There are an estimated 1.1 billion people on the planet with cognitive or mood problems. 1 in 10 Americans are on antidepressants and 1 in 10 children is on stimulant medications. Estimates are that 1 in 4 of us will experience at least 1 major depressive episode in our lifetime. Those numbers are staggering! We are clearly missing something really big here. We need a fundamental shift in how we think about our brain, our mind, and our health in general.
For the past century or so, medical science and "big pharma" has been on the hunt for a single cause of each disease and that has led us to very little in the way of health. Instead, we have an ever-increasing cocktail of drugs for each of these diseases and more people who are sick and suffering. Nowhere has that approach been more tragic than in the area of mental health. The ever-expanding list of anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, mood stabilizers, anti-psychotics, and opiate painkillers is literally and figuratively mind-numbing.
What if there was a different way to think about the problem? What if instead of focusing on a synthetic drug to force the body into a temporary state of function, we focused on the key underlying factors that they all had in common and then layered targeted nutritional support on top of that? Well, that is exactly what the emerging Functional Medicine model is doing and the results are already showing that there is real hope for millions who are suffering.
