Agetech World spoke to Pete Williams, founder of Functional Medicine Associates, on how functional medicine can address cognitive decline and chronic diseases, and support optimal ageing
What is functional medicine in a nutshell and what is its role in addressing chronic diseases?
Conventional medicine represents one problem solved by one answer, which the majority of the time is pharmaceutically led. This can work to an extent, but most chronic diseases are multifactorial with numerous things going on at the same time.
Functional medicine gives you a different way to look at chronic diseases as it looks at the ones that have multifactorial consequences. For this reason, trying to treat a disease with one medication isn’t going to work and so, it’s important not only to deal with the symptoms but to actually deal with the reasons why the symptoms are there in the first place.
What does it offer that conventional medicine can’t?
Chronic diseases are multifactorial. If you look at drug trials and interventions proposed and used for Alzheimer’s disease so far, none of them have worked and the ones that are still available don’t work that well.
Professor Dale Bredesen always uses this summary to explain why this happens: you might be looking at an object that has a hundred holes and you have to try to plug all of those holes before you truly get to solving Alzheimer’s disease. A drug may plug a hole but there are still 99 more.
That’s when you have to think: what else do we need to know? And what else do we need to do to try to plug as many holes as possible? The more holes that we plug the more likely we are going to see a reduction or a slowing down of symptoms.
You often use the Bredesen Protocol, what is it and how does it work?
The Bredesen Protocol gives you a really good instruction booklet which is a multifactorial way of looking at Alzheimer’s, rather than the usual ‘here’s the medication to use’.
Alzheimer is not a disease that you suddenly get, it’s a disease that develops over many decades. There are some genes that predispose the patient who needs an understanding of what else predispose them or accelerate their risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The Bredesen Protocol gives you a robust starting point to look at an individual from a multifactorial way. When using the Bredesen Protocol the number one thing to look at is if the patients are genetically predisposed. The key gene that you would look at is the APOE e4 e4, the most common genetic variant associated with Alzheimer’s disease. If you have an understanding that you have the APOE e4 e4 or that you are family predisposed, you might want to start doing something about it decades before there’s any risk.
This means understanding what you can do from a lifestyle perspective that is going to reduce your risk: not drinking, not smoking and doing consistent physical exercise.
Pete Williams is the founder of Functional Medicine Associates (FMA). He is a medical scientist with over 20 years of experience applying Functional Medicine in clinical practice. His work is based on the Functional Medicine approach to treatment of the root cause rather than the symptoms. Pete is also an advisor to nutraceutical and lab testing companies.
