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Educator and Physician Specializing in Celiac Disease
Dr. Tom O’Bryan is the founder of theDr.com and recently hosted the paradigm-shifting ‘The Gluten Summit – A Grain of Truth’, bringing together 29 of the world’s experts on Celiac Disease and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity.
Functional Medicine is defined as patient-centered, science-based health care that identifies and addresses the underlying triggers that cause disease and dysfunction. Its therapeutic goals are to reverse or prevent disease progression and enhance vitality. Functional Medicine is a field of health care that utilizes sophisticated assessment and testing to discover early indications of potential imbalances so that we may intervene early, improving one’s overall health.
The Functional Medicine health care approach recognizes that our bodies want to be well and that each individual patient is unique. What may work for some, may not work for others. Therefore, the therapeutic game plans used in Functional Medicine concentrate utilizing this premise while integrating knowledge from a wide range of academic and clinical disciplines. Its focus is to assess and intervene at root levels of metabolic imbalance – that is to identify the “cause” of an illness rather than focusing only on the illness. It aims to improve and optimize health at the psychological, biochemical or structural levels through therapies that restore, repair and rebuild that intrinsic balance. Its goal is to intervene before imbalances become later diseases utilizing intelligent and individualized combinations of treatments or protocols.
Most chronic health conditions involve metabolic imbalances in one or more of these six categories: Nutritional Imbalances, Immune/Inflammatory Imbalances, Intestinal Dysfunction, Impaired Detoxification, Oxidative Stress and Endocrine Imbalance. The treatments and therapies used in our office include only those in which good science and/or clinical experience have demonstrated results.
To be considered as consistent with the principles of Functional Medicine a treatment method must fulfill four criteria. They are:
Although this approach usually necessitates some laboratory testing and a potential range of therapies directed at the underlying causes, the most important therapy is the time and care taken with each patient at every visit. There are few shortcuts to this approach; we strongly feel it is time well spent and have hundreds of patients that have benefited from the Functional Medicine approach.
Dr. Tom O’Bryan is an internationally recognized speaker and workshop leader specializing in the complications of Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity and Celiac Disease as they occur inside and outside of the intestines. He recently hosted the paradigm-shifting ‘The Gluten Summit – A Grain of Truth’, bringing together 29 of the world’s experts on Celiac Disease and Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity.