Health Optimization and Wellness

Trust the Functional Medicine Experts in Dallas

Here at LifeSeasons Medical Clinic, we take a holistic approach to helping patients with various health issues. By utilizing a patient-centered approach that focuses on causes and prevention, functional medicine allows patients and practitioners to work together to discover the root of a disease. When you’re ready to experience the difference that this alternative approach to medicine can make, partner with LifeSeasons Medical, the best functional medicine clinic in Dallas.

What Is Functional Medicine?

Before understanding how functional medicine applies to some of the health concerns above, it’s important to understand what it is, and what it is not. The Institute for Functional Medicine defines it as “a systems biology-based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease.” As such, each symptom or diagnosis may be one of many different factors contributing to an illness.

Holistic

This alternative approach to medicine takes the whole body into account, not just areas where the symptoms currently are. In conventional medicine, areas of the body are compartmentalized, essentially ignoring the natural relationship between body parts. Our functional medicine practitioners at LifeSeasons Medical Clinic, on the other hand, understand how inefficiencies and imbalances in one part of the body can actually be related to different symptoms in another part of the body. In doing so, we are better able to target, treat, and eliminate the cause of a symptom rather than simply alleviating the symptom.

Individualized

In order to do more than just suppress a symptom, functional medicine takes an individualized approach to each patient. While the symptoms between two people may be similar, the underlying causes of those symptoms differ greatly. Some symptoms may be a result of genes, others may be a product of lifestyle, and some may be impacted by environment. Treating each scenario with individual care is vital to understanding which combination of these factors contribute to a patient’s condition.

Collaborative

Conventional medicine puts much of the power in the hands of a doctor, oftentimes removing the most important part of everything — the patient! Treating the patient rather than the disease opens up a whole new world of collaboration that can help identify root causes of the disease. In turn, this can lead to actual removal of the illness as opposed to alleviating the symptoms for a limited amount of time.

Preventive

One of the major goals of our functional medicine clinic is to prevent chronic diseases, and we believe a holistic, patient-centered approach to medicine allows us to do just that. Whereas traditional approaches to medicine often lack proper tools and techniques needed to prevent certain chronic diseases, functional medicine practitioners utilize an integrative approach to better help patients prevent the onset of an illness.

Lifestyle-Based

Something that makes functional medicine so unique and different from traditional is its emphasis on lifestyle, environment, nutrition, and other factors that the latter tends to ignore. At LifeSeasons Medical Clinic, we believe that health is more than simply the absence of disease — it’s a combination of patterns and practices that lead to increased vitality, energy, and overall health and wellness.

Cause-Focused

All of these factors combine to help functional medicine practitioners and patients work together to identify root causes of a disease. While traditional forms of medicine stress the treatment and alleviation of certain symptoms, that is rarely a long-term solution to an illness and does not help identify techniques to prevent it from affecting other patients in the future. Functional medicine digs deep into what causes someone’s symptoms in the first place, thus making it possible to cut out those poor habits or adjust their environment to better prevent chronic disease.

What Can Functional Medicine Treat?

Functional medicine can be used to address dozens of health issues. Far too often, patients suffering from certain conditions who turn to conventional care are disappointed with the lack of progress or overall understanding of their particular situation. Our team of functional medicine practitioners at LifeSeasons Medical Clinic are prepared to provide a level of treatment and care you won’t be able to find anywhere else.

We’ll take a look at some of the most common health issues that functional medicine can treat below, but please contact our team if you have questions on any other conditions you’re struggling with.

Toxicity States

Whether you realize it or not, we are perpetually exposed to harmful chemicals, metals, and pathogens that can be severely damaging to our bodies. Environmental toxins, pesticides, viral and bacterial infections, heavy metals, and more can accumulate over time to create a toxic burden within many human bodies. While some levels of toxins are inevitable in our world, many people reach a point where they are no longer able to filter out excess levels of toxins.

In many cases, these high toxicity levels manifest in symptoms such as chronic fatigue, neuropathy, foggy brain dysregulation, migraines, gastrointestinal disorders, and more. Whereas conventional medicine will offer alleviation for those symptoms, it is rarely able to identify the toxins that caused the symptoms. By using specialized testing, we are able to identify certain toxins and help eliminate or remove the total toxic burden in the body.

Hormone Imbalance

Hormones affect our day-to-day lives more than you may realize, and because they are not something we can physically see, understanding how they interact with behavior, mood, and the body can be difficult. As part of our endocrine system, hormones help regulate metabolism, growth, development, sexual function, sleep, mood, and more.

However, common hormones such as thyroid, estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, and cortisol fluctuate daily, and the change becomes more severe as we age. Because of that fluctuation, hormone imbalances can result in too much or too little of a certain hormone in the bloodstream. The results of these imbalances are seen in many symptoms, including:

Irregular or painful periods
Osteoporosis
Breast tenderness
Depression
Anxiety
Changes in sex drive

There are many more symptoms that can result from hormone imbalance, and by utilizing functional medicine to identify root causes of hormone imbalance, we can help eliminate common root causes like stress, poor sleep, and overexposure to toxins. We perform hormone testing to accurately assess your hormone levels and determine which of those root causes could be affecting them.

Weight Management

Now more than ever, obesity is an epidemic in our society. With constant reminders to eat food that is calorically dense and nutritiously poor, an increasing number of people struggle with weight management. From fast-food joints to foods loaded with artificial preservatives, eating unhealthy food has become the norm for many Americans. Paired with a decline in physical activity throughout the nation, many people are struggling to control their weight.

By examining an your lifestyle, environment, and nutritional choices, however, functional medicine can help you take control over your weight management. Healthy lifestyle practices, regular exercise routines, and nutrient-dense foods will all considerably impact overall health. Here at LifeSeasons Medical Clinic in Dallas, we can accurately assess your starting point using a state-of-the-art bioimpedance scale and implement a course of action that works well for you.

Type II Diabetes

If you have Type II Diabetes and are struggling to see the results you’ve worked for and desire, a functional medicine approach could allow you to accomplish your health goals. While many people look at the elevated blood sugar of type II diabetics as the cause for their syndrome, it’s actually a symptom of diabetes itself. Conventional medicine could result in medications that treat that symptom, but it doesn’t do enough to attack the root cause.

Using our functional medicine practices at LifeSeasons Medical Clinic, we can help you identify less renowned causes of the insulin resistance which leads to Type II Diabetes, including chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and microbiome health, all of which go along with poor diet. By addressing multiple potential causes, we are able to implement a plan that not only treats Type II Diabetes, but reverses it all together.

Arthritis

Osteoarthritis and Rheumatoid Arthritis affect millions of Americans every year, and more and more people are being diagnosed with the disease at an earlier age. Both forms of the syndrome cause pain and stiffness as tissue surrounding often-used joints becomes inflamed. When this happens, the synovial fluid inside the joint thickens, eliminating the slick and fluid movement between your joints.

Traditional medicine may mask that pain with pharmaceuticals, but identifying what really causes that inflammation and pain is key to successfully treating the syndrome. That’s where functional medicine comes into play. A functional approach to arthritis focuses not on the joints that are swollen, but on the immune system deficiency which causes that inflammation in the first place. Arthritis is a result of a mishap within the immune system that essentially causes the body to attack itself, and our approach to treatment can help identify that mishap and prevent it.

What Does Normal Treatment Look Like?

Part of the beauty of functional medicine lies in the answer to this question — there is no answer! Remember when we introduced functional medicine as an individualized, holistic approach to health? That is especially evident when it comes time for treatment.

Even if two people report the exact same symptoms and follow nearly identical lifestyle patterns, their current situation and course of treatment can vary based on the toxins they are exposed to at work. Likewise, if two people working in the same industry with similar exposure to toxins report equal symptoms, their treatment plans may deviate based on family genetics, lifestyle choices, or nutrition.

No two people are ever the same, so why should we expect a generic approach to medicine to work equally for every patient? Though every treatment plan varies by person and situation, many of our plans are combination of:

Diet, exercise, and lifestyle changes
Sleep improvement techniques
Stress management
Detoxification methods
Botanical medicines
Nutritional supplements

At LifeSeasons Medical in Dallas, our functional medicine experts are committed to helping you discover a specific treatment plan designed to correct the imbalances, inefficiencies, and over- or under-exposures that are causing your disease in the first place.

We know firsthand the impact that functional medicine can have on the treatment and reversal of syndromes you may be suffering from, and we are proud to work alongside you to find what is causing them. Contact our functional medicine clinic today to learn more about treatment!

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Health Optimization & Wellness

Trust the Functional Medicine Experts in Dallas

Functional medicine can address numerous health issues, including: