If you look at a book of medical diagnoses, especially one that doctors use to code your visit diagnosis for insurance purposes, called ICD-9 book, you will find 14,000+ diagnosis codes. That’s a lot of names of diseases your doctor has to choose from to use as a label for what you have…and chances are, your doctor studied hard to learn those long Latin names in medical school, residency, and during board exams.
Now, the new medical code book, ICD-10, coming out for implementation in 2015, has nearly 5 times as many diagnosis codes than in ICD-9! That makes almost 70,000 disease codes! The reasons stated for this increase include: that the ICD-9 “is not sufficiently robust to serve the health care needs of the future”, and “content is no longer accurate and has limited data about patients’ medical conditions”. This is another proof that we are indeed getting sicker as a global society. Many countries have already started using the ICD-10 book. So, you can just imagine, with this new codes to choose from, how much tougher it will be for providers to document a patient visit and order tests and procedures for insurance approval! It certainly will not be easier, I think.
In contrast, what I am learning in Functional Medicine, is that there are only 6 main categories of insults to our well-being! Just 6? Yes, and they are:
- Microbes – bacteria, fungi, viruses, parasites, and others,
- Nutritional deficiencies and imbalances,
- Lifestyle – stress (emotional, physical, etc), sleep, exercise, beliefs,
- Allergies and Sensitivities – to food, drugs, other chemicals,
- Toxicities – natural (e.g. heavy metals), synthetic (e.g. plastics, pesticides, drugs), others
- Genetics – e.g. poor methylation and detoxification abilities
You might say that the above 6 are broad categories and that there has to be more details that need to be looked at to arrive at the diagnoses. That is true, but Functional Medicine provides that map for me to navigate through complex histories, physical examination findings, and test results! Functional medicine is a new way of thinking that makes a lot of sense – that’s why it’s beautiful! The whole body is connected and we can often explain why one complaint is related to another, and why finding the root causes and eliminating them as much as possible can heal you in more than one organ system! Your whole body can actually get better!
