First exams are here and I have no idea how all it鈥檚 going to go. All my classes are herbal and I鈥檓 still struggling with Chinese names. Even so, I decided to dig deeper into my functional medicine knowledge and had five days of brain and blood chemistry functional medicine training during the last two weekends.
It wasn鈥檛 easy, some travel was involved again. Sleep and study hours were sacrificed and now as I鈥檓 drinking a bulletproof coffee, studying for my two exams tonight, hoping my body won鈥檛 suffer too much with all the 鈥減ushing it to the limits鈥� I鈥檝e done the last couple of weeks.
Is it worth it? I feel so grateful I got the opportunity to attend all these seminars! They opened up my mind, clarified so many things, and made me understand many of the cases I鈥檝e seen in clinic — especially the ones that don鈥檛 see marked improvement with Oriental Medicine.
If you鈥檙e thinking I鈥檓 drifting from Oriental Medicine and that functional medicine has nothing to do with it, you are so wrong!
First, I鈥檓 not the first Oriental Medicine practitioner to combine it with functional medicine.
Second, we鈥檙e living in such a different world than thousands of years ago when Chinese Medicine developed. Our world is full of so many toxins and chemicals, our food is so much more altered than what it was back then, and our daily stress if through the roof! In addition, not all of the herbs used in Chinese Medicine have the same potency today, because of all of the environmental changes — not to talk about their processing, mold storage issues, and so on. We see so many patients not improving or having just a slight improvement with herbs and acupuncture; I believe we can do more to help them.
And third, legislation in Illinois has recently changed allowing us to use nutritional supplements as Oriental Medicine practitioners, so why not when using functional medicine, which I believe is the future of medicine?
These are important points to consider as health care evolves.
