Functional Medicine and Functional Neurology
What is functional medicine and functional neurology?
We are now offering patients functional medicine and functional neurology, a unique and previously unavailable combination approach to helping many different chronic conditions. Our three-pronged approach includes: metabolic (functional medicine), neurological (functional neurology) and biochemical assessment with the goal of treating the whole person.
The typical assessment by a doctor or physical therapist, will usually only approach your problem from one perspective (biomechanical/orthopedic, neurological, or biochemical/metabolic). Often this singular and narrow approach fails to address the multiple factors that contribute to hard to treat conditions and cases like fibromyalgia, peripheral neuropathy, hashimoto’s, type II diabetes, chronic back and neck pain, migraines, difficulty losing weight and the inability to maintaining high energy levels.
It is my experience that if you want to make long-term changes in hard to treat cases and conditions, you have to approach the problem from many different perspectives. Our approach to your health encompasses all of these components, so that we have the best chance of helping you get better. Neurologically, your brain health and it’s ability to normally receive input and stimulation from your environment (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, hot/cold, vibration, pain, body position, etc..) has a profound influence on the health of your autonomic nervous system (sympathetic/parasympathetic) function.1 Loss of your brain’s ability to receive normal and balanced input is most commonly the result of chemical, physical or emotional stress that damages nerve pathways in the brain.1 Damage from stress to the nerve pathways in your brain is called “transneural degeneration.”1 Transneural degeneration results in a loss of normal impulse (nerve firing) between the different areas of your brain (cerebellum, thalamus, cortex, mesencephalon, ponto medullary reticular formation, intermediolateral cell column) that normally communicate and work together.1 The loss of normal brain impulse frequently causes loss of the normal regulation and balance in autonomic nervous system function.1 Loss of bilateral (because you have two halves) balance in nerve impulses between these areas of your brain can result in many of the symptoms associated with chronic pain, hormonal and autonomic nervous system dysregulation.1 I commonly find that autonomic nervous system dysregulation is a major problem in patients with chronic health problems.
In addition to addressing your health from biomechanical/orthopedic, biochemical/metabolic and functional medicine perspectives, we use functional neurology to balance nerve impulses in the weak areas of your brain. Functional neurology works because of neural plasticity, and your brain’s ability to strengthen and rewire the mesh of nerves that allow communication between the different areas in your brain. Our functional neurological and functional medicine support, in combination with biomechanical treatment of your condition is what sets us apart from other doctors.
If you are interested in becoming a patient, visit our “New Patient Application Page.”
1. Beck, Randy. Functional Neurology for Practitioners of Manual Therapy. Philadelphia, PA: Churchill Livingstone, 2008.
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