Root Cause Medicine is the Best Medicine

“The young physician starts life with 20 drugs for each disease but the older physician ends life with one drug for 20 diseases.”
William Osler

After 25 years of practising as a conventional hospital doctor, I’m finally practising medicine the way I want to practise it.

Root cause medicine is the way forward for healthcare.

As doctors, we have to develop a better understanding of the underlying causes of disease and address those instead of focusing on symptom control.

That’s why I love the Functional Medicine model of care.

Functional Medicine is the practice of medicine, which seeks to identify and treat the core physiological, biochemical and other clinical imbalances that underlie various disease conditions.

Functional Medicine isn’t the same as alternative medicine or complementary medicine. Whilst both of these can be instrumental in helping someone recover from an illness, what Functional Medicine does is aim to identify the underlying cause of that illness. It is the practice of evidence-based medicine, using advanced laboratory tests to develop a personalised treatment plan that seeks to address the root cause of disease in a particular individual.

The table below illustrates the main differences between conventional and Functional Medicine, and the main differences between how I used to practise medicine, and how I practise medicine now.

To read about Functional Medicine in action and how it changed the lives of a mother and son, see this page: The Power of Functional Medicine.

“Your genetics load the gun. Your lifestyle pulls the trigger.”

Mehmet Oz, Cardiothoracic Surgeon.

Lifestyle is extremely important in terms of increasing or reducing the risk of developing diseases. Having a genetic predisposition to developing a certain disease, such as breast cancer or dementia, does not necessarily mean you will develop that disease. Lifestyle plays a big role in activating the genes that predispose you to that disease. Through your lifestyle, you can reduce the likelihood of those genes ever becoming activated in the first place. If you have already developed a chronic medical condition, you can often improve your outlook by making changes to your lifestyle.

In addition to using a Functional Medicine approach to discover, and address, the underlying causes of your condition, I ensure that I review critically important areas of your lifestyle such as nutrition, emotional health and other lifestyle factors, and, working with you, address these important areas to ensure all damaging stressors are removed from your system as far as practically possible, and chronic inflammation is reduced to a minimum.

I also use treatment modalities with the primary aims of reducing the inflammatory burdenin your body and improving your microcirculation. With a more efficient blood flow in your smallest blood vessels and capillaries, your cells will receive a higher supply of nutrient-enriched and oxygen-enriched blood, thus providing your cells with the essential elements to absorb nutrients, to undergo efficient detoxification and to function at their optimum capacity.

The treatment modalities I use include BEMER physical vascular therapy, low level laser therapy and exercise with oxygen therapy. Used together, these treatments improve your circulation and boost and strengthen your immune system, your body’s first line of defence against any disease. During these treatments, I use a potent natural anti-inflammatory supplement which is carefully timed so that it is carried efficiently to all your body’s cells, together with the specific nutrients that were identified by your laboratory tests, targeted to your individual needs, so that your cells have all the building blocks they require for optimal function, recovery  and regeneration.

I hope you find the information here informative and interesting, and I look forward to working with you on your journey to optimum health.