Sachin Patel outlines functional medicine's six pillars: energy, liver detoxification, brain health, digestion, hormones, and environment. The approach focuses on changing cellular signals through lifestyle rather than treating single diagnoses, and teaching patients to manage their own health.
Chapters
So we focus on six pillars with our patients when they first come in. The first one is energy. You need energy for healing, you need energy for repairing. And thyroid patients in particular have energy related issues. The second one is the liver and especially detoxification. And so our body is constantly making toxins that the body has to get rid of. But now, this day and age, we're exposed to exogenous toxins that the liver has never had to deal with ever before. The third pillar is brain health. We find that brain health is very often overlooked and it's not just the biological health of the brain or the biochemical health of the brain, but also mindset. The fourth one is diet and digestion. We focus on what patients eat, but also how they eat it. The next one is hormones and inflammation. Inflammation interferes with normal hormone production and also metabolism. And the last pillar is the environment and their lifestyle. So we believe that what happens when a patient leaves our office is probably more important than what happens in the office. The, the way they behave, the environment that they go back into. It's really time for us to start focusing on global health instead of just myopically focusing on a single diagnosis and ignoring everything else that's going on. The same blood that's creating the thyroid problem is going everywhere else in the body. So to think that it's not just not impacting those other organs, I think is very short sighted. There's no wonder that people's health is shifting in the wrong direction. And this is why people have a hard time recovering. They don't change the signal and to the cell. And what I mean by this is our body's in a constant state of replacing itself, right? My nails grow, my hair grows somewhat, my skin, you know, everything is constantly replacing itself. And so you have to wonder if our body's replacing itself with brand new cells, why do people stay sick? Well, the answer is because you haven't changed the signal that you're sending to the cell. There's no reason for us to wait for a crisis in our health to get healthy. We handle crises, we handle everything, but much more efficiently and effectively. When we're constantly healthy, we tend to delegate our health, right? We go to the doctors and we say, fix me, right? But what we should be saying is, teach me how to fix myself.
