Aug 2000, Functional Medicine vs. Traditional Medicine

Welcome to BIC Body Update

Dear Clients, Patients and Friends,

Welcome to our first edition of BIC Body Update. Our bimonthly newsletter will keep you informed on activities in the clinic and bring you helpful news on health.

Since I became a doctor of chiropractic in April 1997, the newsletter has been on hold while I completed post-graduate training in clinical nutrition and became certified as a chiropractic extremity practitioner. I have also been busy setting up the office with state-of-the-art equipment and educational materials to serve you.

Texas Chiropractic College taught me the basic skills I needed to incorporate chiropractic care and nutrition into our existing massage practice. My goal has always been to create balance in your posture or structure through stretching, massage therapy and now chiropractic spinal realignment. I now also offer targeted clinical nutrition to correct nutritional deficiencies and create optimum health.

Our new theme at BIC is creating health through biochemical and structural balance. I'm here to work with you to relieve pain, correct nutritional and structural imbalances, improve health and help prevent future problems using natural therapies and proven high quality supplements.

Chiropractic Care vs. Pain Management

There is a misconception about chiropractic. Most people think you go to a chiropractor only when you get hurt and you're in pain. As muscular-skeletal specialists chiropractors do get great results treating acute pain, but that's only one aspect of chiropractic.

There are three levels of chiropractic: acute, corrective and maintenance care. You'll benefit most from chiropractic if you take advantage of all three levels of care as needed to keep your body working at its best. The key to staying healthy is to keep all parts of your body, both muscular and skeletal, moving as freely as possible. A common problem I see in the clinic is fixations (joints not moving freely), particularly in the mid back (thoracic spine).

What causes these fixations in my spine and how can I correct them?

Fixations, or subluxations, in the spine are usually caused by postural habits developed over a period of time. For example, sitting for long periods can make you slump, creating subluxations in the mid-back area. Another example: If you always cross one leg over the other, you may develop a low-back subluxation.

Normal day-to-day activities can correct mild fixations. When normal movement does not correct the situation, chiropractic manipulation is needed.

Do these subluxations cause pain and can I tell if I have them? 

Subluxations create tension in the muscles, which then press on the nerve endings. The result is usually a dull but sometimes sharp pain. These fixations may not move for days, weeks, months or even years. You become aware of the pain at first until it goes away or your body adapts to it.

Our bodies have an amazing ability to adapt to unnatural conditions, structural or chemical. For example, the first few cigarettes usually make a new smoker cough, a natural response to the toxic chemicals in tobacco. With persistent smoking, the body adapts and the person no longer coughs, even though he is still ingesting toxic chemicals.

Our posture and structure can adapt in the same way. Subluxations cause unnecessary wear on the joints and over a long period of time can wear down the joints. The body adapts by building up or replacing the lost cartilage with bone, creating osteoarthritis. This extra bone puts pressure on the nerves coming out of the spine, causing tightness and pain in the muscles and decreasing the effectiveness of major organs (heart, stomach, etc.) supplied by these nerves.

A chiropractor can determine if you have subluxations and treat them appropriately to restore mobility and balance allowing your body to function at its best.

Functional Medicine vs. Traditional Medicine

Functional medicine is one of the new buzz-words in health care. Many health care providers expect this cutting-edge approach to make a drastic difference in our health in the coming years.

What is functional medicine and how is it different from traditional medicine?

Traditional medicine focuses on pathological conditions, that is, conditions that cause a breakdown in the body and keep particular organs from functioning properly. Functional medicine focuses on correcting nutritional deficiencies in the various organ systems before they develop a pathological condition.

How does functional medicine treat health problems differently from traditional medicine?

The traditional treatment for many health problems is to remove the damaged organ or to prescribe pharmaceutical medications that block a natural function in order to reduce or eliminate the pathological condition affecting the organ. All pharmaceutical medicines, with the exception of antibiotics, are designed to block a chemical function in the body, thereby reducing the pathological problem but not necessarily correcting the cause of the problem.

Functional medicine focuses on isolating and identifying nutritional deficiencies and supplying needed nutrients to prevent pathology from developing. Sometimes small changes or subtle differences in body chemistry that would be regarded as insignificant in traditional medicine may indicate the potential for a future problem. Functional medicine takes note of these small changes and utilizes nutritional principles to correct the problem at its root.

To understand how differently these methods work, consider the number one killer in America today, cardiovascular disease (CVD). CVD claims as many lives as the next eight leading causes of death combined. In the U.S. alone CVD causes over 950,000 deaths a year or an average of about 2600 deaths each day. Globally, cardiovascular disease accounts for almost 50 percent of all deaths.

In traditional medicine, one way to correct CVD is to replace the arteries around the heart with an artery from the leg or abdomen. The standard protocol for treatment is to diet, exercise and take pharmaceutical medicines to reduce blood levels of several traditional markers for CVD, including triglycerides, cholesterol and LDL ("bad" cholesterol).

Unfortunately, almost 50 percent of all heart attack victims don't show abnormalities in these traditional CVD markers. Recent research has identified a wide array of other markers for CVD, including several lipoproteins not tested in traditional medicine.

Functional medicine focuses on assessing these important early indicators of CVD and using them as a basis for treatment. The most crucial of these indicators are identified and measured in the comprehensive cardiovascular assessment. Using this state-of-the-art assessment, a health care provider knowledgeable in functional medicine can better identify individuals traditional medicine might miss. Once identified, they can be treated nutritionally to decrease the incidence and halt the progress of the disease.

Can functional medicine and traditional medicine work together?

It takes the best of both traditional and functional approaches to give us our best chance at living long and healthy lives. When our bodies have a pathological condition that ultimately results in disease, traditional medicine is a must. When our bodies are "diseases waiting to happen" because of genetic predisposition, poor diet or lifestyle, but we have not yet developed symptoms, functional medicine can identify potential problems and help us head them off before they become deadly.

I've spent the last three years studying and implementing functional medicine into our practice. I urge you to take an active preventive approach to maintaining your own health.

The greatest tragedy of modern medicine is that many deadly diseases are preventable. Don't overlook those small changes in your body's functions or cover them up for a prolonged period of time with pain relievers or antacids. Your body is telling you that something is not right. Listen to it and consult your health care provider. Then insist on the latest in both functional and traditional approaches, as needed to restore your body to optimal health.