Institute for Functional Medicine and Sanoviv Team Up
to Revolutionize the State of Health Care

From The Sanoviv Blog , June 17th, 2009

The Institute of Functional Medicine at Sanoviv

If you are reading this it’s most likely no secret to you that the Western-based healthcare system is broken. Physicians are disenchanted and patients are dissatisfied with treatment outcomes.

But what does it take to really change how physicians practice? The Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) has spent years researching and perfecting their approach to this very question! IFM is an independent, nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to improve patient outcomes through prevention, early assessment, and comprehensive management of complex, chronic disease.

The Institute of Functional Medicine provides high quality continuing medical education for healthcare professionals, publishes books and other educational materials, and offers clinicians a Forum for the shared exploration of emerging research and clinical applications to improve patient care and outcomes.

Although Sanoviv’s physicians are already well versed in the practice of integrative medicine, Sanoviv’s founder, Dr. Myron Wentz is committed to surpassing the highest quality of integrative care available today. As a result Sanoviv has retained IFM to conduct a six-month, in-depth program to train all of the physicians and health professionals at Sanoviv in IFM’s “Functional Medicine Matrix Model.”

The Functional Medicine Matrix Model© has been designed to educate doctors and health care providers in understanding the cause, prevention , and treatment of complex, chronic disease.What does it take to really change how physicians practice?

According to The Institute of Functional Medicine, Inspiration is step #1. Information is step #2. But real change, step #3 – Integration – doesn’t happen until physicians have regular access to colleagues and mentors who have walked the path before them. And this is the model they bring to Sanoviv.

Research has shown that most physicians practice “as taught”; they tend not to make dramatic changes from what they learned in medical school and residency training. Despite substantial annual requirements for continued learning, the data shows that simply acquiring information (e.g., earning CME credits, reading books and journals, attending conferences) does not normally change healthcare providers’ clinical strategies.The issue is further complicated by these issues:

• Today’s healthcare providers are not adequately trained to manage the increasing burden of complex, chronic disease. Effective prevention of chronic illnesses requires understanding individual genetic vulnerabilities (20-30% of chronic disease risk) and the effect of lifestyle upon those individual variations (70-80% of the risk).
• Physician education, training and payment for services are focused on treatment of disease using drugs and surgery rather than comprehensive patient-centered treatments focused on the individual.
• We’ve learned a tremendous amount about chronic illness through research in basic sciences, but integrating this knowledge into clinical practices is very slow in coming. In other words, what we know about disease is often not used to treat disease!
• Physicians highly trained in standard diagnosis and treatment (drugs, surgery, radiation) are not well qualified to recommend treatments including nutrition, diet , detoxification programs, individually tailored drug treatment, organ system restorative programs, and therapeutic exercise. Such interventions, however, are critical to helping patients minimize their risk of suffering from one or more of the major chronic diseases in America ( heart disease, diabetes , autoimmune disease, mental illness, and cancer).
• Most physicians are equally unprepared by their training to apply the rich scientific research that demonstrates the importance of lifestyle changes for the improvement of already established chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer .

IFM has studied these issues extensively. Their unique philosophy works to transform them in order to give physicians the opportunity to keep pace with the changing demands and needs of patients.

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