Fitness leaders have the skills to be true health advocates, says Hyman
Hyman credits this approach – known as functional medicine and spearheaded by Dr Jeffrey Bland over the last 30 years – with his own recovery. “I then began to apply it to my patients and it was very powerful,” he adds. “I began to understand that medicine wasn’t really about disease – it was about the science of creating health.”
Creating health The fi tness industry has, I observe, been talking about creating health – preventative healthcare to avoid chronic lifestyle-related diseases – for some time now. How does functional medicine tie in with this? “People tend to think that lifestyle can be used for prevention, but that when you get ill you need to go and see a doctor to get something stronger. However, while it’s true that functional medicine can be used to prevent illness, really it’s about far more than prevention. By creating health and getting to the root causes of the problems, you often deal with disease as a side-effect. “Indeed, we’ve found that lifestyle
and nutrition – the functional approach generally – is more effective than medication for most illnesses. We need to leave broken bones and acute disease to the hospitals, but for lifestyle disease,
august 2012 © cybertrek 2012
I began to understand that medicine wasn’t really about disease – it was about the science of creating health
functional medicine has been shown to work faster, better and cheaper, and it’s profoundly more dramatic in its outcomes than anything you’ll ever get with medication.” He continues: “Functional medicine is about understanding where the imbalances are in the body and how to get rid of them by creating balance. It allows us to transform our health by dealing with the root causes of illness, whether that’s lifestyle, diet, environmental toxins, stress… All these things affect our genes and create imbalances in our biological systems – our immune system, our hormone communication system, our detoxifi cation system and so on – and this, in turn, drives most chronic illness. Put simply, functional medicine is about taking out the bad stuff and putting in the good stuff to create a healthy ecosystem. “The good stuff starts with eating simple, fresh, whole, good quality food:
fruit, vegetables, beans, animal proteins, whole grains. Food isn’t just calories – it’s information to upgrade your biology. You can’t medicate your way out of a bad diet. “So yes, you need the right nutrients – vitamins, minerals – and you also need a balance of hormones. And then you need all the other things like light, air, water, sleep, movement – so exercise. You also need meaning and purpose. All these are the real ingredients for health. “Cardiovascular and heart disease,
obesity, diabetes, stroke prevention, dementia, all your allergic and auto- immune diseases, headaches, neurological problems, hormonal disorders – all of these are extremely amenable to the functional medicine approach. “For example, I talked to a guy this morning who’s suffered for 30 years with incapacitating migraines, terrible digestive symptoms, fatigue, sleep disruption. He’s a world leader who was barely able to stay functioning, but within three weeks
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