Our minds, bodies, and spirits are an integrated whole and deeply connected to the physical and social environment in which we live. We will work with you as a whole person to achieve your highest level of functioning, even in the presence of chronic disease, and to optimize your health for the future. Our goal is to help facilitate the innate healing processes that are coded in our genes. On emotional and spiritual levels, we believe that healing is our birthright and is possible even when confronting serious illness.
Functional, Nutritional, & Botanical Medicine
With Functional Medicine, we identify and treat the underlying clinical imbalances that contribute to chronic and degenerative disease, creating momentum towards health. Key factors include nutritional deficiencies, immune dysfunction, hormonal imbalances, inflammation, oxidative stress, detoxification and digestive function. Functional Medicine focuses on you as a unique person, not merely on a disease.
Diet and nutrition lay the primary foundation for good health. .We have long known that the foods we eat provide the very building blocks of our bodies and the nutrients that regulate our most basic cellular processes. Now science is showing us that the foods we eat contain many bioactive components which communicate with our genes, modify our genetic predispositions to various health problems, and affect our ability to defend against environmental toxins and stresses. For many diseases, including diabetes, coronary heart disease, and high blood pressure, what you eat is as important as, or more important than, what medicines you take. Nutrigenomics is the study of how bioactive food components communicate with and affect the expression of our genes. Using the principles of nutrigenomics, we can assess your current diet and supplement intake, and, accounting for your unique nutritional needs, work with you to develop individualized recommendations that will support maximum health and longevity.
Botanical (plant-based or herbal) medicines were once the mainstay of drug treatments in the United States. They were superseded by synthetic drugs not because herbs were unsafe or ineffective, but because synthetic drugs had more dramatic actions, and produced greater profit. Nonetheless, most synthetic drugs today were derived from the natural world, especially plants.>/p>
We prefer to use herbal medicines when possible because:
- abundant evidence-based research documents the safety and efficacy of many herbal therapies,
- major improvements in the quality and standardization of herbs and supplements have been made,
- herbs avoid much of the toxicity and side effects of drugs, although herbs often work more slowly than pharmaceutical drugs
- herbs are generally much less expensive than pharmaceuticals drugs, and
- many herbs have powerful therapeutic effects for which there are no current pharmaceutical equivalents. (An example is milk thistle, which is beneficial for the regeneration of liver cells in people with chronic liver disease.)
Mind-Body Medicine
We teach basic relaxation techniques, such as imagery, breath awareness, meditation, and progressive muscular relaxation. These practices produce a state of deep, physiological relaxation that is regenerative, healing, and helps reduce symptoms.
We offer sessions in Interactive Guided ImagerySM as a central component of our mind-body approach. Interactive Guided ImagerySM is unique in that it is based entirely upon your imagery and is specifically tailored to you. This is a very effective way to tap into your mind’s inner wisdom to enhance healing, explore the roots of illness, promote wise choices with difficult decisions, and mobilize the resources to make lifestyle changes.