WHAT’S FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE?

Optimal health and wellness is our right as humans. It is often hard to decipher how or when we may have lost it and gotten off track. Ali is committed to helping you find your way back to wellness learning how to thrive vs. simply survive!

Functional medicine works to identify and treat the cause of a condition rather than silence the symptoms. We focus on improving on the health and wellness of the whole person instead of a quick fix with medication which may contribute to additional health issues by causing side effects. Ali treats the body as a whole, discovering the imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, and metabolic dysfunction that regulate your system and are all too often overlooked in a standard model of health care. By strategic use of laboratory assessments, food-as-medicine, mind-body counseling, and pharmaceutical-grade nutritional supplementation, we can address and correct these underlying issues to promote better health and functionality.

All too often a medication is prescribed for a condition that can be corrected by repleting a micronutrient deficiency. If using food-as-medicine, not only can you correct the targeted symptom or condition but you can also see favorable outcomes with varied conditions while correcting the driving cause verses covering it up. Ali looks for clinical trends when running micronutrient panels on patients. For instance a patient with depression, fatigue, thinning hair, and diabetes can see clinical outcomes with identification and repletion of biotin deficiency as biotin plays a role in mood stability, utilization of glucose as fuel, production of amino acids for hair growth, and release of insulin from pancreas to aid in blood sugar regulation. All of these favorable outcomes can come from repleting micronutrient deficiency and that same client may get the added benefit of reduced blood pressure as biotin aids in relaxing smooth muscles. Rather than leading to undesired side effects and causing a chain reaction of more medication need, food-as-medicine can address the symptoms and conditions from the root cause while provide a multitude of beneficial outcomes.

BEYOND FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE – ALI’S APPROACH TO BALANCED EATING

Ali takes the positive aspects of various diets, removing the burden of unrealistic components, and addressing the individual with successful treatment modalities to yield long-term results and ultimately FREEDOM from the Vicious Diet Cycle!

You too can find yourself in an ideal health state while exploring the diverse world of natural unprocessed foods discovering abundance with your diet and ultimately your life. You have the power within YOU to take back control of your body by redefining your relationship with food!

TREATMENTS

As an example, the most common drug treatment for cholesterol levels is a statin medication. These drugs block an enzyme in the body called HMG-CoA Reductase. Along the biological production pathway of this enzyme is cholesterol, the targeted steroid hormone, but there are also many other key players in your body’s optimal functionality that are made in this pathway and they too are blocked by a statin drug. This pathway of formation or use of cholesterol as a steroid hormone builder plays a role in the production of vitamin D, serotonin, testosterone, and enzyme CoQ10. So now as your cholesterol levels decline with use of a statin drug, your physician taps you on the shoulder to say good job about your lowered cholesterol levels while you arrive deficient in vitamin D, depressed and anxious from low serotonin, feeling depleted with low libido or erectile dysfunction from declining testosterone, weaker from muscle breakdown, and presenting at higher risk for Alzheimer’s’ disease and Diabetes. This sets us up for a potential cocktail of medications to cover up the deficiency of the statin drug and then each of those newly prescribed drugs also have their own list of side effects thus creating the vicious cycle of the “pharmageddon”!

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