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Ask our Doctors

Skin Renewal Doctors all have a broad knowledge, background and passion for aesthetic medicine. Please feel free to ask them your questions and concerns.

SKIN RENEWAL AESTHETIC CLINICS
SKIN RENEWAL AESTHETIC CLINICS

About Conventional, Integrative and Functional Medicine

Health Renewal...Wellness: A philosophy everyone can live by

Begin Your Journey to Wellness by visiting Health Renewal

Our job at Health Renewal is to listen, to connect the dots between a patient's medical history, symptoms, and their underlying causes. Health Renewal is a great place for women and men to secure integrative and holistic health care from providers who give personalized care, partner with the patient to focus on the root cause of their illness, support their recovery, and help them maintain good health. We are here to listen and to help. 

What is the difference between Conventional, Integrative and Functional medicine?

1. Conventional medicine is a system in which doctors and other healthcare professionals treat symptoms and diseases using drugs, radiation and surgery. The goal of conventional medicine is for doctors to identify diseases by recognizing patterns of symptoms and to treat those symptoms by prescribing drug-based therapies. 

2. Integrative medicine is a model of medicine that integrates the alternative modalities such as nutrition, Chinese medicine and Homoeopathy into conventional medicine so that patients have the opportunity to receive all these potential therapies when appropriate. It means that patients can get acupuncture or herbs along with their drugs or surgery. Integrative medicine still uses the basic ideas of conventional medicine as a base, in that it still needs the physicians to name a disease and then find the drug or treatment for that disease, albeit a complementary alternative solution. It works well for acute diseases such as trauma, infection, and emergencies, but unfortunately, it falls into the realm of naming the disease and treating the symptoms, whereas Functional medicine seeks to find the cause of the patients imbalances and treats the patient as a whole.

3. In Functional Medicine, the doctor would search for the WHY she has these named illnesses. All consultations begin with the doctor taking an extensive history and listening to her life story of how she got to where she is today, then they may order comprehensive state of the art lab testing and make the necessary dietary and lifestyle changes based on the history. Through this process we may find that this woman has an allergy to dairy, difficulty detoxifying and a parasite in her gut. By removing dairy from her diet, improving detoxification with vitamins and supplements, and treating her for the parasite, within a short period of time her headache, joint pain and stomach pain all resolve. This patient won’t need to be on any medication. Functional medicine doctors seek to find the common link and solve problems from the root cause rather than simply treating the symptoms with a variety of medications.

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a personalised, systems-oriented model that empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working together as a team to address the underlying causes of disease. Functional Medicine doctors spend time with their patients, listening to their histories, mapping their personal timeline, and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex chronic disease.

Most people have experienced being examined by their doctor, having blood tests done, x-rays or other diagnostic tests taken, only for the doctor to report back that all the tests are normal. Yet, both the patient and their doctor could see that the patient was not well.

Our Health Renewal, Functional Medicine Doctors aim to reduce this problem by applying a new model that focuses on treating your body as a whole system, that treats the causes not only the symptoms, that sees the body as a whole organism, rather simply a collection of organs. This emerging model of diagnosis and treatment better matches the need to improve the management and prevention of chronic diseases.

By changing the disease-centered focus of medical practice to this patient-centered approach, our Health Renewal doctors are able to support the healing process by viewing health and illness as part of a cycle in which all components of the human biological system interact dynamically with the environment. This process helps to seek and identify genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors that may shift a person's health and well being to illness.

At Health Renewal, we can address each of these systems with specific blood tests. This approach to health offers advantages, one of which is a gradual improvement of symptoms. Patients report improvement in how they feel usually within the first month. Even for those who have struggled with lifelong depression, results are usually seen within the first couple of months. This is largely because the precise cause of the problem has been diagnosed by the diagnostic machine

Click here for more detailed information on Functional Medicine.