What is chronic illness?
Chronic illness is a health condition that lasts for three months or more. These illnesses usually develop slowly but if unaddressed can get worse over time. Timely and effective intervention is key to stopping their progress, reversing the symptoms, and restoring quality of life.
Examples of chronic illnesses include:
- Alzheimer’s
- Depression
- Arthritis
- Diabetes
- Kidney disease
- High blood pressure
- Heart disease
- High cholesterol
- Osteoporosis
- Obesity
These conditions take more time to develop than acute conditions and left untreated usually progressively worsen over time. Certain chronic illnesses have obvious warning signs, while future indications for others are more subtle.
How can Well Integrative Medicine help me?
Doctors are taught to diagnose thousands of different diseases. Traditional medical training gives these diseases names like depression and hypertension, which groups people with similar symptoms together. However, when viewing from the root cause perspective, we can see that symptoms of chronic illnesses are reflections of bodily imbalance, not simply labels applied to everyone with similar issues. To address these chronic illnesses, we need to consider the whole body and how it works as a system – not just its components. We treat people, not body parts; we treat the causes of disease, not symptoms alone.
We are all different. Functional Medicine personalizes treatment based on each patient’s unique needs. Understanding this allows us to develop unique methods to treat the reasons why patients are symptomatic, not just the label or diagnosis based on symptoms.
Request a consultation at Well Integrative Medicine in Chicago
If you are suffering from a chronic disease or you think you may be, Well Integrative Medicine can help. Request an appointment with us by calling 773-784-7000 or submitting the form on our site. We look forward to facilitating your wellness!