Here is Matt with another video for the blog of functional medicine accelerate. In this video, I want to share a few thoughts with you that I have been actually thinking about while being on holiday in Italy. The topic of this short presentation is "high tech" vs. "high touch" medicine.
There is an information war going on right now in medicine and I decided to take a stand!
Why is this topic so important to me? Well, basically, it is important to me because when I look at our society, I'm from Germany, I see that the dominant narrative concerning medicine is coming from the high tech environment. And right now it has gone so far that actually the German Medical Association is basically on a crusade to destroy the German Heilpraktiker Movement. Even some politicians are getting behind that call, and I find that deeply disturbing.
Why ist that? Because I think that our high tech based medicine, which is very expensive, personell intensive, does not really deliver and cater to all the needs that patients actually have, and I think COVID-19 really showed us that very, very brutally. So this was why this topic is so important to me. High tech medicine is not the be all and end all. There are other paths too. And mutual respect, freedom of choice, are freedom of speech are key aspects of our free western societies.
And we know that as functional medicine practitioners, we know that our path has a lot to offer. It is actually "high tech" and "high touch". It is high tech because it uses cutting edge diagnostics, it uses genetics analysis, nutrigenomics and some other of the most advanced ways of testing for hormones, and for intracellular health.
And at the same time it's high touch because it uses the gift of "food as medicine". And we all know that nature is the best healer of all.
Is expensive high tech medicine the solution to all of human suffering? I don't believe so...
Here's the point: high tech is expensive, it can be abused, and it promises a golden bullet at times. And what does that do? Well, basically, when it's expensive, it costs our state a lot of money to actually pay for delivering care that often goes right into chronic disease management, not care if I might say, and which is the most expensive type of care too.
As well, high tech medicine can be abused. We know that, for example, if clinics and hospitals need more profit, they might, you know, schedule an operation but maybe it's not even needed. Maybe person doesn't need a hip replacement, but maybe the person just needs a bit of yoga, more movement, and some weight loss.
And of course there is the desire to find the golden bullet like the one pharmaceutical that can totally beat cancer. But we all know that's not going to happen anytime soon. So we know this is not going to happen because, that's not how health works.
Instead I believe "High Tech" and "High Touch" Medicine delivered together is the solution! Science and nature married up to create healing not just customers...
Being of service to human beings to get well again and to bring them back to themselves is a big gift.
Human beings that are deeply in touch with themselves know their needs and respect the needs of others.
What's the fourth point? Basically, I think when human beings are in touch with themselves, they truly know their needs. And I think we have a chronic disease epidemic in our society is because people are not in touch with their needs anymore.
Why? Because they're so distracted with the media, with social media, with the internet, through marketing firing at them, through fairy tales, being dispensed in the movies and so on. People are far far removed from themselves, especially their bodies, and when you are removed from the needs of your body from the feeling side of it, then of course you cannot attend to them. And you will be in a state of learned helplessness.
The underlying reason for the rising chronic disease epidemic is because human beings are out of touch with their body and nature itself!
This really is the question: is chronic diseases a result of human beings just being severely out of touch? And I think it is like that to be honest. Looking at it from my own perspective with my own experience of having gone through Hashimoto's I think my autoimmune disease was a result of severely having been out of touch of myself and there were some very specific events in my life that contributed to that.
And a big journey for me was to get back in touch with nature, really taste my food, to cook my own food, to truly nurture myself, and to use science to do that at the same time. I deeply appreciate the great breakthroughs that we made about gut health in the last decade. And we need both: we need intelligence to get healthier coming from our intellect, and we need our connection to the body to get healthier. If our healing is mainly based on the head, it's not going work.
Functional medicine can deliver "high tech" and "high touch" in a wonderful way to tackle big problems in our society
And this is why I'm such an advocate for functional medicine because it is "high tech" and it is "high touch" and because of that, it's very promising to being able to tackle a lot of the challenges that we have in society.
Nature, food, and community is a truly potent medicine to stop chronic disease in its tracks!
And this is my deep conviction: I think food, nature, community, and life itself, are the best medicine to overcome disconnect.
What do I mean by "life itself is the best medicine"? So, if we end up in life in a state of illness and unhappiness or in a more advanced state of chronic illness, there is actually a lesson in it I believe.
The body itself is so incredibly intelligent, it will teach us exactly what we need to know, and and what life changes we'd actually need to get into. Burnout as an example is the final dead end in which the body sets clear boundaries: "The direction you are heading in your life is really not for you! You need to slow down, reassess and do some deep soul searching."
Lifestyle change will ultimately lead to the end result that will live a better life. And you know, living a good life is a is the best medicine to get happy and to be fulfilled on the long term.
So this is my advice to you: functional medicine is best delivered by living example. So what's the story you need to tell others in your life, and what is the life that you need to live that would really inspire human beings to follow your lead as a practitioner? Leading by example is the core activity of being a mentor and a guide. There needs to be integrity.
"Be the change that you'd like to see in the world" and amplify this very life example of yours via digital...
This is really the gift that I want to give to you: to inspire you to find your story and inspiration to share that lifestyle with others with integrity over social media, via interviews on podcasts, via your web content to actually make an impact and bring functional medicine more into the world because we really need it badly.
