Synthesis Health Lab: If Chinese Medicine and Functional Medicine had a Love Child

Many people are realizing that while Industrial Medicine excels at emergency care, it's not up to the task of managing, let alone reversing complex chronic illness. These are things like autoimmunity, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, chronic infections and many functional mood and digestive orders.

And of course in recent years it's taken a nose dive in respecting patient preferences and bodily autonomy. Medicine without ethics isn't medicine.

So what are you to do? Besides endlessly search the internet and drive yourself crazy . . .

Chinese Medicine has so much to offer here. But we actually need to untangle this term a bit, as it isn't really one thing. What most licensed practitioners are trained in is a style of Chinese Medicine developed in the 1970's that was an abrupt departure from the medicine practiced before then.

And if you, your life, your symptoms, your body resemble a typical middle aged office-worker in Beijing in 1972, then this approach might bear fruit for you.

No? Me neither. So what we really need is an approach that benefits from the millennia of systematically acquired knowledge that understands how to treat you as a complex, natural system, that's applicable to modern, Industrial lifestyles, diets and diseases.

I've been fortunate enough to train with some of the brightest minds in this area who have collectively treated hundreds of thousands of patients. I can now help patients with very gnarly presentations, sometimes shockingly easily, whereas with my previous tools and approaches it would have been an uncertain, convoluted mess, if I'm being totally honest. And this with the benefit of over a decade of practice, two clinical MScs (one in Chinese Medicine and one in Functional Medicine) and countless other trainings.

Which brings me to Functional Medicine. Ahhhh, Functional Medicine. So much promise. So many aspects that improve on the barbarism of Industrial Medicine Chronic Sick care. And yet . . . so young, so distracted by the new and flashy, and so lacking in basic principles of how the body works.

The short-comings of Functional Medicine are vast and I won't go into all of them here. But we also don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which is why I still use some of the tools I've learned along the way.

One major issue is lack of track record with using new, often invalidated tests. I've been running and interpreting labs in my practice for over a decade and I've seen lab markers come and go. I've seen the danger of honing in on a certain body system without the wisdom of knowing what lies beneath it.

Not to mention that when you find 26 markers out of range, you can't just help but use a supplement to "fix" each of them . . .

For example, it's common to run a hormone test. But how can you possibly interpret it separately from what the mitochondria are doing? That's what the hormones are made. Or what the brain is doing for the matter? Your low hormones may be perfectly appropriate for what your brain has decided is currently in your best interest. Do you really think it's wise or "root cause" for a practitioner to top up your low levels without really understanding how it all fits together?

This is why I had to create Synthesis Health Lab. Based on the science of how natural systems actually work, rather than getting thousands of dollars of lab testing to "correct" with bags and bags of supplements. Or a narrow Chinese Medicine approach that seeks to identify you as a unique snowflake with your own unique patterns of disharmony, failing to recognize the context that you live in.

The people in my group, on average, have had their health issues for over two decades. And within weeks and months, they notice massive changes in their health.

Without bags of supplements. Without thousands of dollars of labs.

Because if you're reading this, I already know a lot about you. You're literate. You have a computer. You speak English. If we zoom out, I already know a bit out your health.

I can start to ask questions to narrow it down from there and help you start to make some immediate progress. The ways in which you're truly different will bubble to the surface and then we can address them.

When navigating healing from complex chronic illness, you need a plan. And you need a guide. And you need the support of a group cheering you on.

This is Synthesis Health Lab. Read to stop running around in circles? Apply to a be a free Guest in our group and see how you can start making real progress towards healing now.