In conventional medicine, assessment and treatment of mental health conditions generally involves matching a patient’s symptoms to a standard diagnosis and then prescribing one or several medications that have been approved for that diagnosis. We believe there are several important limitations to this approach.
People diagnosed with anxiety, depression, ADHD, bipolar disorder and even psychosis or schizophrenia often have dramatically different symptoms from others with the same diagnosis. For example, an individual diagnosed with depression may feel deep grief while another may actually experience emotional numbness. These variations in symptoms reflect very different biochemical and physiological imbalances which cannot be addressed effectively with a single treatment approach. In fact, we even find that patients with very similar symptoms can sometimes have dramatically different underlying imbalances which require very different treatment approaches.
For these reasons, our approach to patient assessment is designed to uncover the unique underlying factors contributing to each individual’s symptoms. We begin by spending ample time with each patient so that we can gain a thorough understanding of their symptoms and circumstances. We also use specialized in-office diagnostic procedures and innovative laboratory tests such as urinary pyrrole testing, methylation analysis, essential and toxic metal assessment and salivary hormone testing to help us identify such factors as nutritional deficiencies or excesses, genetic vulnerabilities, toxicity, and hormonal imbalances.
The combined approach of thoroughly assessing each patient’s symptoms and medical history with targeted diagnostic procedures and lab testing provides a window into each patient’s underlying imbalances that allows our treatment approach to be highly specific and individualized.