1. Stress you’re managing
2. Sleep you’re getting
3. Movement you’re making
4. Food you’re taking
5. Relationships you have
6. Previous trauma
7. Chronic Infections
8. Toxin Exposure

In Functional Medicine, the above list comprises the eight different factors that impact a person’s health.  According to Dr. Raymond Escalona, Functional Medicine practitioner and Director of Medical Education at LifeScience Institute Philippines, “About 40-50% of [health] is really the nutrition that we have.  So if you just start shifting to whole foods, unprocessed, you start changing the expression of your genes. If for example, you’re the gene that says you should have hypertension now, you can turn it off through the food that you’re eating….  Lutong bahay.  No processed food. No packaging. From scratch. Simplest.”   HERE is that previous post on the topic including an interview with Dr. Escalona.

To maximize the healing benefits of food, they are best fresh, natural… home cooking/ lutong bahay. [Yehey for Karen’s Kitchen’s cuisine!  We incorporate herbs and vegetables known to have healing properties like okra, garlic, turmeric, kale, other greens, offer to substitute pasta with zucchini converted into “zoodles”)  even to traditional Filipino dishes; don’t do deep frying but slow-bake or simmer meats to get rid of the fat…even though we could make more money with french fries and fried versions of meats and fish, and lots of carbonated drinks.]

Functional Medicine’s holistic approach is no longer just finding out the what… getting a prescription for every symptom but the why…a comprehensive look into the enumerated eight factors of a patient’s lifestyle to look for root causes of illness with the goal of reversing even chronic disease through specific diet and lifestyle interventions.

Here are two of the posts that Dr. Escalona shared which you might be interested in:

Investing in Food as Medicine

Functional Medicine Approach to Autism

He is completing the first phase of his continuing training under Dr. Lisa Perry, senior educator for the Institute for Functional Medicine in San Diego, California. They run an Autoimmune shift in the school clinic that is focused solely on reversing Autoimmune conditions and take care of individuals with a minimum of three autoimmune diagnoses (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, SLE, asthma, allergy, eczema, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, alopecia, inflammatory bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease, etc – all thought to be irreversible).

Dr. Escalona is also currently affiliated with the LifeScience Center and the LifeScience Institute at BGC.  He handles any and all complex chronic conditions but most especially with Autism and autoimmune disease.  He is excited to come back to Manila this December to conduct some talks including Food as 21st Century Medicine to share his learnings as he seeks to bring Functional Medicine into mainstream medical practice.   “I have so much to share already and I think the time is right for Filipinos to understand that diseases truly are reversible,” he said.

Dr. Escalona’s Info:

Raymond Joseph Y. Escalona M.D., M.B.A.
Functional Medicine
Director of Medical Education, LifeScience Institute Philippines
Bastyr University MS Nutrition for Wellness 2018

For interested practitioners or patients, you may reach Dr. Escalona at this email address:   info.institute@lifescience.ph

For interested patients, you may reach Dr. Escalona at this email address: info@lifescience.ph