Bridging the Gap: Integrative & Functional Medicine
Medical care can be overwhelming in this day and age. We want to ensure that we are always receiving high-quality, contemporary, and evidence-based care. We hope to minimize the medications that we are currently taking while also thinking about preventing the diseases that come from aging and various lifestyle choices. We also hope to find a practitioner who is well-versed in lifestyle choices that promote vitality as we age, who can also distill down supplementation to only those supplements that are truly health-promoting with science to back them up. It can be really difficult to ascertain where we should go for this care, relying on google reviews, word of mouth, and face-to-face visits to test out new practitioners to see if they are a good fit. In short: it’s hard being a patient!
I know this from personal experience, as well as from being a medical professional trying to ensure my patients’ satisfaction with their care. I am often asked what exactly my “deal” or “angle” is as a physician who practices Integrative and Functional Medicine. After stumbling and fumbling through various answers, I’ve settled on this: my goal is to bridge the gap between conventional medical care and alternative treatment modalities. I don’t really have an angle, other than to provide the best care to my ability and to treat my patients as individuals with distinct goals for their own health and wellness. I always endeavor to provide the newest, most cutting-edge care, but first I need to see evidence to back up my recommendations, meaning that I will not be promoting the new fad supplements, treatment modalities, or pharmaceuticals until I have reason to believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. I will always work to minimize medication use as much as possible, but when a pharmaceutical agent is the most appropriate treatment, that is what I will recommend, using my breadth of knowledge and experience as both a conventionally-trained MD and a board-certified practitioner of Integrative Medicine. I practice the tenets of Functional and Integrative Medicine not only on my patients, but on myself and my family.
An example of conventional medical care and alternative treatments working well in combination is the treatment of anxiety and sleep disorders. Throughout medical school and residency, I became more and more interested in how alternative therapies like supplements and mind-body medicine (acupuncture, massage) could help me to manage my anxiety and difficulty sleeping that I had experienced since childhood. I utilized supplements like magnesium, clinically-studied lavender capsules, adaptogens and medicinal teas to calm my nerves. I exercised regularly, and I ate more fruits and vegetables than I ever had. I found my anxiety improving, and noted even more success when I received regular acupuncture and journaled and meditated. It was amazing to experience such profound changes with these subtle treatments. I started talk therapy during an extremely stressful time in life as well, and that helped me to tune in to how my body felt during the early stages of anxiety, so that I could use these cues to stem the anxious thoughts and feelings before they spun out of control.
While things had certainly improved over the years, I found that significant life changes caused my anxiety to flare in a way that these therapies could only help incompletely. Moving away from Denver after 8 years and leaving many close friendships to live in the Aspen area and start a new job was one of these difficult times. While I was excited at this new adventure, it was a difficult transition, and I found myself again struggling to sleep. It occurred to me that if I encountered a patient who had experienced what I had and who was having the anxiety and sleeplessness that I was having, I would not hesitate to recommend pharmaceutical medication to them to manage their symptoms while working to identify underlying imbalances and treatable pathology that could be contributing to their current state.
I started medication for my anxiety and utilized the lowest dose available. I tested myself for the MTHFR mutation and found that I was homozygous (mutation inherited on both genes - one from each parent) for the mutation. This helped me to target my supplementation and to understand that I naturally need a little extra help than the average genetically “normal” person to manage my serotonin production, further affirming my decision to start medication. I continued to take the supplements and utilize the lifestyle changes that helped with my anxiety before, and I found that the medication helped me to continue those good habits and to thrive in my day-to-day life. While I do not necessarily intend to be on this medication for the rest of my life, utilizing it to bridge me through trying periods when my anxiety is controlled by little-else has improved my life exponentially.
I say all this in hopes of reassuring any potential patients who may read this post that I will take a similar meticulous, caring, individualized approach to your treatment plans, and I would hope that any Integrative/Functional Medicine practitioner would do the same. We should be using every available arm of medicine when it is most appropriate to help our patients thrive, and while we work to always utilize natural therapies and alternative treatment modalities, sometimes that does include the use of pharmaceuticals. My training as a classically educated MD who has spent years studying Integrative & Functional Medicine and acupuncture allows me to zoom out and carefully select the best plan for the patient, using everything I have learned to creatively combine diet, exercise, supplementation, lifestyle changes, mindfulness, medications, and skilled practitioners of mind-body medicine to curate a plan to optimize their health. I love utilizing the longitudinal and trusting relationships I foster with my patients to adjust the plan and monitor their progress, ensuring their long term success in achieving health and vitality that will last their whole lives.
