What does telling your story have to do with your health?

How well do you know your body? Did you know that one diagnosis can have multiple causes or that multiple diagnoses can be caused by the same root cause? Let that sink in for a moment. When you go to the doctor for a troublesome symptom, you'll often get medication to treat the symptom. The symptom may have multiple causes, but the medication addresses one cause, or often, it doesn't treat a cause at all but merely lessen the symptom. The symptom may get better to some degree or may go away only to come back later. In some cases, the medication causes bigger problems than the one it was designed to treat! This is because the root cause or causes have not been fixed. In functional medicine, the analogy is this: If you're sitting on a tack and that causes pain, do you take an aspirin for the pain, or do you remove the tack? The root cause is the tack. The functional practitioner looks at your symptom or constellation of symptoms, illness or diagnoses and traces back to the factors that caused them. This involves having an interactive dialogue that explores your personal history, looks at your habits and lifestyle--including your diet and exercise patterns, and accounts for your stress levels. Gathering the holistic picture of your health status acknowledges you as a unique being with a unique story, unique eating patterns, unique exposures to toxins and pathogens, unique stressors and so on. Addressing all of these areas in your care and treatment plan is truly individualized medicine. Healing designed with you, for you. And it's all based on a therapeutic partnership between you and your functional practitioner. As a functional nutrition coach, I partner with clients to understand what's really going on in there, clear the muddy waters so underlying causes can be seen, and develop a plan of action to reset and rebalance the body's systems so they work the way they should. If you have some funky symptoms you'd like to explore, consider seeing a functional nutrition coach. You'll not only lower inflammation and heal your body, but you'll come understand how your body works so you have the skills to rebalance yourself in the future. That's invaluable. You deserve a balanced, thriving body that allows you to feel good every day. That's why I hope you'll share your unique story, understand your "why" and find a path to true healing.