What is Functional Medicine
Functional medicine is a personalised and integrative approach to understanding immune dysfunction and its symptoms. It is based on the insights and perspectives of scientific influence from those who realise the importance of a personalised approach to healing. Your body is not just a system of moving parts, it is not just your emotions, it is not just your thoughts, it is not just electrical impulse and energy and it is not just your biology and chemistry. It is ALL of these things, intricately woven together in an ever changing and moving dance as it/we respond to all of the things that we are subject to.
It is concerned with getting to the root cause of symptoms. I became particularly interested in this trying to understand long term inflammatory musculoskeletal problems like frozen shoulder, chronic pain (long term pain that doesn’t clear up), and delayed healing. I have been perplexed with cases where people would constantly re injure themselves or be subject to long term pain and discomfort with no obvious cause.
Understanding more about our own immune response having the tools to support our wellbeing is a game changer. If you have allergies, recurrent infections, PMT, IBS, are grappling with the changes as you approach menopause, injury yourself frequently, get raises and itchy skin please know there are things you can actively do to change how you feel.
Having grappled with pain in my body for a large part of my life and having endeavoured to find solutions for it I feel that Functional Medicine is a huge missing piece. I, like so many people, have chased pain around my body seeking to understand and resolve it. Over the years I’ve tried physiotherapy, painkillers, all kinds of movement, magnets, acupuncture, kinesology, acupuncture, craniosacral therapy. I’ve worked with psychotherapy, EMDR, counselling and cellular release therapy to better understand myself.
All the bodywork concepts that I’ve studied focus on concepts around the structure of the body. The talking therapies I work with offer great change in addressing clearing the ‘charge’ around dramatic experiences and deeply held fears and beliefs. For example I used to believe that I had a weak back, it’s why I studies Pilates and movement. I cleared the accidents and associated fears and beliefs about my body that had arisen from them with Cellular Release Therapy and felt huge relief. Unfortunately perimenopause bought me a huge amount of discomfort in my body once again. But this time as I listened to my lectures I had a whole new insight into other causes of pain and inflammation in my body.
The relief has been enormous. It is not an overnight process and it takes time and commitment. But really what’s 3 months in the big scheme of things. I felt change within a week and progress every week thereafter.