Anxiety can have a profound and long-term impact on our lives. The dread, fear and worry we have can be so debilitating that it can impact our ability to work, parent or socialize. If anxiety has robbed you of a life you once loved, functional medicine can help provide you with long-term comprehensive care and therapy that will focus on treating the underlying cause of your anxiety.

 As is often the case with traditional medicine, you’ll see a doctor, you’ll tell them the symptoms you’re experiencing and they will most likely write you a prescription. That medication may be helpful. After all, it’s alleviating your symptoms, right? However, it’s not addressing the root cause of your anxiety. This means that while the medication does a fairly good job at dulling the symptoms temporarily, it won’t make them go away. The only way to eliminate these symptoms is to find out what’s causing your anxiety and targeting the problem itself.

How Functional Medicine Can Help

When working with an integrative medicine practitioner, the major benefit is that they will look for a variety of factors that could be affecting or even causing your anxiety. These are factors that traditional medicine may not even take into account. Thanks to our high-tech functional lab testing, Dr. Chan and her medical team can test for everything from fungal overgrowth and parasitic infections to food allergies and other gut problems that could be fueling your anxiety.

Functional medicine also focuses on the gut-brain connection. Anxiety isn’t just a condition caused by dysfunction within the brain. It can also be the result of physiological problems. In fact, research has shown a connection between the health of the gut and the health of the brain. Therefore, it’s possible for inflammation that starts in the gut to cause inflammation in the brain. Additionally, problems such as fungi, parasites and certain bacteria in the gut can also lead to this widespread inflammation, which can result in anxiety and other mental health problems.

 Along with potential gut problems, we will also look at oxidative stress levels, nutritional deficiencies and acute and chronic diseases, all of which can impact anxiety. In fact, the top causes of anxiety include poor gut health, nutrient deficiencies and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis dysfunction. Fortunately, functional medicine can detect these problems and treat them through a variety of traditional and alternative therapies to provide long-term relief from your anxiety.