Functional Medicine Defined

Simply defined, anti-aging/functional medicine is a new approach to complete health care. This approach not only addresses and alleviates a patient’s symptoms, but looks for the cause of the symptom and treats the cause. 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 and interventions 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.

As the body ages it usually experiences increasing illness, disease symptoms, or disability. These are signs of 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, Dr. Trew’s approach is to explore how to restore organ reserve and function.

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. Using 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, Dr Trew’s 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.

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. The constant dynamic balancing of the body.