Core Principles of Functional Medicine

In the fall of 2002, my grandma decided that 3 years in the nursing home was all that she could take and she wanted to go home. She had been there for about 3 years, and often times, when I went to visit in the middle of the day or afternoon, she was asleep. When she was awake, she would complain about how she was unable to sleep during the night, how she felt lost and confused, and how she wasn't being attended to the way she needed. She wanted to go back to her home.

My uncle asked for my help in taking my grandmother back home. When we arrived at the nursing home, and after signing all the discharge paperwork, one of the nurses came up to me with the list of my grandma's medication. There were 37 items listed, 2 pages long. She then held out two transparent trash bags, one in each hand, and said “Here, here are her medications.” I could not believe what was being handed to me. She was on so many prescription pharmaceuticals, they had to be put into TWO separate trash bags. I thought to myself “No way. This can't be right.”

I had to help my grandma. Though I had years of knowledge and experience in health, nutrition, and exercise training, it wasn't enough. So began my research into each and every pharmaceutical she was prescribed, potentially dangerous drug interactions, safer alternatives, etc. I began my search with a book titled “Best pills, Worst Pills” and then worked my way through some 15 other books. My grandma was on 7 different pulmonary medications alone! She was also on several others including psychotropics, diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, laxatives, proton pump inhibitors, and others. She had been bed ridden for almost the entire 3 years she had been in the nursing home.

Armed with all my research, with my grandma's blessing, and the help of her primary care doctor, we started to ween her off her medications, improve her diet, and increase her supplementation. Within a few weeks, she was sitting up in bed and able to move herself to a wheel chair. Within a month and a half, at her doctor's appointment, she was given a lung function test and passed with 101% of expected value. A few more months passed, and she was walking around with the help of her walker or behind her wheelchair to help her balance. A year later, she and I were enjoying a vacation in Puerto Rico! My grandma was 76 when she left the nursing home. She's now 90 and still living in her own home. She stays away from prescription medication as much as possible. She's not as mobile as she was, having broken a hip and having had replacement surgery some 8 years ago. But, she can still move herself around her house, goes out to enjoy her garden, and her mind is still plenty sharp and she will talk to you for hours about how things were in the old days growing up.