Conventional Medicine for chronic disease is set up as “one pill for one ill.” In contrast, Functional Medicine requires you to be a participant in your lifestyle choices, understanding medical costs and driving health care decisions. This shift from the backseat to the driver’s seat can be overwhelming and even paralyzing… and sadly, it causes many people to back away from functional medicine before they see any results….
You just finished your first appointment with a new patient. It went a little long (2 hours, yikes!) but you’re feeling good. The patient was agreeable and open to any suggestions you made – which was a good thing, because you had a LOT of suggestions. The next week you’re surprised to see their follow-up is cancelled… and even more surprised when your calls and emails go unanswere…
In 2006, my son was two weeks from his third birthday when I learned the dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals/chemicals, how leaky his gut was, the gut-brain axis, the opportunistic gut pathogens, the vitamin and mineral deficiencies and the high inflammatory foods I had to remove….
Autism has so much vengeance to it; it has so much force. I went to battle with it because that’s my personality. I’ll take a bull by the horns and I’ll wrestle it down to the ground. That’s what I tried to do with Autism, and it about killed me. I learned that if I was going to sustain this journey if I was going to SURVIVE this journey then I couldn’t fight Autism. It was bigger than me….
I deliberately used the word “remission”. The word “recovery” is thrown around like candy in the autism world. “Oh, my sons recovered,” “Oh, I’m trying to recover him.” From what I can see, having been in the clinical setting for 7-years, is this really places even more stress on families. Families are feeling if they haven’t achieved recovery in two, three, four, five years, they feel like they have failed. …
Teri S. and her husband Alan arrived at my Autism Recovery Clinic in December of 2013. Their then 12-year old son refused to eat-he would scream and clear the table when she served him a meal, he was so thin Teri cried each time she bathed him, his meltdowns were so severe trips out in public were limited, he was totally non-verbal, chronically constipated, and not potty trained….