(As part of a good medicine series interspersed in our usual blogs, these blogs explain how your provider handles your care with more than just what facts they know.)
In a world filled with toxins and noxious microbes where our bodies age from daily wear and tear, it should be no surprise that we or our loved ones face common illnesses. However, the commonality of the human condition in a broken world does not mean that one-size-fits-all therapies will actually fit everyone. So many in medicine want it to be simple (ultimately so that it makes it easier for them), but those therapies often don’t work for the unique patient with unique needs and circumstances.
Some promote one-size-fits-all testing as their simplistic solution. Sign up for a program, get a bunch of labs done and suddenly the door is unlocked to know your health status. Fancy dashboards and lengthy computer-generated printouts provide flashy answers, but do you really know more about what you need than before? Are you still left asking, “What do I do?”
Some promote views of mankind which simplify you down into a ball of energy or a collection of frequencies. This sounds amazing (almost too good to be true). Just balance that energy with their gadget or learn to read your frequencies, and all will be well. In truth, while energy and frequencies are a part of us, they are still not the whole. Do you want partial recovery at best, or whole person health?
Some find one scapegoat on which to blame nearly everything and focus every therapy on that one target. They may choose one infection, like EBV, as their scapegoat, or they may choose a specific area of medicine, like toxins, and blame every problem every person has on problems in that one area. While sometimes it’s true- EBV and various toxins can be the primary issue for some-, applying these instances as a general rule leaves many others still unwell.
Before you sign up for an online lab testing program to save a few bucks or get drawn into the pseudoscience of an internet guru promoting their one-size-fits-all approach, ask yourself if you are a carbon copy or a unique wholeness. The beauty of the functional medicine approach is that it bases its single pattern of looking at the whole person for combinations of root causes on the reality that you are a unique person with a unique combination of factors requiring a unique combination of responses.
A computer-generated dashboard cannot interact with you comprehensively through a set of lab results, even when those results are combined with standardized questionnaires. The kind of health restoration you desire, a healthier, more abundant life, requires a real interaction with a real person using labs chosen specifically for your symptoms. That will require time with that functional medicine provider with its costs, but money will be well spent in restoring health.
If you have already spent money on the one-size-fits-all lab approach and need help applying what you’ve learned there to your unique health needs, we can be the one to sit down and sort out the details of your whole person needs.
Dr. Eric Potter IFMCP
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.