Share  “Your body has the ability to express wellness. Removing the interference is a matter of investigating the root causes of your unique persona,” says Dr. James Padilla, Chiropractor and Functional Medicine Specialist at the San Diego Spine and Wellness Center located in Carmel Mountain Ranch. “Exposure to toxins through the atmosphere and the food we eat, as well as our thought patterns, all affect our health. These need to be incorporated into the treatment process in order to bring the body back into perfect balance.” Five years ago, he began looking into functional medicine when he attended a seminar conducted by Dr. James Chestnut, developer of the Innate Lifestyle™ and honored in 2007 as Chiropractic Educator of the Year by the International Chiropractors Association. His philosophy of “eat well, move well, think well” combines scientific research and chiropractic to show how our environment and lifestyle not only affect, but CONTROL, our genes.   Several wellness seminars followed, leading Dr. Padilla ultimately to the Institute for Functional Medicine, where he found a scientific approach to creating health and wellness. There he found some of the most progressive doctors in the medical industry, both medical and chiropractic practitioners who were using functional medicine as their core approach with their patients and getting significant results where traditional medicine had failed.

Functional medicine is a patient-centered approach to health care that concentrates on identifying and removing the underlying causes of disease, rather than treating the symptoms. It looks at clinical imbalances that occur in the body from external environmental inputs (such as diet, exercise, air, water, and trauma), and how they are processed by one’s body, mind, and spirit through a unique set of genetic predispositions, attitudes, and beliefs. This is a holistic approach to health.   Medical doctors are trained to treat symptoms. Their usual recommendation is to prescribe drugs. In many cases, this only treats the symptoms, not the root cause of the illness. It is true that all the nerves in our body travel along the spine. When an area is blocked, through what’s called subluxation, it compresses the nerves in that area, restricting blood flow to certain areas of the body. This occurs when a misalignment of one or more of the joints in the spine places pressure on a nerve. Nerves communicate from the brain through the spinal cord and nervous system. Pressure on the nerves can cause interference with the transmitted signal. This can cause pain and/or discomfort, as well as other symptoms. The result is pain and weakness in an area seemingly unrelated to the spine.   Some Chiropractors focus only on spinal re-alignment. Like medical doctors, they specialize in one area of expertise, physical manipulation of the spine and other joints to release subluxation. While this helps, it frequently is a temporary fix, since it focuses on releasing the pain and weakness rather than getting at the root cause of the problem.

Pain is a great motivator to see a Chiropractor, but it’s a symptom of something deeper and more extensive. Alternative health doctors like Dr. Padilla and his counterparts, look at the body as a system of interconnected systems. Like a Rubik’s Cube, when one side is affected, it throws the other sides out of balance.   We’ve all experienced this when we’ve eaten something that tasted good going down, but hours later created gas, painful abdominal cramps or worse. What happened? Something in the food interacted negatively with the digestive system. The body then unleashed a series of assaults to rid itself of the foreign intruder. This may have created a series of symptoms throughout the body: headache, gas, light headedness, flu-like chills, abdominal cramping, etc., which are all symptoms of other diseases.  Without the proper tests to determine the true culprit, you doctor might treat you for something totally unrelated to the cause, and this might lead to further complications. An alternative health specialist will focus first on what might have caused the discomfort at the outset, then outline a plan of action to root it out and get your body back in balance.   Similar to medical doctors, alternative health practitioners use some of the same basic testing as traditional doctors, but focus more on getting to the underlying root cause of the body’s dis-ease. It’s a natural extension of Chiropractic, which also tends to view the body as a whole system of systems.   During his 10 years of training, Dr. Padilla has been influenced by leaders at the cutting edge of the health and wellness field, such as Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Candace Pert. Dr. Lipton is an internationally recognized authority in bridging science and spirit. A former medical school professor and research scientist, his book, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles,examines in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. His research radically changes our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts.   Dr. Candace Pert, an internationally recognized pharmacologist, has published over 250 scientific articles and several books. Her book, Molecules of Emotion: The Scientific Basis Behind Mind-Body Medicine, explains how emotions exist both as energy and matter, in the vibrating receptors on every cell in the body. It’s about the mind-body connection and our body’s miraculous ability to heal itself when we focus our emotions and thoughts in positive ways.