Mainstream medical practitioners practice symptom-oriented treatments, covering the symptoms. Functional medicine focuses on the root cause resolution, fixing what is causing the problem. If you can understand which approach is better, you are already halfway there. Your health coach will help you understand the other half!

Podcast 402: Health Coach – Chronic Illness – Overlooked Hacks to Rebuilding Health

Welcome, everybody! This is the Life Enthusiast Podcast, and today we are going to talk about Chronic illness and the overlooked hacks that will help you rebuild your health. My name is Martin Pytela, I have been a health coach for about 15 years, well actually even longer! I am a certified metabolic typing advisor since 2011, I was previously certified as a clinical hypnotherapist, and I worked in the field for a little while, but then I ended up doing management consulting. I spent 20 years in the computer industry, management consulting, and information technology. I trained people in the use of software, highly complex technical software. I have a university education in computer science and business administration, and I worked in the field as a business consultant.

I became very health challenged, my problem was mercury toxicity. I got 12 mercury amalgam fillings from a dentist, and that precipitated a very serious health problem. My genetics are such that I don’t detoxify very efficiently. So my situation got worse fairly quickly. In my case, it was pretty rough. I’ve spent at least 15 years in pretty rough shape. I tried to get help from the mainstream first. I went to the orthopedic surgeon because my problems were collapsing arches in my feet, plantar fasciitis, and I had carpal tunnel syndrome, so my wrists were hurting, and then my back started hurting. The orthopedic surgeon injected me with cortisone shots and said: “well, that is all I have.” Six weeks later, the effects wore off, and I was back to being worse than before.

I sought help from chiropractors, very good, well-meaning, well-educated, highly skilled people. I saw many in my life, I may have spent tens of thousands of dollars in chiropractic offices over my life. It helped, it was treating my symptoms, but it was not getting me better, it was just helping me cope. And that seems to be the model for both the allopathic, the mainstream medical system, and the alternative medicine. They treat the symptoms. It is about creating a practice and having an income stream, more than it is about healing the person and having them free of their health problems. That is why you see the words ‘root cause resolution’ on the screen. 

Functional medicine practitioners do that. They seek the root cause resolution, fixing what is causing the problem. I eventually got certified as a metabolic typing advisor, and that is one of those disciplines where we understand how food, diet, and nutrition are intersecting with the genetics of a given person. There are individual differences, and if we don’t take those into account, we end up not being able to get to a happy outcome. I’ve been doing that since 2011.

So let’s get to the core of this. What are the important things we must do to regain and maintain optimal health? As a health coach, I’ve talked to several thousand people over the years, and I see some patterns, I see some tendencies. First of all most of us are oriented toward ‘new’ instead of toward ‘tried and true.’ Instead of turning to the basics that everybody should be doing, we are trying to look for what is new, trendy, different. We are naturally oriented towards that. 

The mainstream medical world, most allopathic, and even some alternative health practitioners practice symptom-oriented treatments. If you tell them you have a headache, they will give you a pill for the headache,