Tidbits Tuesday

As I am sitting here learning about blogging and trying to put my thoughts and understanding of this process together, I took a pause and what did I do? Turn to social media because, lets be real, that’s how we roll now. Well anyways I ran across a meme by Dr Frank Lipman MD (A well known and highly knowledgeable Functional Medical Doctor) and it says:

We need to start thinking of the body as an integrated whole, and not as a machine with separate parts treated independently

This got me thinking of things I have said many times before, we in the medical world have sliced and diced the body to such an extreme that each specialty thinks of only their specialty, meaning that if you see a GI (gastrointestinal) doctor they will only look at symptoms and issues related to the gut, ENT doctor (ears nose and throat) only things related to the ears, nose and throat, or Cardiologist (heart and it’s vessels) looks at whats going on with the cardiovascular system. We do not have systems or body parts in isolation, they all work as a moving team, very intricately I might add. When one system is out of balance so likely are many others, this can include our emotional and mental states. I once heard a physician tell a family (they asked a question about a certain set of symptoms) I only do ears, noses and throats, I do not know about anything else going on with the body system. ( Really??)

While I am sooo thankful for specialties, they have saved many a life, I wish the governing body of medicine would not have compartmentalized medical specialties to this extreme because there is sooo much more at play inside our bodies that better healing could occur when treating the whole person! When the spirit is broken so it the body. Even if there could be a better integration of specialties and communication we may actually heal more people instead of just band-aid on symptoms. I think the idea was for the family practice or internist to manage the whole patient, monitor and create the plan while having communication with all the specialties. In theory this is plasuable but in reality with increasing numbers of patients, increased demands on physicians to comply with regulation agencies and metric compliance it is very difficult to spend any quality time with patients.

This is also why I have just begun the process of seeing functional medical doctors and also naturopaths, they know we are a sum of ALL parts and want to look at the body as a whole to address the root causes of ill feelings and symptoms and heal from the inside out, this includes nutritional status! Check them out in your area ifm.org or naturopathic.org. You can also google your city + functional medicine.