To be fair, it wasn’t me that decided to get rid of all pharmaceuticals. It was my hippy husband who was sick of watching me become more and more of a robot each day.

We would like to start a family sometime soon, so I decided to start caring about my body and ridding myself of all things pills. (even our friends Tylenol and Excedrin). At first it was NASTY. I missed a lot of work (thanks Doug for not firing me 🙂 ), and I was miserable. But then my body learned to cope with a higher pain tolerance.

A colleague of mine referred me to the Great Plains Institute. They are a lab that does extensive (and disgusting might I add) lab work to help identify possible causes for chronic illnesses. And that’s how I found Dr. Beyer.

Dr. Ed Beyer is a functional neurologist in Tinley Park, IL. You can watch his many chronic headache and migraine videos here. I will warn you, these videos are cheeeeee-zyyy. However, I’m 17 pounds thinner with no migraines in 50 days, so listen to him.

Functional Medicine is different from Traditional Medicine in that it’s designed to find the root cause of the problem, rather than treating symptoms.

Holy shit. You’re telling me that the doctors I’ve been going to for 30 years aren’t trying to fix the problem? No, why would they? Then you don’t come back.

If they treat enough of the symptoms that you are relatively happy but still miserable enough to come back, they profit.

Super sad, and super true.

I shouldn’t bash all doctors. I’m not saying all of them are doing this consciously, but many of them are so trained in higher level acute issues like Heart Attacks, Brain Tumors, etc that when a patient comes in with a lot of headaches – if the CT scan doesn’t show any lesions – they just prescribe a pill and get rid of the patient so they can focus on more pressing issues, as they should.

The cool thing that I love most about functional medicine is that treatment is 100% centered around you and your body. They do an insane (and I mean insane – like pooping into a cardboard box insane) amount of lab work before even coming up with treatment ideas to make you better, which I really like.

Then from the lab work, they decide where you are in relation to healthy people. With traditional medicine, if you had a blood test done at a lab at a doctor’s office, they compare your results with other people in that lab. But if you think about it, what’s the one thing everyone in that doctor’s office has in common? THEY’RE SICK! So why would you benchmark yourself against a sick person. Instead, functional medicine looks at the functional range before you are shit out of luck to see warning signs and red flags

Another thing they taught me, which I thought was interesting, is that almost all diseases begin in the gut. Ok, Hippocrates taught me that – but I forgot. And it makes sense to me – in college I gained the freshman 40 (yes 40) – but not from beer bongs and pokey sticks like I wished. I was in and out of hospitals trying to understand why my metabolism just stopped overnight and food hurt my stomach so bad. They never really figured out the cause, and when I removed high stress it went away, so I never thought anything of it again.  Turns out, years of inflammation have caused my body’s “fight or flight” hormones to supercharge like Keanu Reeves on speed in the movie Speed getting a speeding ticket.

The 3 main areas they are looking at for me is:

1. Food Insensitivity (Blood Panels) 
2. Hormonal Imbalances (28 Day and 1 Day Saliva Test)
3. Gut Flora Imbalance (The traumatizing poop test)
4. They also did some Urine work, but I’m not sure what that was for, so I’ll let you know when I learn

What I’m learning, which makes sense and is really cool, is that everything in your body relates to everything else.

Fixing or treating one problem or one area will never work long-term until you address the entire ecosystem.

It makes sense, right? Of course if I were to fix one area (say stop eating foods that I’m insensitive to) and my body doesn’t fix the hormonal issues I have, then my hormones are going to keep over-producing and triggering migraines to my brain. And visa versa, if I fix the hormone problem and eat Gluten (which I’m so saddened to know I’m insensitive to), my gut will flare up so much that it will trigger my midbrain to freak the f out, and we are on the first train to migraine city.

More to come on specifics / what I’m learning, but basic Functional Medicine knowledge is important to know the WHY behind they do what they do (because 90% of the time they sound like looneys).