Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
This podcast is for you if you are struggling with symptoms of IBS and IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a holistic, whole-person approach.
Resolve IBS and IBD Naturally
Episode 48: Why Your Doctor Couldn't Find What a Functional Practitioner Can
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Functional Diagnostic Nutrition offers a comprehensive approach to tackling IBS and IBD symptoms by identifying physiological root factors through specialized testing and holistic interventions. This episode explores the differences between conventional nutrition approaches and functional medicine methodologies, highlighting why insurance typically doesn't cover this type of work and how the DRESS method helps restore metabolic balance.
• Different training backgrounds between registered dietitians and functionally trained nutrition practitioners
• How conventional medicine connects to industry interests including big agriculture, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance networks
• The concept of "metabolic chaos" as a way to understand escalating, complex symptoms
• Using the DRESS method (Diet, Rest, Exercise, Stress reduction, Supplementation) to address root causes
• Why functional testing often reveals answers conventional medicine misses
• How innate intelligence (similar to qi or prana) governs our body's complex operating system
• The validation clients experience when seeing direct correlations between test results and symptoms
If you are ready to say yes to self-empowerment and to starting the journey to real improvement in your gut health, click the link to grab my free e-guide.
Link to a free 30 minute Gut Check Call
Disclaimer: None of the content discussed is meant to be taken as medical advice. All information presented is for educational purposes only and listeners and viewers assume all responsibility around implementing any changes to their health and medical regimen.
Introduction to Functional Diagnostic Nutrition
Speaker 1Welcome to Resolve IBS and IBD. Naturally, I'm Courtney Cowie, a nutrition therapy and functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner. If you are struggling with the symptoms of IBS or IBD and want to get to the root cause of your symptoms so you can take back your health through a whole person approach, this podcast is for you. Just a disclaimer that the information I'm presenting in this podcast is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice. You should always consult a qualified practitioner before making any changes to your health or medical regimen. That being said, let's get on with the show. So today I want to talk a little bit about the concept of functional diagnostic nutrition, and actually this is one of the two certifications that I hold and I feel like this is actually very timely because I've done a lot of real postings on those short one minute video postings on social media this week. Speaking a bit to topics like why the type of work I do, and pretty much every other functional medicine practitioner out there does, is, nine times out of 10, not covered by insurance, and I know that I've touched on this topic in the past, but I will just kind of circle back to that and speak on that a bit again today.
Speaker 1And then secondly, just starting to dive into the distinction between a dietitian, a registered dietitian and someone who is functionally trained in nutrition. So you know, in the field of nutrition and functional medicine there's a lot of just collective terms like nutritionist right, and even in the general public people will speak of seeing a nutritionist or sometimes even on gut check calls they will say, oh, I've been to a nutritionist and to me it's very important to understand what the exact training and background of that particular professional was, because there is a wide range of trainings and backgrounds and methodologies within nutrition as well as functional medicine. And then a lot of that distinction also goes back to in the case of a registered dietitian. Their training is overseen by the American Dietetic Association, which connects back into a lot of other conventional medical organizations and ultimately guidelines set in part by the government. So their regulation and range of training is going to look very different than the training that I got and a lot of other functionally trained practitioners got. So it's super important to essentially kind of distinguish between these things and really have a solid understanding of the type of professional that you're working with.
Insurance Coverage and Functional Medicine
Speaker 1It also just behooves you to know that so that if you decide to hire a practitioner, whether they are covered by your insurance or they're not, you have a really clear understanding of the type of assistance, knowledge and help you're going to be getting, because it will differ person to person. So let's touch a bit just on the insurance piece just to clarify this, because I still find that this is a common question that comes up a lot with prospective clients, and that I do not take health insurance and that actually this is very common. This is the rule in functional medicine and so I don't really want to get into whether the insurance system works or doesn't work. Certainly, I think most of you who have done your own research and have hit a lot of points of frustration and roadblocks within conventional medicine understand on some level that the insurance system is very well linked to the pharmaceutical companies and that there's an incentive to run testing and authorize procedures that essentially are moneymakers and will often result in pharmaceutical based recommendations. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that if that's a model of medicine that you subscribe to and that works for you, but a lot of people and I'm willing to guess you're here in this group really don't want to be in that model or they've seen that it doesn't work the way that they want it to work, and so then your alternative really is to consider going down a different path, and then that means often taking your health into your own hands and then funding someone to help guide you down a different process, which is often functional medicine, to give you a very different result, very different answers, very different testing, very different process. So I just want to clarify that and touch on that a bit because, again, sometimes it surprises me how often that question comes up and how little understood that is, and it's pretty important to understand and just recognize. I mean, it's the inconvenient truth of where we're at right now in healthcare In terms of just functional diagnostic nutrition.
Speaker 1I want to talk just a moment about just how my training as an FDNP and a NTP so nutrition therapy practitioner is different than a dietician. So, as I mentioned just a minute ago, a dietitian tends to be governed by the ADA and by a pretty structured set of rules and guidelines. Curriculum-wise, a lot of the different programs and schools across the US are going to have a pretty standardized curriculum and a lot of those nutritional concepts are coming from policies that often have some vested interest in them, whether it's supporting and sustaining big agriculture, specifically corn and soy, big egg farming in the United States, as well as dairy, as well as other industries and agricultural industries. And I don't again really want to get too deep into the politics of food culture in the US and just how deeply lobbied the government is by Big Egg to promote some of their policies and keep, you know, the soybean and the corn farming going. But let's just say that I think most of us, if we really have gotten knowledgeable on label reading, can look at a lot of packaged food labels and see a lot of processed corn and soy, and so that already should tell you that these are very economical ingredients to put into food at a very cheap price. And these industries like that and they like to push that type of dietary philosophy, if you will are oftentimes sometimes touted as being plant-based foods which are healthy for you. Right and again, that's an entire topic in and of itself.
Speaker 1But what I want to say is that registered dietitians they're more regulated, their curriculum is definitely leaning more in the conventional medicine direction. There's more similarities and ties with just training across the board in their vein. That's going to match up with what doctors and nurses are told about nutrition and, just on some level, although doctors and nurses don't have a lot of education in nutrition, some of those core principles that they are taught will also be standard to registered dietitians. Now, that being said, not all registered dietitians are coming from a conventional model. I've certainly met some who have really gone down the functional path and gotten some very extensive, very, very awesome training from my perspective, and so this isn't to say that I'm throwing any registered dietitian under the bus, but just as a baseline credential, it's going to have a very different flavor and lean to it compared to a functionally trained practitioner.
Speaker 1Are you struggling with chronic diarrhea or constipation and have been told by your doctor that there's either nothing wrong or that you're going to need to take a med for the rest of your life to control symptoms? What if there was another way, a way that empowered you to take back your health through a smart nutritional strategy and through running the right testing to identify true root causes? If you are ready to say yes to self-empowerment and to starting the journey to real improvement in your gut health, click the link to grab my free e-guide. Functionally trained practitioner is often going to be trained through a program that's, for the most part, often truly independent, is, looking at, you know research across the board in terms of health and nutrition and population studies, and you know just core principles that have been at play since the beginning of time. And, looking at, you know what tends to lean towards allowing a person to be healthy through diet, through nutrition, through lifestyle. What are those principles? How can we, you know, encapsulate those and teach those, and then teach these practitioners and methodology to help guide people struggling with their health to naturally support their bodies back to health through some of these core principles?
Functional Training vs. Dietitian Education
Speaker 1And then, of course, there's this whole gamut of testing that comes along with some of these credentials in functional medicine. That is quite different than the testing that you're going to have offered to you by your doctor, and for good reason, because, again, a lot of these tests are looking at different functions in the body that insurance companies traditionally just haven't been willing to pay for, because a lot of times they're looking at these what I would call more so physiological root factors that are driving symptoms, and if we can identify those and develop a plan to eradicate those or address those, chances are very good a person's health is going to improve, and so this is a really good segue into the question what is functional diagnostic nutrition? And so this particular certification that I got really works under the premise that the body functions in this very fine orchestration of metabolic processes that involve cells, tissues, organs, systems, fluids, gassets, chemistry, energy, all of these things interacting together and also with a variety of other organisms, right? So there's kind of this microcosmic world inside of the body, but then there's this environment we live in and we're interacting with other people and touching soil and touching pets, and, you know, there's a lot of uh, microbe and energy exchange, you could say, in our day-to-day lives, and so there's this kind of, you know, interaction of all these processes, and so this metabolic orchestration is the result of a detailed set of instructions, or what we often call innate intelligence. And another way to think of innate intelligence is, if you're familiar with Chinese medicine, the term qi is often used, which is sort of this is similar to that light force, energy, or you know, the innate intelligence you could say governs the life force, energy of the body. If you're familiar with yoga, this term would be prana, but this innate intelligence works on every particle of every cell, and it's similar to an operating system of a computer, so the operating system is really designed to accomplish or manage a specific set of purposes, and so, then, our potential to maximize our health is largely determined by how well our operating system is adapting to these complex metabolic changes and challenges that we're facing on a day-to-day basis.
Metabolic Chaos and Innate Intelligence
Speaker 1And so these metabolic pathways are intermingled in these complex ways, and so, when a person starts to have symptoms that come on and then often get worse with time, this is resulting from a disruption of homeostasis that, as an FDNP, we're trying to look at clues that suggest imbalance, and so symptoms will often get worse as they go unaddressed, and so this is, in a sense, a reflection of just how much the body is out of whack or out of balance, and this makes sense. Something goes unaddressed, and it's a problem, the more and more out of balance the whole system can start to become, and so what might start as, say, a simple stomach ache problem can, over time, turn to constipation and then migraine, headaches, and, you know, things can start to pile on and other systems of the body can start to get impacted. And so, as an FDNP, we call this picture, this evolving picture of all these symptoms, metabolic chaos, and it's just to say that there's a bunch of ways in which this innate intelligence organizing all of these complex processes in the body is going haywire, and then, depending on your unique genetic switches and your history and your environment, this is going to trigger any number of symptoms, and it'll look very different person to person. So, as an FDMP, really what I'm trained to do is guide clients in the art of at this sort of picture of metabolic chaos, or, you could say, dysregulation of health, using an acronym called DRESS, d-r-e-s-s, and so if you've ever, you know, interacted with any other FDMP, you might've heard this before. If this is the first time, that's great. Hopefully, this is something you can easily remember, because it's a pretty holistic way of looking at health from multiple angles.
Speaker 1Essentially, the D in DRESS stands for diet, the R in DRESS stands for rest, the E is exercise, the first S is stress reduction and the second S is supplementation, and so we want to consider all of those components equally as important and equally in terms of not missing any one of them when we're trying to help guide a client back to health, and so we definitely like to run specific functional tests that give us a pretty black and white insight as to what's going on, for example, in a client's gut with a client's hormones, potentially other pathogenic loads that they might be carrying that they just haven't been able to test for because they might have only had conventional testing available to them. And so in running all these tests, we're looking for these factors that fall outside of the healthy optimal range or the healthy normal range that a healthy person would be in, and making note of that and then trying to correlate. Do these things we're finding on the test actually relate back to the symptoms this particular client is experiencing? And in every single case I've looked at in the past you know, year or two the answer is yes. I mean, it's a fascinating and often very validating process to go through with a client because they're just amazed at how, for the first time often, I can go through their testing and say, well, we have this, this and this and this is correlated with this and this is correlated with this and this would explain why you're having the diarrhea and why you're having the joint pain and why you're having the brain fog and they're just like, wow, like I can't believe my doctor couldn't tell me this Right and it's it's, it's super empowering and it it's very validating, and I feel like sometimes that's a great place for people to start, because they feel like they've been given the runaround, or they feel like they've run the gamut of tests that their doctor can run and nothing really has been found, and then they've been offered meds to try to manage the symptoms, but deep down they know that the root cause is still there.
The DRESS Method Explained
Speaker 1So you know really what we're looking for on these tests, as well as just in doing a very thorough interview and assessment of the client across multiple areas their history, their environment, their relationships, you know their work, like all these core areas of their function and the way they show up in their life. We want to have some insight as to how are those things going for them, because what we're looking for are what we call healing opportunities, things that just seem pretty blatantly out of whack or, you know, are very identifiable on a test. Those are the easy ones, but sometimes there's lifestyle, mindset or other factors that are applicable that are driving some of these symptoms that we have to include in the healing opportunity group of items that we're noting, and so we really want to look at this in terms of, you know, can we work on as many potential root cause issues and opportunities to improve function of the body, improve lifestyle, improve environment, improve mindset in order to guide a person back to health. And so, time and time again, the clients that I've worked with who take this on very seriously and are very committed to making changes and discovering what's really driving their symptoms get fantastic results, and the beauty of this is is it's obviously a non-pharmaceutical based approach. Yes, we do often work with supplements, because a lot of times we're finding microbes, pathogens that do need to be crowded out, eradicated on some level, and there's a lot of natural supplements that do a very good job of that. But the other part of the work is helping a client really orient around all right, how is everything else going with you in your life and can we maybe start making some changes or optimizing some things to support your body from an outside in perspective, to get health back?
Speaker 1That is really what functional diagnostic nutrition is in a nutshell and just to reinforce kind of how that differs from my original training as a nutrition therapy practitioner.
Speaker 1The functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner certification was really centered around functional testing, running functional testing, understanding functional testing, interpreting it, being able to correlate back to client symptoms and then developing an effective plan to address the things we found in the testing, which I find is almost necessary in today's world because people have complex things going on and we often need to look for some factors. You know, physiologically driving that so super, super important piece of what I do, and you know I have to say that since becoming an FDMP, you know I've probably doubled, if not tripled, my success with clients, simply because of having that tool set and also being able to look at testing, sometimes understand it at an even deeper level than other nutritionists, so to speak, can, because I've gone through such an extensive program around functional testing and working with those and understanding those results. Did you find this episode informative and helpful? I'd love to have you leave me a five-star rating. And working with those and understanding those results.