Modern medicine too often busies itself with applying Band-Aid’s to diseases — Lipitor for cholesterol, Losartan and Norvasc and metoprolol for high blood pressure, Metformin for high sugar, Protonix for heartburn, Ambien for insomnia, Lexapro for anxiety, Ibuprofen and narcotics for pain.  So commonplace are these laundry lists of drugs and diseases that a seasoned physician can almost guess a patient’s drugs and history from the bedside before they even speak.

This type of medicine is not sustainable.   Not for you, the patient, not for the doctors, not for the economy, and not for the planet.  Drugs are layered upon drugs, often to treat side effects.  Nutrient deficiencies are predictable consequences and more symptoms arise from these deficiencies.  Immune function falters.  Potassium and magnesium are lost.  Blood pressure increases.  Insulin sensitivity worsens.  The treatment of one disease results in the creation of another until every patient we see has the same drugs and diseases that only differ in how far along this path a patient finds onself – lack of vitality, increased fatigue, inflammation, and pain, delayed healing of injuries, elevated blood pressure and cholesterol, irritable bowel and heartburn, increased allergies, depression and anxiety, obesity, diabetes, gout, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, cancer…

Instead, imagine a paradigm in which the Band-Aid’s were replaced with upstream therapies, based not in blocking one-enzyme for a narrowly-focused effect but using natural molecules that have been isolated from our foods and plants with which our DNA has interacted for longer than we can conceive.

Instead, imagine a lens through which a good doctor could look and see your list of diseases and symptoms and complaints and recognize processes that group together, empowering you with the knowledge of the one or two causes beneath them all.

Imagine having the time to sit down and understand the biochemistry that causes you to ache or that elevates your blood pressure or makes your sugars high.  To fully grasp the why’s and how’s that make you feel the way you do.  In a way that is translatable and not cloaked in hard-to-understand “medicalese.”  By a doctor who talks to you real and direct, like your friend.  In a setting that feels like a lounge or living room instead of an impersonal and sterile box.

Imagine if there existed labs that no doctor had ever told you about, labs both available through your insurance or through specialty centers.  Labs to measure your insulin sensitivity years before a doctor might tell you your sugar is high.  Labs to measure 30 of your hormones or the efficiency of the energy production inside your cells.  Labs that identify 40 different bacteria and 20 different viruses and parasites in your gut and the level of inflammation they cause that, if treated, would reduce your allergy or fatigue or migraines or pain.  Labs that identify what foods you are eating that you are allergic to, foods that, with each bite, spark more inflammation that cycle faster the wheels of disease.  Labs to identify the toxins inside you never knew you had — mercury and lead, pesticides, mold toxins, round-up, plastics – toxins that you could help your body remove by eating more cilantro or blueberries or broccoli, by sweating, or by taking a vitamin that enhances your own body’s natural means to clear them.

Only by identifying and treating the root causes of disease can you affect long-lasting and sustainable change.  Only a physician trained in the broadest-scope of this type of medicine can help you know where best to place your fulcrum to most effectively shift your health and move your world.