Dr. Elizabeth Boham explains functional medicine's approach to healing. The talk covers why illness is complex, how to address root causes in the right order, and the key factors for biological health.
Welcome to the Ultra Wellness Center. Hi, I'm Dr. Elizabeth Boham, a physician at the Ultra Wellness Center. Today we're going to talk about our approach to the optimal healing process. In the practice of medicine, healing depends not only on doing the right things, but doing them in the right order. Illness is never simply one discrete process or dysfunction. It is a bundle of the patient's whole life, their genetics, early influences, environment, diet, lifestyle, habits, travel, relationships, beliefs, and how those influences are layered and woven to create the things we call disease. Rooting out the original causes from the downstream effects is essential task of the healing process. Our job is determining how the illness is layered or woven into your story and your biology, This helps us know where to start first, which layer to peel away or which knot to untangle in the web of physiologic dysfunction.
Doing the right thing in the wrong order will often result in failure or worsening of the illness. Finding the one medication or surgical procedure or the right herb or alternative modality to treat a disease may fail, even though it is the right thing to do, if it is done in the wrong order.
More importantly, there are often many things to do, and it is difficult which to choose to do first. But after many years of thinking, sorting, trying, failing, succeeding, a few things seem apparent, and here we offer them humbly to those who struggle to hold and make sense of the infinitely variable threads of human story and disease.
Fortunately, though human biology is infinitely complex and beyond anyone's capacity to fully grasp, There are some principles and well-traveled routes to healing that are straightforward and accessible for healing. In fact, I believe this map and methodology are our best hope. This is the map of functional medicine, or whole systems medicine.
Our first task in the Patient Healing Partnership is to persistently seek the cause or causes of the illness. Thankfully, there are only a few root causes for any illness. infection, allergen, toxins, stress, both physical and psychological and poor diet and genetics. That is just six things to think about. But we must become an expert in identifying and treating these underlying causes of disease.
The second task is to identify the seven ingredients needed for optimal biologic function. The first is real food, nutrients and hormones. a healthy environment, deep relaxation and rhythm, including sleep, movement, love and community, and the seventh, meaning and purpose in life. We must also become expert in assessing deficiency of these ingredients and helping provide the necessary conditions for thriving.
The presence of any of the six root causes of disease and the absence of any of the seven essential ingredients creates imbalance in the basic biologic web-like systems and processes of the body. 1. Hormonal neurotransmitters 2. Immune 3. Digestive 4. Detoxification 5. Energy metabolism 6. Structural 7. Mind body Any imbalances in any one or combination of these systems results in a manifestation of disease as we know it. Without this map and process of thinking, the name of your disease becomes increasingly meaningless.
So first we must seek the cause. When faced with multiple causes of disease, toxins, infections, allergens, poor diet, and stress, which often occur together in varying patterns and degrees, the question is what to do first, and next, and next, and so on. The trick lies in having a place to start. and understanding how to unpeel the layers of dysfunction and in what order. Fortunately, the body knows how to heal if we remove the impediments and provide the proper conditions in the right order. This takes time, patience, and persistence.
