The Future of Healthcare

The Future of Healthcare

 

Healthcare is one of the most complicated words in our present day vocabulary. No one knows for sure what it means. Healthcare is complicated by politics, economics, and personal choices and often dictated by insurance. According to my beliefs and practices: if healthcare were a pure entity without the external forces molding it into something barely recognizable, then it would be highly personalized using the cutting edge of science married to the art of practice to create a process of healing and health promotion that moves the patient to a cure.

 

Ideally, healthcare would be personalized and practiced with clarity. It would tell you precisely what to do on a daily basis to take the best care of your body. It would be holistic and integrative, because no body part or organ system works in isolation from the other or in isolation from your culture, social system or your environment. Your plan of care would be markedly different from the plan of care for your best friend, neighbor or even your closest relatives.

 

Healthcare needs to be individualized for many reasons. Traditional medicine is based on norms, both for better and for worse. Norms change. Norms are what is prevalent at a given time. Here is an example to illustrate how norms change over a time. It was a normal health practice 20-40 years ago to focus on eating primarily carbohydrates in the form of grains. Fast forward to today and we now have an epidemic of diabetes. When we make one practice for all, as is the goal of traditional medicine, we are taking shortcuts. Shortcuts are not a good practice for good healthcare. Traditional medicine seeks to fit patients into a category called a diagnosis and formulate a treatment plan according to that diagnosis. It is considered irrelevant if your genetic makeup is not a good fit for that treatment or that the plan is predicated on medicine that assumes one drug or treatment fits all.

 

I would venture to say that most people don’t feel well or well enough. Most people wish they could sleep more soundly, lose weight more easily, not feel as stressed or anxious or have something about their mental or physical health be improved. The causes of all illnesses or lack of wellness are biochemical anomalies that need correction. These anomalies can be due to nutritional deficiencies, lack of psychological support to manage stress and anxiety, lack of proper sleep or other issues that leave us feeling not quite as well as we want to feel.

 

Functional Medicine is based on a model of personalized care. Functional Medicine begins with an assessment of your biological needs(molecular biology to be precise), nutrition, sleep habits, stress management, social supports, genetic and developmental history to name only a few parts of the functional medicine detailed evaluation of your health status. At FxMed Centers we include all aspects of a person’s life (health practices, social system, environment, psychology and biology) to devise a plan of care specific to his or her needs. All treatment goals are done collaboratively. We decide together the best health plan for you with your goals in mind. FxMed Centers is uniquely positioned to not only provide a plan of personalized care but help you actually make the behavioral and psychological changes to implement the plan of care for optimal health.

 

Traditional, Integrative or Holistic Medicine all have some benefits to offer but Functional Medicine offers all the beneficial aspects of these models along with a fully integrated and holistic approach that will assist you with achieving your best state of health and improve your overall wellbeing and energy. Functional Medicine offers nutritional guidance and coaching for behavioral change. Enter into a new age of healthcare and experience it being practiced the way it was meant to be practiced: Care for the health and wellbeing of you as the unique individual that you are.

 

Sign up for our newsletter to read about an actual case and how FxMed Centers with our personalized approach turned one person’s life around.

 

Here are some my favorite resources.

 

Mark Hyman’s video: Functional Medicine: The Medicine of Why

 

Kelly Brogan’s new book: A Mind of Your Own

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