant doctor who knows absolutely everything there is to know about the heart, for an example, but largely ignores the rest of the person and more importantly the affect his heart treatment may have on the person as a whole is a major problem in Traditional Medicine.

According to Wikipedia, iatrogenic disease is defined as “induced in a patient by a physician’s activity, manner, or therapy. Used especially to pertain to a complication of treatment”. Surprisingly and critically important, iatrogenic disease is generally thought to be the third leading cause of death in our country following only heart disease and cancer.(1) The majority of these deaths come from the interaction of a drug. The scenario goes something like this. A doctor will give a prescription for a drug for a condition. Many of these conditions have other treatments available which do not include the side effects of the drug they prescribe. But instead of instituting another treatment, they will prescribe another drug to handle the side effect. The drug that is prescribed to handle the side effect though, has a side effect of its own, that requires another drug. Before long, a patient who is now on 4 to 5 medications, all but one of them given to handle the side effects of the other drugs, is not doing so well. Then it gets really scary. The chemical soup of all the combined drugs begins to take on a life of its own and can have a combined effect completely different than the sum total of all the individual drug side effects. Far too often in this country, the combined effect is fatal.

This is especially a problem in the elderly. As we get older, the ability of our liver and kidneys to clear drugs from our systems decrease. Because of this the dosage of prescriptions should be less in older Americans than it is in younger ones. But far too often, this physiological fact is lost on the average doctor. Due to this fact and others, a disproportionate amount of iatrogenic injury and death falls on older Americans.

A major difference in Functional Medicine is the Holistic View of the human body. Holistic or whole, is the view that the body works in concert like an orchestra, and not a combination of individual soloists. In order for a person to be truly healthy, all of the individual parts must be functioning well. In addition, treatment aimed at one body part can have a potentially devastating effect on other body parts. Functional Medicine places far greater importance on this fact then Traditional Medicine does. One of the goals of the Functional Medicine movement is to decrease the problem of iatrogenic injury and death in the country.

In my next blog, I will begin to explain what a Functional Medicine evaluation looks like. If you have concerns about the current care you are receiving and would like a Holistic based Functional Medicine look at your overall care, please call us a 302 684-1995 to schedule an appointment.

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