Our services support chronic medical conditions, if you are frequently ill, tired or in chronic pain or if you simply seek to optimize your health. If you feel you are taking too many prescription drugs, want a more natural approach or wonder which supplements are right for you, we may be able to help

Standard lab testing does not look for food sensitivities, hidden infections, environmental toxins, mold exposures, nutritional deficiencies and/or metabolic imbalances.

Dr. Macie is highly skilled in evaluating, assessing and treating chronic problems such as fibromyalgia, fatigue syndromes, autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal illness, inflammatory disorders, mood disorders, memory problems, and other chronic, complex conditions. We also focus on the prevention and treatment of heart disease, diabetes, cognitive impairment, hormonal imbalances and digestive disorders. Please contact us if you would like to discuss whether or not we can help with your particular health condition.

Integrative/Functional medicine is a form of healthcare that focuses on identifying the root cause of your symptoms and working with the natural biology of your body to heal. For example, someone may have an autoimmune disease affecting the thyroid gland like Hashimoto's disease.

In this case, the immune system is attacking the thyroid gland. Our approach would be to seek and restore proper function in the immune system to prevent this from getting worse and support healing the thyroid.

This is different from traditional medicine. An endocrinologist (a doctor specializing in hormones) would treat the thyroid with added hormones. They would not address the immune system at all and focus mainly on the thyroid gland that is low in hormones. The difference is focus and priority.

We do not prescribe any medication. We are happy to work along side your primary care doctor to manage your symptoms. The two approaches work really well together. Conventional medicine is great at diagnosing and labeling a disease, but functional medicine digs a little bit deeper to help fix the underlying reasons why that disease was happening in the first place.

We do not provide primary care services. We will work with you closely as a consultant in preventive, nutritional and functional medicine to help you address the roots of chronic health problems. We will confer with your primary care doctor and specialist physicians if required.

Another myth is that functional medicine is expensive and out of reach for a lot of people. However, by focusing on prevention and fixing the root causes, functional medicine can actually  be potentially cheaper in long-term health care costs by minimizing the need for long-term medication management and treatments like surgery. It actually can end up saving people money in the long run if they are proactive in the present. Performing more testing now means that individuals can fix any problem before it gets worse, potentially avoiding more treatments in the future

A common misconception about functional medicine is that it’s not based on scientific evidence. Functional medicine boasts a broader understanding of health, incorporating research from various fields including nutrition, endocrinology, and genetics. There is a large and growing volume of scientific evidence to support a functional medicine approach.

People often think that functional medicine is all about supplements. And a lot of functional medicine practitioners use supplements because the supplements can be a good tool to help the body get what it needs to function better. But we also emphasize other things like nutrition and lifestyle.

With supplements, you’re not always getting at the root cause. Some practitioners employ what’s called green pharmacy. Some patients have gone to other practitioners who are trying the natural approach, but all that’s been done for the patient is giving them 10 supplements like herbs and vitamins. It’s something to look out for because a lot of practitioners will say they’re doing functional medicine because they’re using supplements instead of pharmaceuticals, but they’re still just putting a band-aid on the problem. 

Functional medicine also is not just about diet. Obviously diet is a critical component of someone’s health, but there are so many other pieces that can be involved such as lifestyle and stress. 

Another misconception is that functional medicine is the same as naturopathy. There is an overlap between functional medicine and naturopathic medicine, but they’re not the same. Like functional medicine, naturopathic medicine looks to establish and address the root causes of a disorder. It is based on the philosophy that the human body has an innate ability to heal and aims to maximize the body’s ability to do so using natural remedies. 

Functional medicine extends naturopathy by emphasizing a systems biology approach to root cause discovery and therapies. Systems biology includes the biological pathways and networks throughout the body that link different systems together. It’s how we can understand how the gut or adrenal system are connected to immune health, for example. Advances in testing allow functional medicine practitioners to investigate imbalances or dysfunction in these biological pathways and networks. It’s a customized approach where a functional doctor finds the treatments that are truly best suited to each individual patient. 

Like naturopathic medicine, functional medicine’s main goal is to find the root cause of the patient’s illness. Some functional medicine practitioners will incorporate naturopathic principles into their approach, so there is overlap between the two types of medicine

Once you get a chronic disease diagnosis, conventional doctors look at these as progressive, degenerative, and life-long. In conventional medicine you might be on a pill or other type of treatment regimen for the rest of your life. Compare this to functional medicine where we’re being proactive and helping to support the causes of problems, so supplements do not have to last forever, but healthy lifestyle changes will. Most of our patients only work with us for about six months to a year, and return only for routine, preventive check-ups.