ABSTRACT
Reduced resilience and capacity to deal with daily stresses were the key drivers that led me on my journey to become a functional medicine health practitioner using holistic whole-body approaches to health. Our body sends us daily information about our well-being. It is our job to listen to the whispers and to help nurture the body and mind to achieve optimal health. In the conventional medical model, providers present their help in the form of medication and/or surgery with their inherent adverse side effects and, covertly, the loss of self (body) control. As a senior biomedical scientist, developing therapeutics to treat disease was the goal of my research. However, I became increasingly disenchanted with this medical model because it ignored the learnings from centuries-old traditional therapies, and it failed to recognise the amazing ability of the body to self-heal. My research into natural Indigenous therapies planted the seeds that started my journey towards understanding whole-body systematic healing and the Functional Medicine Model of identifying and addressing the early drivers of disease. This model looks at both inner and outer body systems and their interactions with the environment to understand the causes of ill health and the amazing potential of the body to self-heal when provided with the nutritional, emotional, and environmental support that it needs.
