a free-thinking, nature-loving, tea-obsessed, creative yet analytical, introverted but personable, natural-health enthusiast…
I’m also certified health coach, dedicated to educating, guiding, and empowering you to lead your best life possible.
[quote person=”” title=”” shape=”circle” position=”vertical”]My mission is to enable people just like you, to not only reclaim their health, but to thrive. [/quote]
[quote person=”” title=”” shape=”circle” position=”vertical”]Our food choices are powerful epigenetic modulators, capable of turning genes on and off. While we may not have control over everything, we do have the power to change our diet & lifestyle.[/quote]
Thankfully, we are embarking on a revolutionary shift in the current medical paradigm. As a health coach, I’m thrilled to be a part of this growing movement in which we transition from a broken system which merely treats symptoms and views health as the absence of disease, to a system which addresses the root cause of bodily dysfunction and enables people to flourish.
Functional medicine isn’t simply lifestyle-based medicine, but a systems-oriented, science-based approach that involves taking a patient’s biochemistry, physiology, genetics, and environmental exposures into account when looking for the cause of a specific medical issue or set of symptoms.
While conventional medicine is superb at acute care such as emergency life-saving surgeries; it lacks focus on the underlying causes or prevention of disease and merely aims to treat isolated symptoms as opposed to the whole person.
Our current medical model has gotten so specialized and compartmentalized that we fail to see the forest for the trees.
Patients are often sent from specialist to specialist, and the complex interrelationships amongst seemingly unrelated set of symptoms often get muddled. These people may go undiagnosed for over a decade due to ineffective communication, testing or resources. Many patients may present with subclinical lab values but in fact show strong clinical symptoms, as in the case of overt hypothyroidism for instance, which is estimated to be very common.
Functional medicine is a much more personalized, up-to-date, systems oriented model that engages both patient and practitioner in a therapeutic partnership. By shifting the traditional disease-centered focus of medical practice to a more patient-centered, holistic approach; practitioners are trained to look at the interactions amongst genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic disease.
Take heart disease for instance. Growing evidence points to cardiovascular diseases as having a multi-factorial origin as opposed to the singular, once-touted diet heart hypothesis; with immune dysfunction, microbiome dysbiosis, vascular inflammation, and oxidative stress all playing a causative role in disease manifestation.
Our approach should therefore be multifaceted; taking into consideration epigenetic modulators such as lifestyle and dietary interventions, which can have a profound role in disease prevention, management, and treatment. Once people realize they have much more control over their health than they’ve been lead to believe, they can begin to connect the dots between symptoms and diet / lifestyle factors, and alter their habits for the better.
