Consultations
Your initial consultation will take an hour or longer depending on the complexity of your presenting health conditions. Every person is unique, and your response to physical and mental stressors, and disease risk factors, is determined by a unique combination of genetic, infection, stress and environmental influences. My goal is to optimise your health by identifying the best diet and lifestyle choices for your individual metabolic make-up and specific unique health challenges.
As a functional medicine clinician, I use the Functional Medicine Matrix and the Functional Medicine Living Matrix cloud-based program that assists practitioners in organising and prioritising the health issues of each patient as elicited by a thorough personal, family, social, and medical history. It is specifically organised in order to help practitioners gain a comprehensive perspective of each patient as a whole, and to facilitate discussion of complex medical issues.
There are three parts of the Matrix graphic.
The Patient’s Story: This part of the Matrix allows practitioners to organise the predisposing factors (antecedents), precipitating events (triggers), and ongoing contributors (mediators) of each patient’s chronic health problem(s).
Physiology and Function: This part of the Matrix facilitates organisation of clinical imbalances and prompts the practitioner to think about each patient’s symptoms in terms of the underlying clinical imbalances that may be causing or exacerbating those symptoms. It contains seven ‘nodes’ named for the physiological process that together make up the body’s function: Assimilation, Defence and Repair, Energy, Biotransformation and Elimination, Transport, Communication, and Structural Integrity.
Fundamental Lifestyle Factors: This part of the Matrix examines the patient’s environment and lifestyle including diet, stress, and exercise. These are the health-changing areas that the patient is most in control of and is always a good place to start, allowing patients and practitioners to collaboratively agree upon foundational proactive changes that promote health.
Why use Living Matrix?
The use of this technology, formatting, and creating a Functional Medicine Timeline and Matrix makes it accessible to patients so they are able to see the development of the conditions they are facing and motivate changes necessary to enhance their health.
Living Matrix is a cloud-based application that streamlines and automates the paper intake process, maps patient information into the Functional Medicine Timeline and Matrix and makes tracking patients’ progress easy.
Living Matrix allows clinicians to personalise information in real time and provide patients with a hard copy of their health assessment. As a patient, you’ll not only gain useful insight into your health during your visit, but you’ll have an understandable, easy-to-read view of your current health, a list of health goals, and if necessary, a Functional Medicine prescription which will include diet and lifestyle recommendations and may include a supplement regime and herbal prescription. The personalised guidelines will be e-mailed to you when I have all your results, with a report or summary.
Your designed health regime is specific to yourself and will vary depending on your condition and constitution. It is difficult to accurately predict how long it will be before benefits are felt, however, the majority of patients that adhere to the recommendations, before even taking an herbal prescription and supplements will notice improvements in two weeks.
A follow up consultation is usually advised 2 -4 weeks later to discuss your progress and results. We will assess your progress and may make changes to your herbal / nutritional / diet / lifestyle prescription if required. Your exercise regime and lifestyle will again be discussed, and I will agree new goals with you.
At follow up consultations we will assess any changes to your health indicators. This includes evaluation of your response to your altered diet and fine-tuning of the diet based on your diet symptom diary. I may suggest further testing.