Wonderful Kale

I have been under the weather for the past week with a frustrating summertime cold.  All that my throat wanted was warm liquids, but it was incredibly hot and humid the first half of the week, so I refrained from making soup.  Well, last night the front moved through and the humidity broke.  Today I decided to muster up the energy to make some soup.  Based on the ingredients, this would typically be considered a winter soup, but I had a fridge full of kale waiting for a recipe.  I found a good one from the Harvest Eating Cookbook by Keith Snow.

Kale and Potato Soup

3 Tbs extra-virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
Kosher salt, to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
½ cup sliced onions
1 quart chicken broth
3 russet potatoes, peeled and diced
6 oz chorizo, cooked
5 cups fresh kale, chopped
3 cups water

 

1.       Heat oil in large soup pot.  Add onion and garlic and sauté for 5 min.
2.      Season with salt and pepper.
3.      Add the chicken broth and potatoes.  Cook for 25 min.
4.      Mash 2 of the potatoes, then add 3 cups water.  Add the cooked chorizo, diced potato and kale.  Cook for 15 minutes.
5.      Enjoy!

 

Kale is a superfood.  Its dark green leaves are full of anti-oxidants, magnesium and calcium.  I thought that the soup was wonderful.  Enjoy it in sickness or in health!

 

What Can Functional Medicine Do For Me?

I am often asked to explain what Functional Medicine is and why it is so different from conventional American medicine.  There is so much I want to tell you about this amazing discipline and how it can help transform your life.

Functional Medicine is a roadmap for health.  If I only look at a patient’s current symptoms, then it is often very difficult to know how to best help them.  What I do instead, is look at the whole map.  I need to see where they came from and which roads they took to get to their current state.  Functional Medicine is often called “upstream” medicine.  It is critical to understand the lifestyle, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to someone’s current condition. The goal is to discover the root causes of the current symptoms. This is a place where conventional medicine falls very short.  Conventional medicine focuses on how to manage or mask current symptoms, usually with pharmaceuticals, without concern for what driving factors led to the disease in the first place.  This creates a big problem, because with this approach the disease process is not changed.  Different patients can end up with similar symptoms that come from different causes.  Conventional medicine tries to apply the same protocols and drugs to all of these symptoms, rather than individualize the approach to target the actual cause.

Functional Medicine recognizes an often forgotten fact:  our bodies were designed to be healthy.  Over the past few decades, Americans have gotten so used to being sick that many just accept that they don’t feel well.  I have had so many patients say things like, “Well, I am forty now, so I figured it was normal to start having problems.”  With the average life expectancy close to 80 should people really resign half of their life to not feeling well?  Health should be the norm, rather than a rarity.

Functional medicine focuses on helping the body regain balance to promote health and vitality.  By really listening to the patient’s story, I am able to piece together a restoration plan that often involves extra attention to nutrition and movement. The plan can also utilize integrative, preventative, lifestyle, and even conventional treatments.  Developing a therapeutic relationship with the patient is critical in order to give them new tools and help motivate them on their path to wellness.  Practicing this way allows me to offer patients the best of all worlds for optimal results.

Functional medicine takes time, care, and patience.  I spend between 60 and 90 minutes with all of my new patients in order to have enough time to really listen to a patient’s story and then begin the detective work to uncover their path back to health.  The rapid pace of conventional medicine does not allow for this.  Conventional medicine is great for managing medical and surgical emergencies, acute infections, and trauma.  But the majority of illness today is due to chronic diseases such as diabetes, autoimmune diseases, fatigue, heart disease, digestive problems, etc.  The Functional Medicine roadmap allows me to help patients improve, and often reverse, chronic diseases by addressing the inter-related biological networks that are not limited to just one organ system.  Addressing the entire person is the key to helping a patient regain health.
Functional Medicine is 21^st Century medicine.  This is how American healthcare can be transformed.  Imagine the money that can be saved, the energy that can be felt, and the life that can be enjoyed by embracing a personalized approach to health.  There is hope.  Come and find out what my practice can do for you.