Finding the root causes of disease
Functional Medicine Portland
What is functional medicine?
Functional medicine is a model of care that focuses on optimal function of the body. This means helping the body function in the best possible way by focusing on the efficiency of each organ in the body. It differs from the conventional approach and focuses on promoting well-being and helping to prevent and treat chronic diseases, the biggest health problem we face today.
Functional medicine is a type of alternative medicine that focuses on the function of the body‘s systems and organs, rather than on specific diseases. practitioners of functional medicine believe that the body is a complex system, and that imbalances in one area can lead to problems in other areas. Functional medicine comprehends a variety of techniques, including nutrition, exercise, and supplements, to help the body reach a state of balance.
This therapeutic path is based on the conscious and structured management of the person’s lifestyle, taking into account pillars such as nutrition focused on the particular needs of the individual, personalized physical activity, recovery & sleep, proper management of stress and emotions and exposure to toxic loads.
Functional medicine recognizes the individuality of each patient and her unique interaction with the surrounding environment. Therefore, functional medicinel centers on the person, not to the disease. The idea is to identify and address the root cause of a disease.
What are the principles of functional medicine?
- Care centered on the patient and not on the disease.
- Identification of health as positive vitality and not just the absence of disease.
- Biochemical individuality.
- Dynamic balance between external and internal factors (genetic, environmental factors, etc.).
- Consider the individual as a whole: body, mind and spirit interaction for a complete approach.
- Promote not only the increase in life time but the life time with optimal health.
Treating the mind + Body
We Specialize in
Brain Health
At Functional Medicine Portland, our medical team is expertly trained to discuss the symptoms and causes of your brain health decline and diagnose an effective treatment plan. Watching your parents go through dementia or Alzheimer's, to sustaining multiple brain injuries (TBI’s) in your life, our team will create a plan to get you back on track and to help prevent further damage to your brain.
Longevity
Dr. Eckel has proclaimed he wants to live to be 150 years old. Which usually results in an overwhelming silence...and retorts of, “are you nuts? Have you seen what the elderly look like these days!”
Well, we are living at an amazing time. Dr. Eckel and his team have been researching the latest most effective longevity treatments. We are seeing amazing real-world results shared with us by patients who are reporting relief of chronic pain to reversal of symptoms from long-standing brain conditions.
Let’s age well together, with our brains, brawn, and community!
Real Solutions
No patient is exactly the same, and yet there are 9 factors that affect your health. Guided by our team, we will get to the root cause of your dis-ease – using diagnostic tests that your current doctor may not even know about.
We'll explore your situation holistically, uncovering mediators in your home, at work, and your mental state to arrive at a “lifestyle prescription” that puts you back on the road to health.
Not the kind of care you can get at primary care/ family medicine providers - natural medicine.
The main advantage of functional and integrative medicine is that it is a system for creating health. On the other hand, protocolized medicine focuses on correcting problems with drugs.
In functional medicine, there is hope of optimizing health system resources and obtaining truly impressive results for patients, mainly by modifying these factors and correcting dysfunctions in a personalized way.
To find the root cause in each patient requires an investment, mainly of time. One barrier to its implementation is the standard of care within the current “health” insurance system. It will never be possible to help a patient get back to health in a 15-minute consultation, nor by ignoring her lifestyle.
Herein lies the main disadvantage of functional medicine, although at the same time it becomes a strength, since the time spent allows us to get to know the patient very well, in the detail and minutiae of the factors in his life that have contributed to the loss of his Health. It is this time and this complete and detailed information that allows us to create personalized treatment strategies, to discover what each patient really needs.
Within the range of conditions are cardiovascular diseases such as high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases such as obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma.
The impact of functional medicine on chronic diseases is unprecedented. It ranges from allowing the doctor to reduce the dose or number of medications by seeing that the patients improve the monitoring parameters, to even inducing remission of chronic diseases in some cases.
This therapeutic path is based on the conscious and structured management of lifestyle, taking into account pillars such as food focused on the particular needs of the individual, personalized physical activity, recovery and hygiene of rest and sleep, appropriate management of stress and emotions and exposure to toxic loads. Functional medicine recognizes the individuality of each patient and her unique interaction with the surrounding environment.
To achieve this approach, a precision system is used, systematically collecting and organizing the clinical history, working on a time line that leads to finding and detecting those factors that caused health problems and prevent recovery. In this process, a detailed physical examination and basic and specialized paraclinical examinations aimed at looking for alterations are also important, which, once corrected, allow achieving the much sought after and desired balance in health.
Several specialists recommend it for anyone who wants to achieve the desired state of well-being.
Functional medicine is recommended for any patient with chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune diseases -such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis-, polycystic ovary syndrome, dysmenorrhea and Alzheimer’s disease.
Also for those people with chronic conditions labeled as syndromes (groupings of symptoms) in conventional medicine, for which there are no drugs that really modify the course of the disease, such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.
In addition, for cases where there are chronic and/or recurrent symptoms with no apparent explanation, or that do not fit into a diagnostic category, but that decrease and affect the patient’s life, because in functional medicine they could find their root cause and thus undertake the health recovery process.
Functional Medicine is the future of medicine
This makes functional medicine a valuable approach to reduce the use of drugs, which may help us with the treatment of a certain disease, but prolonged intake can cause other ailments. In addition, the fact of being able to contribute to the improvement of our health allows us to recover the control that we thought we had lost.
