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What is a Functional Medicine and Nutrition Appointment?

These are separate, distinct treatments from the chiropractic treatments. These appointments focus on balancing body chemistry, analyzing organ reflexes, reviewing blood chemistries, salivary hormone profiles, other lab tests and making recommendations for specific nutritional supplements and dietary changes. We address issues such as heartburn, “leaky gut”, indigestion, dysbiosis, poor liver detoxification, perimenopause/menopause, bone loss, vertigo, allergies, food sensitivities, fibromyalgia, arthritis, auto-immune, thyroid, eczema, fatigue and others. The appointments are 15, 30 or 45 minutes in length depending upon the number of problems, past medical history, length of time with these problems and the extend of your imbalances. Initially you may be seen once per week for a few weeks and then visits will be extended based upon your response. Some of these issues do require a few weeks to several months to help restore your biochemistry and health. These treatments are not covered by insurance. However, your flexible spending, medical savings or health savings account can reimburse you for the cost of the visits and nutritional supplements.

Why Is Functional Medicine and Nutrition Important?

Why is nutrition such an important aspect of achieving health and even your recovery with respect to musculoskeletal/chiropractic problems? Why is a chiropractor interested in nutritional status of his patients?
Simply, if your body does not have the appropriate nutrients or balanced biochemistry your healing response is slow or minimal.

Here are some examples:

  1.  Blood sugar imbalances such as hypoglycemia or insulin resistance can lead to slowed healing of your ligaments, discs, cartilage and tendons. These imbalances may even lead to headaches.
  2. Smoking results in decreased available Vitamin C which slows healing of your tissues especially, collagen fibers that make up many of your connective tissues. Additionally, lack of Vitamin C decreases immune system response and tendency for greater inflammation.
  3. Imbalances of fats in your diet namely omega-6 and omega-3 can lead to increased inflammation which will slow down your recovery time, lead to arthritic and fibromyalgia symptoms.
  4.  Lack of certain antioxidants can cause decreased fat burning abilities, allergic inflammation, immune system imbalances, decreased mental function, improper liver detoxification and much more.

Are you beginning to get the idea? Of course some patients problems will be more involved than others and not everyone will need a nutritional analysis and/or treatment. For those patients truly interested in improving their health we do offer nutritional appointments and evaluation.

For more information check out our videos below

Q&A: What is Functional Medicine and what are its benefits? 

What to Expect: Functional Medicine Appointment