Conventional medicine got me a diagnosis. Here is what actually helped.

A few years ago, a rheumatologist looked at my swollen hands, my nail changes, my MRI full of inflamed tendons, and offered me one plan: a drug they originally gave to cancer patients.

For life.....with nasty side effects.

He wasn’t wrong to offer it. 

He was doing exactly what he was trained to do: match my symptom pattern to a diagnosis, then treat the diagnosis.

That’s conventional medicine’s job, and it’s genuinely essential especially for diagnosis itself, and for anything urgent.

But it only asks one question: what condition is this?

It doesn’t really ask: why is this happening, and what else in the body is connected to it?

That second question is what sent me looking elsewhere.

What I found on the other side Functional medicine isn’t a replacement for conventional care. I have had my fair share of surgeries and bad injefections conventional care is necessary.

 What’s different is the lens.

A few of the actual differences, not in the abstract but in how it plays out:

Where it starts.

 Conventional medicine starts at the diagnosis.....what condition matches this symptom pattern. Functional medicine starts at the person, what’s happening across the whole system that’s producing this pattern in the first place.

How it reads bloods. 

Conventional medicine flags what’s outside the reference range. If it’s not red, it’s not actioned. 

Functional medicine looks at where a marker sits within the range, and how it’s moved over time. A result can be technically “normal” and still be telling you something, trending in a direction worth paying attention to, sitting at the edge of the range instead of the middle, or just not matching how you actually feel.

The goal.

Conventional medicine aims to manage or reduce the symptom. Functional medicine is looking for the root pattern driving it, even when that takes longer to uncover than a prescription would. 

The timeline.

Conventional medicine is often faster to a plan it’s built for urgency and acute care.

Functional medicine is slower to start, because it’s mapping the whole picture before it moves. That’s a real tradeoff, not a hidden downside. It’s why I don’t think one should replace the other. 

What actually changed things for me

Getting diagnosed didn’t fix anything on its own. What actually shifted my symptoms was going deeper testing for what wasn’t being tested, finding nasty gut bugs, SIBO and intestinal permability, micronutrient deficiencys and a jacked up nervous system ....nobody had gone looking for, and rebuilding from there.

then a 6 month intensive protocol, I stopped training crossfit style workouts the stress on my body had been too much. I was on well over $1000 of supplements a month, strict nutrition, no alcohol. I had horrible die off reactions from the antimicrobials I was on (this is where the "bad" bacteria essentially send a last hoorah before they die off, and systemic inflammation happens.

Anyways, getting to this point It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t easy.

I did'nt give up looking for answers.

But it was the first time someone was asking why, instead of just what. Felt familiar because that's the lens we through as an osteopath. 

Next time you’re told your bloods are “normal” and you still don’t feel right: normal range and “nothing’s wrong” aren’t automatically the same thing.

 That gap is worth asking about.

Digging into WHY is this happening. 

 If any of this brings up questions about your own results, or you’re just not sure which lens applies to what you’re going through reply to this email.

I read every one.

Talk soon,

 Georgia