Functional Medicine Practitioner in Devon
I am a Devon-based functional medicine practitioner. I am focused on treating you as an individual, with a unique, complex and interwoven set of circumstances, environments and physiology. You are one of a kind, and so your health strategy should be too. Functional medicine enables me to piece together the puzzle and take a more integrated, holistic understanding of your health. Through a therapeutic and collaborative partnership, we work together to find a plan of action that is realistic, achievable and gets great results.
How functional medicine can help
The functional medicine approach focuses on assessing every aspect of health, including nutrition, lifestyle, genetics, epigenetics, your history, physiology, psychology and current environment. By analysing all of the factors that could be potentially contributing to poor health, I am able to pinpoint problem areas and create an individualised strategy to address the underlying causes of your health issues.
Functional medicine works on the premise that the body wants to be well, and is constantly working to maintain balance. When aggravating factors get in the way, the body will be less able to achieve this. Once these factors are addressed, the body will naturally revert back to a state of good health.
Functional medicine is a systems biology–based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease or ill health rather than seeking to offer a ‘quick-fix’ of covering up or suppressing symptoms.
Functional medicine was born out of a need to find alternative solutions to chronic health issues, solutions that didn’t rely solely on pharmaceuticals, and that helped people to achieve a greater state of health, rather than simply the absence of symptoms. The concept of functional medicine was created in 1990 by Dr Jeffrey Bland and has been used as a highly effective approach by doctors and other health practitioners across the world.
Functional lab tests are a great way to find out what’s really going on ‘behind the scenes’. The answers provided by testing allow me to get to the bottom of your symptoms quickly, rather than wasting time on ineffective strategies due to guesswork. Testing can identify many different things, including nutritional deficiencies, imbalances in the gut/vaginal/oral microbiome, toxins, inflammation, immune health and hormonal imbalances. You can read more about functional testing here.
Equally, whilst testing can be incredibly helpful to pinpoint problem areas, I am not interested in running a multitude of expensive tests, just to cast the net wide. In my opinion, a huge amount of information can be gathered through an indepth initial consultation, and a few carefully selected functional tests. The same goes for supplements – whilst they are very effective at moving your physiology in the right direction, in a way that is difficult to achieve through food alone, there are so many other foundational things to focus on that supplements should only ever be the ‘icing on the cake’ rather than the main tool.
Ready to start your journey? Book your free discovery call
If you would like to have a chat about your health issues and see how I may be able to help, I’d love to hear from you.