Personalised Functional Medicine in Brisbane: revolutionising healthcare

15 Jun Personalised Functional Medicine in Brisbane: revolutionising healthcare

Through an approach of personalised Functional Medicine in Brisbane, the Australian Centre for Functional Medicine can identify the underlying factors driving your health problems.

Chronic diseases are reaching alarming levels in Brisbane and across Australia and the standard model of health care is struggling to address this growing problem. Personalised Functional Medicine Brisbane, as implemented by the Australian Centre for Functional Medicine (AUSCFM), is using a new approach to tackle chronic and hard to treat diseases.

Functional Medicine Brisbane merges advanced biological and biomarker-based testing with standard medical approaches. In addition, AUSCFM employs current findings from clinical research using natural and traditional medicines to address the root of your health problems.

Functional Medicine Brisbane employs a health care model that is superior to the standard model of care, gaining unprecedented insight into the health of each person.

Founded in Perth, the Australian Centre for Functional Medicine is backed by experienced staff and a solid record of successful treatments of chronic conditions.

Brisbane History and demographics

The city of Brisbane was founded on the ancient homelands of the Turrbal and Jagera Australian aboriginal people and named after the Brisbane River, which flows through the city. The first European settlement in the area occurred in 1824, as a prison settlement to move the worst convicts from other settlements. In 1825 this colony was moved to the site of modern Brisbane, and by 1842 the settlement was open to any settlers. By 1900 Brisbane hosted over 130,000 inhabitants and was rapidly growing.

Today, Brisbane is Australia’s third most populous city, with more than 6 million inhabitants and the capital of the north-east state of Queensland. Brisbane is composed of a population with a significant European ancestry, reported by more than 70% of their inhabitants.

Furthermore, more than half of Brisbane’s population has at least one parent who was born overseas. After Australia, the top three most common countries of birth reported for Brisbane are New Zealand, England and China.

Brisbane Health statistics

According to the most recent report from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), the leading causes of disease in Queensland are coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and back pain problems. Other conditions also noted to cause harm included mental disorders and musculoskeletal conditions.

The risk of acquiring these and other diseases seems to increase with age, and adults in Queensland have a high risk of developing certain chronic diseases throughout their lifetime. For example:

• • • The lifetime risk of a cancer diagnosis is over 33%
    • For heart disease, this risk is more than 33% for men and 20% for women
    • Diabetes has a lifetime risk of 33% and
    • Chronic respiratory conditions have a 25% lifetime risk

According to the AIHW report, the leading risk factors behind these diseases, which affect all Australians, include tobacco smoking, poor diets, high body mass (obesity), excessive alcohol consumption, and physical inactivity (Table 1).

Other significant health problems include back pain, anxiety, and depressive disorders considered the three largest causes of disability. In turn, coronary heart disease and lung cancer are responsible for the most deaths, followed by suicide and self-inflicted injuries.

Table 1. Top chronic conditions affecting Queenslanders

DALYs: Disability-adjusted life years, a measure of how much a disease affects a patient’s life. It translates as the number of years lost due to disease, disability or early death.

Children are another important group affected by chronic disease in Brisbane and in Queensland in general.

According to a recent report, there were 988,000 children living in Queensland, during 2018 and the most recent data available (only available Australia-wide) reveals significant levels of chronic diseases.  For example, it is estimated that about 43% of all children suffer at least one chronic condition, like asthma or some form of allergy.  Across Australia:

• • • 11% of children report having asthma
    • 11% report having hay fever and allergic rhinitis
    • 10% report having allergies, including food allergies (6.3%)
    • 3% report having anxiety problems
    • 7% had problems with psychological development and
    • 3% report having behavioral, cognitive, and emotional problems.

Another important chronic condition affecting children is obesity. According to a report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics¹, Queensland children aged 5-17 are facing serious obesity problems, with 19% of children being overweight and 7.2% obese.

This finding is further supported by data showing that more than 240,000 and 800,000 Queensland children fail to meet the recommended fruit and vegetable consumption guideline, respectively. Likewise, more than half of children in Queensland are active for less than the recommended one hour per day.

All these factors and chronic conditions are preventable as well as treatable, and their management is a central aspect of the Australian Centre for Functional Medicine in Brisbane.

Healthcare in Brisbane

The healthcare needs of Brisbane’s large population are met by Queensland Health’s “Metro North” and “Metro South” Health Service Networks, a Department of the Government of Queensland. Brisbane is mainly served by 12 major hospitals, which includes hospitals that are specialised in trauma, burns, or children care. Throughout Queensland, there are 122 public and 109 private hospitals, which together handle over 2,365,000 hospitalisations each year. Some of the leading causes of hospitalization included renal failure, digestive system diseases, and conditions associated with chest pain and fainting, among other problems.

In the past decade, the number of hospital admissions has increased by about 85,000 every year, a trend that, if maintained, can lead to 3.7 million hospitalizations per year by 2026. Over 15% of these hospitalizations where due to conditions associated with preventable risk factors such as for overweight and obesity, high blood pressure and smoking.

What is Functional Medicine Brisbane?

Traditional medical approaches, commonly known as the standard of care within the healthcare environment, employ a system where patients visit a general practitioner (GP) who prescribes drugs or treatments to address a condition or set of symptoms.

Alternatively, the GP can refer a patient to a specialist, in case of a hard to treat or unknown condition. Throughout this process, the focus of the standard of care model is the specific condition or symptoms affecting the patient.

On the other end of the health care spectrum, there are different “natural approaches” to medicine, labelled as naturopathy, herbal clinics, natural medicine or homeopathy, among other names. Common to these alternative healthcare practices is the avoidance of traditional medical treatments and medicines, in favour of natural supplements. However, the efficacy of some of these treatments has not been evaluated in clinical studies.

Functional medicine Brisbane stands apart from these two spectrums of healthcare, bringing together standard medical treatments with evidence-based complementary approaches, including certain natural supplements that are backed by clinical evidence.

The goal of Functional Medicine Brisbane is to fully understand why patients are sick and what is driving their symptoms, based on the understanding that the different systems in your body are interconnected and influence each other. To accomplish this goal, Functional Medicine Brisbane uses a combination of advanced clinical testing, used to measure the presence of specific biomarkers in stool, urine, blood, and breath.

Additionally, Functional Medicine Brisbane incorporates information about the composition of the gut microbiome, which has been linked to multiple aspects of our health by a myriad of research studies.

This inclusive approach sets Functional Medicine apart and above standard medicine, which so far has been slow at the implementation of gut microbiome analyses into clinical practice.

Functional Medicine Brisbane: why now?

The Australian Centre for Functional Medicine has designed the next generation of Functional medicine in Brisbane, which uses a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and evidence-based approach to health care. Ultimately, the goal of Functional Medicine Brisbane is to address your health problems from the root, by identifying and targeting the underlying factors driving your disease and symptoms.

The comprehensive approach to health care translates into an innovative and effective approach to tackle chronic diseases. With the growing incidence of cancer, mental disorders, digestive problems, allergies and other chronic conditions, the approach followed by Functional Medicine Brisbane comes at an ideal time.

There is an urgent need to find a better way to prevent, treat and eliminate chronic diseases in adults and children. The current standard of medical care is struggling to deal with the increasing incidence of these diseases and part of the problem is a lack of understanding of all the factors driving chronic diseases.

Functional medicine Brisbane overcomes the limitations of traditional medical practice, by building on the standard model of care and incorporating findings from clinical research on gut microbiome and natural therapies.

This combined approach to health sets Functional Medicine Brisbane as a superior approach to treat chronic diseases and may serve as a model for the development of a new standard of care in the future. Only through the establishment of a comprehensive approach to health, as implemented by Functional Medicine Brisbane, will it be possible to alleviate the pressure that chronic diseases are placing on the Australian healthcare system.

BECOME A PATIENT OF FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE IN BRISBANE TODAY

BECOME A PATIENT

Following your registration, we will schedule an initial consultation that can be in person or remotely, through our Telehealth system. During this consultation, we will listen to your main health complaints, evaluate your health and medical history, and discuss potential options to move forward, including making diagnostic tests and potential treatments.

References

1. Australian Bureau of Statistics. National health survey: first results 2014–15. no. 4364.055.001. ABS: Canberra; 2016.