I find it incredibly difficult sometimes to explain to enquirers just how the type of approach I take to health conditions actually works! It’s really complex stuff and very individualised.
So, I was really pleased to see a Natural Medicine Journal article recently which takes three cases and shows what process each went through and what outcomes they gained. Note here this is talking about the functional medicine approach – in my view, this is another way of saying naturopathic nutritional medicine with testing, which is I what have been doing for years! That said, I think we need it expressed in this more medical format if mainstream medicine is going to start taking us more seriously.
I plan to add this article onto the site somewhere so I can direct people to something that will give them a good idea of how their case could be tackled by functional medicine approaches. These three cases are actually chronic pain issues, mostly neuropathic and shows the problem at the start, the tests done, the treatments given and the results gained. It’s quite technical, but fascinating, to me anyway!
One point I will make is that I think they have missed out some important dietary approaches before they got all complicated with what is essentially using supplements a bit like meds to effect biochemical changes. For example in two of the cases, I note the DN4 neuropathic questionnaire score didn’t change much. The patients were diagnosed as gluten free but had they gone truly gluten free (ie. grain and cross-reactives free), I am pretty certain this would have dropped a lot more.
Anyway, have a read here:
Integrative and Functional Medicine in Refractive, Chronic, Complex, Pain Syndromes
Three case reports
There’s always hope and a different approach…