Are you struggling with Health Problems?
Are you struggling with health problems and the doctors don’t have an answer for you?
With the dramatic increase in chronic disease patients are left with unanswered questions of what is my diagnosis, how did I get this, and do I really have to stay on medication for the rest of my life.
This scenario is all too clear with people suffering with autoimmune diseases.
Did you know that all the diagnostic testing for autoimmune diseases is not specific. That is there is no one test that tells you what autoimmune disease you have. The diagnosis is made primarily by physical examination and or x-rays and the doctors’ expertise. A good example of this is a patient that obviously has rheumatoid arthritis by physical examination and x-rays with blood tests that are negative rheumatoid arthritis.
Lab test can be broken down into 2 categories. Tests for inflammation and tests for antibodies. The body can produce antibodies that attack specific tissues in our body.
Common test for inflammation are: C-reactive protein (CRP) and sedimentation rate.
The common antibody tests are: rheumatoid factor, Cyclic Citrullinated Peptide Antibody (CCP), DNA antibody, Anti-Nuclear Antibody (ANA). There are also more specific antibodies for different types of autoimmune diseases such as Sjogren’s disease. The ironic thing is that none of these tests are specific for any type of autoimmune disease. You can say they’re suggestive. These tests must be analyzed with physical examination and possibly x-rays/CAT scans/MRIs.
To answer the question how they get this disease, traditional medicine has no answer. However there is growing research and is now pretty well understood now how we get autoimmune diseases.
I will explain this in a little more detail on the next email.
In the functional medical practice we may use the same tests that a rheumatologist use such as the ones listed above. In functional medicine practice we want to know how you got the autoimmune disease and treat the cause. This is in opposition to treating the effect which is just blocking the symptoms with pharmaceuticals. By treating the cause you can decrease the impact or eliminate the autoimmune disease.
With this in mind we evaluate what may look like distant functions of the body in relation to the autoimmune disease. We investigate the gut function, the detoxification process of the body, evaluating the good bacteria in the gut, maintaining a rich micronutrient and antioxidant reserve, evaluate the energy producing system, reducing stress, and reducing and eliminating inflammatory triggers.
This approach is necessary since that autoimmune diseases do not occur just by chance.
If you want to learn more about unanswered health problems, continue to read my emails and pass them along to friends that may have unanswered questions to health problems.
If you go to my website I have of section on all my past emails. There is a search box for different types of health problems. www.robertromanelli.com.
One of the most important things I’ve learned in practicing functional medicine is the stress and fear patients have when they know this something wrong and all the doctors are telling them that their fine.
