Anti-Aging/Functional Medicine Defined
Simply defined, anti-aging/functional medicine
is a new approach to complete health care. Functional medicine is not only
addressing and alleviating a patient's symptoms, but looking for the cause of the
symptoms. It is the field of health care that employs assessment and early
intervention to improve physiological, emotional/cognitive and physical function.
Using this approach, Dr. Trew treats illness and promotes vitality by focusing her
assessments at root levels of metabolic imbalance. Her aim is to improve and
optimize health at the psychological, biochemical or structural levels through therapies
that restore, repair and rebuild that intrinsic balance.
For example, as the body ages, it usually experiences
increasing illness, disease symptoms, or disability. Anti-aging/functional medicine
recognizes these signs as loss of function, or organ reserve. At younger ages, our
bodies have plenty of reserve to withstand or accommodate disabling events like infection
or trauma without resulting long term problems. But at an older age, organ reserve
is lost and that same trauma may overwhelm the body's ability to respond
efficiently. Disease or illness often ensues. Whereas conventional medicine
looks for ways to suppress the resulting symptoms, using an anti-aging/functional medicine
approach, Dr. Trew explores how to restore a patient's organ reserve, function and
balance.
Using an anti-aging/functional approach to medicine,
the absence of disease does not guarantee the presence of health. Instead, health
represents a positive vitality unique to each individual. With this approach
Dr. Trew looks not only at the patient's primary complaints, but assesses the patient's
overall health status. She explores methods that can create a state of
wellness for the patient.
Furthermore, her approach insists that alleviating
symptoms and preventing illness are not worthy goals in and of themselves. Medical
goals must support vitality and wellness throughout the patient's life.
Conventional medicine, for the most part, approaches a
patients health from the negative - that is from the viewpoint of disease.
Generally, both patients and physicians have become accustomed to addressing health issue
patterns with fast results for relief of symptoms. As a consequence, this has
resulted in a dependence on pharmaceutical answers to our health issues.
The anti-aging/functional approach, on the other
hand, recognizes that unique factors may affect a person's state of
wellness. This approach focuses on the entire body and it's balance of all the
bodies organ systems, in essence, the constant dynamic balancing of the body.
Our bodies are a complex orchestration of dynamic and
ever changing balances, constantly attempting to rejuvenate, replace, repair and heal it's
parts. Each "part" is affected by every other part in a web like
interconnected fashion. Symptoms, which are our bodies signals for help, can have
many different causes. Treating the symptom only, or trying to eliminate it alone,
is an incomplete approach to our medical health needs.
Rather than compartmentalizing diseases into separate
labeled entities, a functional perspective recognizes diagnostic categories but extends
their meanings by investigating the functions that give rise to the symptoms. It
seeks to uncover the "purpose" underlying the illness. Whereas
conventional practice views illness as something "happening" to an individual,
functional practice considers illness an ever changing dialogue among energy-driven,
energy sensitive body systems and their greater environment. In this sense, illness
has some type of purpose. It becomes functional. The principal focus on this
paradigm shifts from diagnosing symptoms to evaluating and maintaining metabolic freedom
and organ reserve.
Anti-aging/functional medicine addresses
health maintenance and prevention. Whereas conventionally we have been
used to seek medical help when we detect a problem or perceive a loss of function, now we
can and should seek medical advice to measure our health
status to prevent diseases, especially those related to age. It is never to late to
start this process, but the younger the better.
With the technology now available, a trained
anti-aging/functional medicine physician such as Dr. Trew can not only find causes of
diseases, but also assess, measure, monitor and teach patients how to maintain their
health and vitality. |
