Treat the Cause, Not Just the Symptoms | Michael Bell | TEDxMurrieta
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9tYu1THKwg Video ID: I9tYu1THKwg ============================================================ today I want to just ask start with a question and how many of you have had a situation where you've maybe seen traditional medical provider and you've had endless medications endless doctor visits and in the end you just are kind of left with vague answers and really no no solutions to your problem right and so what I'm here to to tell you today is there might actually be a better way and that's to treat the cause and not the symptom so if you look at any kind of uh you know Health Data or anything like that the Centers for Disease Control says that 60% of us suffer from a chronic disease in the United States 40% of us suffer from two chronic diseases now a chronic disease is going to be something like cancer heart disease something very serious like that and from 1990 to 2020 30% there's been a 30% increase in the incidents of diabetes in in the United States 42% of us are are overweight and one in four people in the United States die annually from a cardiovascular event so that to me is is fairly alarming but what we really want to consider is like why do we have these chronic diseases because if you think about all of the technology we have you all all of the research that that's been done all of the things that we have with prescription drugs and you know 66% of our our uh commercials on TV or our drugs is it thing you want to ask yourself is is our health really getting better because of traditional medicine or is it not and not here to bash traditional medicine there's always going to be a time and place for that but what we want to think about is why would we put it this way so if you have like let's think of symptoms for instance a symptom is the result and this is how I want you to think about a symptom is a result of something else going on in the body so for instance let's take high blood pressure most common thing you get blood pressure medication right but if you if you think about what you what the symptom is be C is causing that's very rarely ever asked by by a traditional Health practitioner and so in in in in in a traditional approach what we want to ask is why and so that's what you really want to ask yourself and that's part of my message today is anytime you have some sort of a Health crisis and you're being offered a prescription drug and maybe that it's you know sometimes it's essential sometimes it's not but what you really want to do is you want to dig a little bit deeper and ask yourself why so for blood so blood blood pressure for instance is it are you drinking too much alcohol are are you stressed out you know is it that you're not exercising enough there's all kinds of other root causes and that's what I mean by treat the C cause and not just the symptom and this is perhaps where traditional medicine maybe Falls a little bit short because whenever you have a symptom you present yourself to the doctor and the doctor says well here's this drug or here's that drug or you know that's and that's kind of basically where it ends and if you stop that treatment what happens the problem comes back right and so so that's why when when you see a practitioner that practices functional medicine functional nutrition or you see a natural path or or or or somebody who who looks at Health from a natural perspective they're always going to be asking you why why do you have that particular concern and so may maybe you show up to our office with a with a symptom but that symptom is going to be looked at in in a at a deeper level and so take for instance depression like like like we just talked about and to a functional practitioner that's going to be the gut for instance right we're going to look at the gut and and and and we're gonna we're going to think like so why why do we have depression right and a lot of times like I said that that can be the gut so also with functional medicine we have Laboratory Testing and so there's there's traditional Labs where you just I'm sure you've all or some of you have had Labs run right and it's you get this piece of paper and it's a bunch of numbers and it's all in the green but then what I hear a lot is my doctor said there's nothing wrong with me but of course there's somebody sitting in front of me they're like but I feel like something's wrong with me right I know there's something wrong and and that's where the difference with functional medicine let's call it that is where we'll look at those T those lab tests and we'll say well what would be the optimal for this patient and and that's where we can find a lot of issues that are what what's called subclinical and maybe it's not going to show up as oh there's a problem that is high or low cuz you probably we all seen those lab tests right where it just is high or low but there's there's a deeper understanding of blood chemistry and for you know thousands of years at at least for the last 150 years there's been you know natural medicine has always been there but since about the 1940s that's where we've seen the rise in synthetic drugs and lab derived drugs or what what's called big big farmer I guess you could call it that again not a political comment but just that's been the the focus of our our traditional healthc care system for probably the last you say 40 or 50 years but natural medicine never went away I mean naturop paaths have been treating patients this way for what over 150 years you know you the term alternative medicine came about in the 1950s because guess what patients eventually after about 20 years started to get sick and tired of being sick and tired right and how many people feel that way I mean you know it's just where where are we going to to start making that that decision that guess what I don't need to wait until there's a healthc care crisis that's going to show up in my life cuz that's when you get symptoms part of my message today is to be proactive and not reactionary to your health because guess what by the time you have a symptom it's already too late and just a quick story we had a a patient show up and she I'd met her at a at a it was I think it was a chamber event like three years ago and she'd heard me talk about about you know taking a functional approach to your health and she she came into the office office and she says you know I can't sleep uh I I've lost a bunch of weight I don't feel really well my doctor says my my lab tests are normal I don't really know what's wrong with me I feel like something's wrong but all my doctor wants to do is put me on like anti-depressants and so I said okay let's run some Labs talk to her a little bit and uh she she mentioned something about fasting and like she'd been intermittent fasting for like three years and so she's essentially kind of starving herself when she shouldn't have been and so I said just try this just and then let let me know how this goes in two two weeks when we meet up and I had her just eat a cup of rice at night or I said e eat eat a cup of rice or or I know eat a cup of berries or something like that she was deathly afraid of carbohydrates and she calls four days later wants to talk to me I'm like oh gez what's going on what did I do and she was crying on the phone right and the reason she was crying was because she' slept for the first time in 3 years and all I had done is listen to her and and pick out some things that just uncover a few layers of her life it wasn't that I was so great it was was just like I what I heard from her is she was missing a key component that was she needed to eat carbohydrates all I had to do is take it before bed and she started to sleep right and so because of her lifestyle though we she we ran some labs and we found that she had uh you know hypoglycemia she was um anemic and I think maybe she might have had like uh like a like actually actually had a thyroid issue so it took about 18 months to you know get this under control for her with nutrition diet hormone balancing and things things that that that natural practitioners do when we see patients uh so she you know she she's been a patient for like 3 years now but the reason I tell that story is because her friend came with her and her friend just I didn't know this lady she just kind of came in and sat down in the room and by the time the consultation was over this lady stood up when I was like you know kind of shaking hands with with the patient and she she grabbed my hand and I was kind of taken by surprise by this and I was like well she she's looking me in the eye and she goes I just want to thank you you because you saved my my friend's life and I was like wow okay cool that's so awesome she's like literally I don't know what she would have done without you not saying that from the standpoint that I'm so great but this lady's life was changed because I took the time to listen and we we got her the right care that she needed and she got her life back but her friends also felt like they were going to lose her friend and she literally said I we thought her this lady was going to she was going to die right and so that's why I'm so passionate about functional medicine that's why I talk about this all the time and you know this is what I do you know I think I was getting miked up you said I was a chiropractor right so I started as a chiropractor but this you know becoming board certified in functional medicine was born out of the fact that there was so many questions with patients who had back pain and arthritis and all these different issues I just had to start learning these stuffs because this stuff because patients were wanting to know these things and and I think that really what what the public is looking for now in my opinion is natural approaches they they don't want coverups they don't want quick fixes they want long-term Solutions and and that's also my message today is that you know the power that made the body heals the body and I always want you to remember that and healing in the 21st century is is really going to be where patients take a functional approach to their health where they take a proactive approach you want to be proactive and not reactive and on on a bigger scale the the vision is that not only would Society be healthier but think about the burden of health care costs in the United States how much do we spend on health care how much of it is really actually effective but if we could actually get the chronic disease to go down to get the incidence of Chron chronic disease to go away then the economic and the societal B burdens would drastically be reduced for for all of us now there's always going to be a time and a place for traditional medicine traditional medicine is not going to go away but when you do have those issues I want you to also think of what's when can I take a functional approach when when would this be a good idea for me and if we blend those two together we actually can see our health improve drastically so thank you very much