What Is Functional Health?

Functional health is really the same thing as health but we've been so

conditioned into another way of thinking that it's difficult for us to understand

what functional health is we're gonna go over the differences here so in

traditional healthcare traditional health view we've become accustomed to

think of health as the absence of symptoms as the absence of disease so

diseases when you're not healthy and healthy is when you don't have symptoms

sort of thing but the fact is it's not black or white most of us are somewhere

in between we're not feeling really great and we're not having a full-blown

disease either so here's kind of how that works functional problems means

that you have a partial loss of function there's something that's supposed to

work and it's almost working it's kind of working but it's not totally working

whereas in a pathology or a disease we have a complete loss of function so

think about it this way think of it in terms of light that you're trying to

read something and it's fine print as long as you have really good light you

can make out what it says so you're reading and then all of a sudden the

light bulb goes out and the whole room is black and obviously you can't see

anything that's kind of what a lesion what what a pathology is the function is

gone but if we think of it as a dimmer switch now you're reading and someone

starts turning down the dimmer switch so it they start out at a hundred percent

and then you go down to 90 and 80 and at 80 you're barely noticing there's hardly

any difference and then you get down to 70 and 60 and now you start to notice

there's a little bit of difference but you can still kind of make it work and

then you get down to 50 and it's difficult and you get down to 40 and

it's like really struggling and get down to 30 and now you can't make it out it's

just too too little light and that's kind of how

works as well that we want to think of health as function the ability to

generate energy the ability of the cells to do their job to take in nutrients to

produce energy to produce signals etc if they can do that at a hundred percent

now you have full health you have optimal health and as that starts

declining if it gets down to 90 or 80% you're probably not going to notice

because you have some reserves and because it goes slowly you're not really

noticing from day to day as you get down to 70 things get a little harder you

your vision isn't as good your memory isn't as good your focus you don't have

the energy that you're used to you don't sleep so well and as you go down as it's

continues to decline these things get worse and worse you get some aches and

pains and now you start taking some some stimulants you got to have the coffee

and the energy drinks and the pills to make it through the day you got to have

the pain medication and then you get down into the to the red zone here now

things are starting to fail now you've got to have medication to compensate for

for things that aren't working to cover up the symptoms this is also called a

soft lesion or a hard lesion so in computer language hard lesion would be

that the hardware failed you have a circuit card you have a processor you

have a memory stick something blows up and the computer dies you get a blue

screen or it just shuts down that's a hard lesion the hardware has

failed and in a soft lesion that would be something like the processor is

starting to overheat it's still running it's just not working as well or in the

terms of software if you have malware if you have really poor computer code where

the computer just doesn't work very well anymore it can sort of get the job done

but it's really whoa and it's dragging and it's stopping

and so forth so that would be an analogy with with computers in the body we kind

of have the same thing though in Neurology they talk about a hard lesion

when it comes to things like a spinal cord injury where you can't move your

lower body because the pathway from the brain to the legs is completely severed

it's off it's broken gone not coming back

whereas the soft lesion means the pathway is still there but it might be

having some pressure on it so the signal is interfered with or the brain cells

that are sending signals through that pathway have been weakened or they can't

produce more than 50% of their output that would be a soft lesion if

functionalism would be like type 2 diabetes the body can still make insulin

but it can't keep up because the body has been so abused and so out of balance

that even though the pancreas can still make some insulin it's just not keeping

up type 1 diabetes would be when the pancreas has lost the function to make

insulin that that'd be a hard lesion the cells are gone we can also think of

heart disease versus a heart attack heart disease is the gradual build-up

the gradual degeneration so you have some inflammation so your body produces

cholesterol in response to the inflammation it tries to fix

inflammatory damage now we get buildup of cholesterol plaques so we get

atherosclerosis and narrowing of the blood vessels so less blood can make it

through to the end organ and it makes it harder for the heart to do its job but

it can still keep up that all the cells are still there they're just suffering

because they're they're poorly supplied whereas in a heart attack now we get to

the point where the cells die because the delivery is of blood and oxygen is

so poor that the muscle cell actually dies and not come not coming back we

could have brain degeneration this would be when we lose energy when

we start becoming forgetful when we don't have the focus or the drive we

used to the cells are still there they're just not running at a hundred

percent versus Alzheimer's when a significant portion of the brain cells

are destroyed they're not coming back arterial weakening versus stroke so

arteries are supposed to be really strong and elastic but if they lose that

elasticity then they can lose their strength and pliability and now if they

break and we have a bleeding in the brain that's a stroke and that lack of

blood flow kills the brain cells something that's talked about a lot is

adrenal fatigue and this is because we have a chronic situation of stress our

bodies are designed to deal with short bursts of large amounts of stress to

deal with it and then be able to relax our bodies are not designed for chronic

stress which is a little bit of stress all the time hour after hour after hour

after hour so now we get adrenal fatigue they're working we're just not feeling

good we don't have the energy we don't deal with stress very well versus

Addison which isn't a complete or almost complete loss of adrenal function so now

we're like sitting ducks anytime there's a little bit of stress we totally shut

down so this is the world we've learned to think in we've learned to think that

we either have a disease or we don't when in reality it's more like we have a

little bit or a lot and this healthcare model works really really well with

infections and disasters and bleeding and broken bones and this is what we're

our healthcare model shines but most of the cases today are over here this is

where 90 plus percent of all prescription Medicaid

and all over-the-counter medication everything that we try to take drugs to

compensate is about functional problems and when we do that we are simply

covering up a symptom we are not improving the function so if

we start declining and function and we start taking some medication the

medication will never help us improve function it will never turn that dimmer

switch back up so what is health what how do we want to think about it well

health is about signals if you take an extreme example just hypothetically I

know this isn't gonna happen but you have a person that's alive standing up

and then for some reason he falls down dead and we hurry up and we run all

sorts of medical tests on it so we take x-rays and we take MRIs and we do

imaging on him we run blood tests and we run blood panel lipid profiles his blood

sugar looks good his cholesterol looks good his hormone levels are fine his

spine is misaligned we don't find anything wrong on the MRI but the guy is

dead he is not producing or processing any signals so that's what life is

things that are alive has the ability to produce signals things that are dead

like a rock have no signals and signals are so much tied to life and movement

that only things that move have brains and nervous systems so if you want to

generate lots of signals the best way is is to move so health is the ability to

maintain lots of signals in an appropriate way so homeostasis is where

all the signals are there all the cells have enough nutrients enough resources

enough oxygen to produce energy and produce signals and then we have a

nervous system that's imbalance that we can create homeostasis

that is optimum health and when that works at a hundred percent then we have

no diseases we have no symptoms we have no problems as that ability to produce

and manage signals decline it's like a dimmer switch going down and as we lose

the ability to generate and manage signals then we start developing

degenerative disease and there is no drug that can make you produce more

signals there is no drug that will help or assist a cell in coming closer to a

hundred percent function all they do is they cover up the symptoms so this is

why it's so crucial to understand what functional health is that it's about

signals that it's like a dimmer switch and why the healthcare system is really

really good at managing crises but they have nothing to offer in terms of

regenerating function and if we want to be healthy then regenerating function is

all it's about so let me know if you have any questions on this if this

produced any new awareness or any breakthroughs for you I'd love to know

please share this video because this channel every video that we do is about

how to restore function it's all about functional health on how to get that

dimmer switch working a little bit closer to a hundred percent thanks for

watching