i have already stated that physicians dont need to spend another 4 years each studying nutrition and exercise science because there are other health care providers that fill those roles. MANY physicians understand that diet and exercise play a massive role in health, and will subsequently refer out to experts in those fields. if your physicians aren't aware of these relations maybe they werent held to normal medical training standards. its funny that you mention chiropractors specifically because chiropractic therapy has little to no scientific validity. there is a reason alternative medicine is called what it is, because rigorous attempts to prove efficacy have not been successful. alternative medicine is based on beliefs, not evidence. it would just be called medicine if there were evidence for efficacy. obviously weight loss is possible and you can improve hypertension and biochemistry of the blood, which is why i said a LOT of chronic disease has no cure, not all. you dont need to have a well thought out, organized case against functional medicine because anything that involves chiropractic therapy, homeopathy, and alternative medicine in general is bunk. sure they may be good at suggesting diet plans and maybe they know how to work out. so far you're showing me a bunch of physicians who want to train to be dietitians and personal trainers

This post was edited by cloudkicker on Oct 24 2016 05:08pm

Keep in mind a lot of that weight loss was water weight. Anything works for weight loss if it means you're in a calorie deficit. I'm curious what the functional practitioner did for your concussion. The plan of care for recovery after the initial injury is simply to eliminate strenuous activity and avoid stimulus like video games, homework, etc.

Functional medicine doesn't encompass chiropractic, it is just distantly related to it because it is considered alternative medicine. The real strength of functional medicine is its ability to treat various chronic diseases in a systematic way that nobody else really does right now. If you have type II diabetes or thyroid issues, just for example, a functional medicine practitioner can be a lifesaver. I would like to see their results with cancer patients. Right now the top few cancer clinics in NA seem to be in Mexico of all places. Some of them are using what looks like naturopathic treatments, which is why I wonder if functional medicine practitioners are getting similar results (it's one area I don't have a ton of info about yet). The fact remains that functional medicine is producing outstanding health outcomes like nobody else is (within their scope of practice) and this is why I am adamant about their legitimacy as a part of "medicine". This is why I think their referral chain may open very widely in the future.



There was some water loss, but the diet itself was low-calorie (without being ridiculously restrictive). It was essentially a dive into ketosis. The bigger point is that it works. So claims that it doesn't work are just plain wrong. I mean, for people who don't comply with very basic instructions, I guess it wouldn't work. You can't always control compliance.

On the concussion: my concussion was considered life-threatening. I did not have a big brain bleed (no surgery required) so that was the good news, but the metabolism of my brain was absolutely rocked. To give you a picture of how bad it was, there's a 4 hour window where I remember nothing. I don't remember being in an ambulance. I had been asking the hospital workers the same questions repeatedly. My short-term memory was affected/screwed until interventions I'll mention below were applied. I was off-balance, I couldn't follow speech beyond a short sentence. My speech was gibberish. I wouldn't read properly I had hallucinations. I had basically every concussion symptom--in a bad way. Stuff lie wanting to vomit in the presence of bright light. Heck, I still have some issues with car headlights at night. Let's skip ahead to the functional medicine practitioner. I was told to take resveratrol, curcumin, and fish oil: a complex to work against inflammation in the brain. I was also told to avoid bright lights--something my attending physician somehow neglected to mention. In fact, at the hospital, the lights were a blazin', as one might expect (just giving me a mask or a towel would've been really helpful). I was told to see an osteopath. I also had a hematoma on my lower back, as well as a hip injury. The hospital did nothing to address them, except to say that the MRI showed no break. Apparently, it was the worst hip/lower back bruising they'd ever seen without any clear fracture. My GP checked me out and just told me to avoid playing basketball for one month.

However, my "alternative" medicine practitioners were very clear that I should not play (basketball) for the next year, in case of a repeat injury that could kill me. A year later, my neurologist concurrent with that advice, not the original advice of my physician. The osteopath instantly cleared me of a really horrible headache with some spinal manipulation. It would be considered an "adjustment". Due to his own concussion history in hockey, he was really well-informed about concussions and he was able to provide me with some neurological testing to help me set some benchmarks -- something my physician had no interest in doing. Moreover, he also recommended some programs I could use to enable my brain to re-pattern some "normal" activity. Another useful intervention from functional medicine came from this guy here (adding video because it's interesting in its own right):



He was able to assess just how bad the functional damage was to my brain. It was pretty bad, but he also explained how I could get back to normal or just about normal, and his information was almost instantly helpful. Whereas my GP basically told me that my short-term memory was probably f*cked forever, other practitioners were quickly resolving my problems. My attending physician and GP both missed an injury to my occipital lobe, something that was discovered and quickly addressed by an "alternative" medicine practitioner. The fix was somewhat simple, and it took a couple of weeks. Technically not all the damage was resolved within a couple of weeks, but the functional component (i.e., vision) was fixed that way.

Getting back to my osteopath and chiropractor: they were able to help me with stiffness and pain in the spine and neck. Later, after I got back to playing basketball--and after a lot of driving on a vacation--I managed to slip a disc. Whereas my physician figured I should wait it out and queue for surgery in case it was a busted bursa or something worse (interestingly enough eh was not curious about the type of pain I was experiencing, which is a key marker for the type of injury sustained), my chiropractor put it back in place, thereby enabling me to stop wall-crawling around the house. I learned how to un-stick my IT band (which unfortunately can't be stretched out). My osteo and chiro have been able to put my thumb back in place, fix a previously recurring rib injury, address a long time foot problem related to bone and myofascia (albeit painfully, yet they fixed it). And so on. The point is that chiropractors and osteopaths are practicing medicine. In many cases, given my injury-prone, risk-taking nature, they were able to quickly fix issues that had previously plagued me and which physicians had always told me were completely unresolvable, except for the aid of sweet Father Time and some painkillers.

Have I just been unlucky with the physicians I've seen over the years? Have I been lucky with the alternative medicine practitioners I have gotten help from? There are physicians who feel helpless to address problems likes the ones I have faced, so they're constantly caught up in a big referral engine. Sometimes you get a useful answer and you get the right treatment. Sometimes you don't. And when you don't, as I have experienced many times, real medical problems can be fixed reverses, whatever, by so-called alternative medicine practitioners. Some are quacks, I'll grant that. But I haven't been treated by one yet. I have only seen success so far.

I don't like dismissive claims about functional medicine or chiropractors in general just because it is quite clear to me--beliefs aside--that real medicine is being done by them with quantifiable and qualitative results. The business and the arrogance of "medicine" is a shame. Why can't people who help people just work together and solve more medical problems? Despite my experiences (I have more to describe if need be) with failures of "medicine", I am not saying that MDs are quacks. I understand math and science. For the record, during my undergraduate studies, I was asked to teach a course to medical students at Queen's University. I have won two international math competitions. I have taught logic. I have studied theoretical physics, right down to the painful nuances of topology. I contributed a definition of abstract objects (like numbers) that has been used by physicists. Basically, I was a math prodigy from early childhood. So one would think I'd turn out to be an arrogant prick who thinks alternative medicine is all quackery, right? No. Instead, I got curious about it, asked some questions, learned some stuff, and came to see that there are plenty of working forms of alternative medicine.

I'm happy to accept that all alternative medicine practitioners have limitations in their understanding and scope of practice, but it's not much different than the limitations and scope of practice of MDs, whether they are specialists or not. This is why the case for functional medicine is strong. They can be a really helpful part of a referral engine. There are MDs who already get that. But there are a lot of MDs who don't, and that's what I find painful. Just get curious. An MD doesn't need to convert to functional medicine (but some do and I think that's great) or learn everything about it, but just learning enough about how it affects real people should be enough to get the ball rolling. My own GP happens to be a friend, and he has come around to a point where he is getting really curious about my new business (which includes some functional medicine--no, I'm not the fm practitioner), even offering me an office space in his own practice (we're creating our own space elsewhere). I have been critical of him above not to suggest that he is a bad doctor, but rather to suggest that, in my experience, he's a pretty typical physician. There are just a lot of things he doesn't know. He's really good at what he does know. He is open about what he doesn't know and my is receptive to feedback and criticism because he realizes it can make him better at what he does.

@ cloudkicker: you misread me again. It's not that functional medicine is just about diet and personal training. Most only make vague recommendations for exercise, or they just put an expert on staff for that stuff. They refer out diet to some extent, too. It depends on the practice. Diet is definitely under the umbrella, but it's nothing like the stuff dieticians are into. It's functional medicine, and while the scope of practice can be wide depending on available exercise, chronic disease is probably the major focus. I'm pretty sure that functional medicine practitioners usually avoid dieticians, at least in Canada. Dieticians here are often the closest thing we have to quacks. Whereas functional medicine practitioners understand cell biology, the bodies systems, along with the causes and essentially the treatment of chronic illness. Methylation and mitochrondrial health are sometimes emphasized. The approach is often to fix the body at the cellular level first, and thereby affect the organ, system, or body. The approach is generally systematic, one way or the other.

You will lose weight by going into ketosis but the cause of the weight loss is the calorie deficit. You can lose weight just as easily in a normal non carb restrictive diet. I don't know the point of consuming less than 50 grams of carbs per day to maintain ketosis (or is it less than 50? I forget.) So you'll have to explain that to me.

Your pcp did give you bad advice for the concussion if he really just said to avoid sports for a month without mentioning other things to avoid or wanting you to come back before he cleared you. The sympoms you described are pretty regular symptoms for a concussion. TBIs are actually the #1 cause of death in children and young adults so your alternative medical provider gave better advice, although a year might be too long. You're supposed to just be reassessed after a concussion and once you're asymptomatic you're cleared to return to normal activity. Did they do a CAT scan or do a Glosgow Coma scale test at the hospital? You said this happened during a sport. So did you ever do an ImPACT test? That shows a baseline if was taken before an injury and then they can determine when you recovered from a concussion based on the results from periodic testing. Also yes early on in the recovery of a concussion you need to avoid things like tv, video games and computer work. Strenuous activity also needs to be avoided until cleared to return by a PCP. I'm indifferent towards chiropractors for the most part except a lot of them in my exerpeicne are antivaxxers which is a joke.

This post was edited by dark-soul on Oct 25 2016 03:22pm

Sounds more like an osteopathic approach. But don't get me wrong, docs should always advise about lifestyle modifications, but everybody's fat as fuck especially when I was doing my cardiology rotations, complaining about this and that, people don't want to hear about dietary changes, people don't want to hear about decreasing salt/sugar intake, they all want a quick fix to their varicose veins and heart problems, all the patients were dismissive about changing their diet.

The only way nutrition affects / causes diseases is insulin resistance (from sugar), hypertension (from salt), and some GI disturbances from people with allergies.

Endocrinologists (allopathic) are also very detailed, I don't know why you'd think one is better than the other.

Doctors spend 4-5 years of med school understanding the pathophysiology of diseases.

At the end of the day no person will go to a quack for their condition, they will only go to them to receive reassurance that most doctors can't fit in a 15 minute timeframe that they have to see patients.

e: the only reason these alternative medicine people have made such a come up is because of this new non-gmo no-gluten health bs trend, it's a business, and they're smart at exploiting that to make $$$.

But whatever works best for you, every human is different!

This post was edited by ViviLOL on Oct 25 2016 04:08pm

The year off was recommended only due to the severity of the injury. It's almost like it was giving me enough time to bump my head in a minor way before getting back on the court. To be honest I returned to play once I recovered enough from the spine/hip injury to jog around. It was an early return against the advice I was given but I felt that functional movements would help me recover sooner. I could've done sport-related movements instead of playing basketball, but I figured I'd risk it. Stupid idea? Probably. But I haven't smashed my head badly since the injury. I did take an elbow to the nose that made me dizzy within a couple months of my return, but in retrospect it was a hard shot to the side of the nose that couldn't made anyone dizzy.

The anti-vaccination movement is a neutral topic to me because I have read studies that point in various directions, and just about all of them have been sub-par from the scientific point-of-view (despite which "side" it's coming from). Thing is, even if vaccinations are in some or even many cases harmful, the alternative is a proliferation of preventable disease. I'm getting at least some anti-vaxxers would chill out a bit if the secondary ingredients of vaccinations were changed. It's that little bit of mercury that sets off a lot of fires.



It's not that I think functional medicine practitioners are better than endocrinologists. It's just that they bring a different and helpful approach which I think is still underappreciated. The popularity of alternative medicine has been precipitated by anti-gluten proponents, but the business of functional medicine doesn't seek to exploit this (here I am speaking about the practitioners I know, I am sure there are indeed some bad eggs).

A lot of patients feel driven away from MDs because they (they = the patients, not the MDs) aren't just fat and lazy, but they actually want information and help. In many cases, MDs are ill-prepared to help "willing" patients, whereas functional medicine practitioners sometimes go as far as selecting only willing patients. Sachin Patel is again a good example. He does not want to spend time on lost causes, because his office is having trouble keeping up with the number of people who want his help (due to his high rate of success with resolving chronic illness--some of the cases he takes on are complicated, not just run of the mill stuff). So patients actually need to apply for his services.

This is why I suggest that there is a legitimate niche for functional medicine. It works and it does stuff that nobody else can do. Functional medicine practitioners--at least the ones I know--are anything but quacks. There are quacks in every field of medicine if by 'quack' we include incompetent practitioners. Kind of a funny story, but my former (now retired) GP would ask his medical students to provide full examinations of actor patients, including a brief intake interview with the patient. One of the actors had a glass eye and would make one of his key complaints trouble with his vision. As it turns out, he was used often over several years, and the vast majority of medical students missed the glass eye. I was once in the ER due to my own quackery (had a finger smashed by a metal door), and the resident gave me an anesthetic; trouble is, it went the wrong way (went down my hand, not toward the crushed fingertip). So he starts cutting off part of my nail but manages to dig into nerve tissue. He began vaguely stitching the affected area until an ER doc walks by and sees the grotesque little scene. He excused himself and the resident and proceeded to tear him a new one. The ER doc returned and applied a funky glue to the area and manually pushed the nail bed into position to allow for this. I knew a surgeon who was in charge of a group of residents when I was at Queen's University. He was a basketball player --good hands, thank goodness -- and he would sometimes need to field calls during or between pick-up games. One time I overheard him yelling because an emergency surgery was being done on a leg -- but he managed to figure out that it was the wrong leg! It's like of like when you call up IT because the computer isn't working, you go throw all manner of possibilities, and eventually just notice that the cord is unplugged. There are quacks in every discipline

It's too easy to discredit something unfamiliar just because it is vaguely similar to other activities which are, in some part, themselves quackery. Saying that a functional medicine practitioner is like a dietician is just as accurate as saying that an MD is like a witchdoctor. There will always be a few dieticians and witchdoctors practicing the wrong profession, yet credible practitioners exist. I certainly haven't lost my faith in MDs despite my horrifying experiences. I haven't listed all of my terrible experience, and I believe that I have been a combination of unlucky and injury-prone, which really just compounds the problem by making me more statistically likely to run into some quacks.

What works best for me is what is effective. I sure as heck won't be asking a chiropractor to perform surgery on me, and I won't be asking my GP to fix my next slipped disc. Both of which I would love to avoid forever, of course

This post was edited by RewtheBrave on Oct 25 2016 04:58pm