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And the reason it works isn't that we throw more treatments at you or this compounding
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effect.
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It's that we know exactly which pillar addresses which layer of what's actually going
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on and how those layers connect.
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Trying to fix a multilayer problem with a single layer tool is the reason so many people
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feel stuck and frustrated before they ever even find us.
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Welcome to Health Decoded, your number one source for real health information with your
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host, doctor Alessi and Matt Tack.
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Welcome back to Health Decoded.
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I'm doctor Alessi.
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And today, I wanna answer the single most common question that I get in a first
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consultation or when I'm talking to somebody on the street or in a gathering, and it's, doc,
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where do I even start?
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And here's what usually happens before somebody finds us at
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our
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clinic.
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Maybe you've got low back pain, so you see somebody for your back.
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Maybe you're exhausted by t 2PM, so you see someone else about your energy.
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Your labs come back in a normal pattern, but you don't feel normal.
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So you get told that it's just the stress of getting older or aging.
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Now, three different problems, three different providers, and nobody is looking at the
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entirety of the system, because nobody's really built to.
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At Ascend Functional Health, we don't work that way.
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We built our entire care model around three pillars: physical medicine, functional
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medicine, and longevity medicine.
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And the reason it works isn't that we throw more treatments at you or this compounding
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effect.
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It's that we know exactly which pillar addresses which layer of what's actually going
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on and how those layers connect.
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Today, I'm walking you through all three.
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What each one actually does, why the sequence matters, how they blend together for a real
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patient, and why trying to fix a multilayer problem with a single layer tool is the reason
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so many people feel stuck and frustrated before they ever even find us.
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Now, let's get into pillar one.
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This is what we call physical medicine.
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And for most people, this is the front door.
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It's rehabilitative and corrective work.
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Things like chiropractic care, spinal decompression, functional movement training,
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massage therapy, and other physical modalities.
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Now, let me tell you what each one is actually doing mechanically.
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Chiropractic adjustments restore joint mobility in segments of the spine that have lost normal
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motion, what we call fixation.
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When a joint is fixed, it doesn't just cause local pain, it changes how the nervous system
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reads and responds to that region of the body.
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Restoring motion restores normal signaling.
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Spinal decompression is different.
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It's a traction based therapy designed to reduce pressure on a compressed or herniated
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disc and to take direct pressure off an irritated or impinged nerve root.
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This is what we reach for when imaging shows disc involvement, pinched nerves, not just a
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mechanical joint issue.
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Now, the next step is functional movement training to address something that neither of
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those will touch.
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Compensation patterns.
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If your hip has been weak for two years, your body has been quietly building work arounds.
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Your low back, your knee, your opposite shoulder compensating for this.
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You can adjust the joint and decompress the disc all you want, and the pain will come back
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if nobody retrains the movement pattern underneath.
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And massage therapy, or myofascial release, circulatory, lymphatic, all of these address
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the soft tissue layers around all of this.
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Chronic muscle guarding, restricted fascia, and the tissue level tension that builds up around
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a joint or nerve problem that's been present for a while.
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Now, here's the honest part, and it's the part that matters most for this conversation.
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Physical medicine is exceptional at addressing mechanical and structural drivers of
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dysfunction, but it was never designed to address what's happening underneath the
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surface.
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Inflammation levels, gut function, blood sugar regulation, hormone status, nutrient
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deficiencies, those are not mechanical problems.
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You can't adjust, decompress, or massage your way out of systemic inflammation.
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This is exactly why some patients get excellent short term relief in pillar one, and then
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plateau, or the pain keeps returning even though the mechanical work is sound.
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It's not that the treatment failed, it's that there's a second layer driving the problem that
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physical medicine was never built to reach.
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That's what we call pillar two, functional medicine.
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Now, pillar two is functional medicine, and this is where we stop guessing and we start
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testing.
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When a patient plateaus in pillar one or comes to us with fatigue, brain fog, digestive
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symptoms, or a pattern of normal labs with an abnormal feeling, this is where we go.
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We run things like comprehensive blood work.
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I wanna be specific about what that means because it's not the same panel that you'll get
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at your annual physical.
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We're looking deep at things like inflammatory markers, things like HSCRP, metabolic markers
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like fasting insulin, not just fasting glucose, full thyroid panels, micronutrient status.
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A standard panel is only built to flag disease once it's present.
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Ours is built to catch dysfunction years before it becomes disease.
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Alongside blood work, we run comprehensive stool testing, looking at gut bacterial
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balance, pathogenic overgrowth, digestive enzyme function, and markers of intestinal
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barrier integrity, or leaky gut.
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The gut is involved in far more than digestion.
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It's directly tied to systemic inflammation, immune regulation, and even mood and cognitive
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symptoms.
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If someone has unresolved gut issues, it will show up downstream in places that seem
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completely unrelated.
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And, we run urine testing.
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Organic acids testing specifically, which gives us a window into mitochondrial function, how
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efficiently your cells are actually producing energy, along with markers tied to detox
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pathways and neurotransmitter metabolism.
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Here's the principle that ties these two pillars together.
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Symptoms are downstream.
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Fatigue, brain fog, stalled pain relief, unexplained weight gain, those are outputs.
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Pillar two is where we go to find the upstream input that's actually generating them.
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And once we have that data, we're not treating a symptom anymore.
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We're correcting a mechanism.
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That's the functional medicine difference, and it's a layer that most patients have simply
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never had run on them before they walk through our door.
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Now, let's get into pillar three, longevity medicine.
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Really quickly, let me do a disclaimer here.
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Everything in this podcast and in this section is educational, not personalized medical
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advice.
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Hormone, peptide, and bio regulatory therapies are physician prescribed only after a full
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clinical evaluation, and outcomes vary by individual.
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So, pillar three, longevity medicine.
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This is where we go once the foundational layers, the structure, and the root cause
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function are addressed, and a patient wants to actively optimize, not just resolve a problem.
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This starts with more advanced blood work than pillar two, and this is specifically where
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neurodegeneration risk markers come into play, giving us a much earlier window into brain
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health trends than waiting for cognitive symptoms to show up on their own.
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From there, pillar three includes things like hormone therapy, comprehensive hormone panels,
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where clinically indicated physician directed hormone optimization comes in.
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This isn't just a blanket protocol.
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It's individualized based on patient's actual lab picture and symptoms, evaluated, and
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prescribed by a physician.
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We also use things like peptide therapy.
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These are signaling molecules that support the body's own repair and recovery pathways.
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I want to be precise here rather than promotional.
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Peptides work by supporting cellular communication and the body's natural repair
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signaling.
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Any peptide protocol at ASCEND is physician selected and monitored based on individual
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clinical need.
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Not just what the patient wants, but what the patient's body actually needs.
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And finally, bioregulatory therapy, which supports cellular communication, detox pathways
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as an adjunct to the other modalities in this pillar, not a replacement for them.
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We also use things like red light therapy, soft wave therapy, and PEMF therapy to enhance
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someone's longevity and recovery.
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The thread connecting all of pillar three is this.
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Once we know your structure is sound, and your root cause function is corrected, this is where
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we shift from fixing what's wrong to optimizing what's right.
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Thus, extending health span, not just treating disease.
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Now here's something important.
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I've walked through these three pillars like they're a straight staircase, one after
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another.
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But in reality, it's rarely that clean, and it shouldn't be.
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The pillars blend based on what a patient's body actually needs, not based on a fixed
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order.
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A lot of patients will start in pillar one and pillar two at the same time, because chronic
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pain very often has both the mechanical driver and an inflammatory or metabolic driver running
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simultaneously.
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So treating only the joint while ignoring systemic inflammation means you're managing
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half the problem.
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We see that combination constantly.
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And the transition into pillar three isn't calendar based, it's data based.
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The blood work and testing we run-in pillar two often tells us whether pillar three is even
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indicated yet.
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If someone's inflammatory markers are elevated and their hormone panel shows early decline,
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that data is what points us toward pillar three, not an arbitrary timeline.
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Now, patient I'm about to describe is just a composite, a blend of common patterns that I
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see, not one specific individual.
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This is to protect any patient privacy, and not use real names.
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Now, let me walk you through what this ascension model of the three pillars could
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actually look like.
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So, we see a patient, and she comes to us with chronic low back pain and constant fatigue.
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She started in pillar one, chiropractic care, spinal decompression for a disc issue that we
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confirmed with imaging, plus functional movement work to correct the compensation
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pattern that she built over two years of favoring her one side.
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She got relief.
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Genuinely, got better mobility, less acute pain.
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But her fatigue was still there and never really moved.
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And every few weeks, the back pain would flare again with no clear mechanical trigger.
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That's the plateau pattern that I mentioned earlier, and it's exactly the signal to move
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into pillar two.
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Her blood work then showed elevated inflammatory markers, insulin resistance that
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nobody had flagged before.
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Her stool testing showed a gut dysbiosis pattern that was actively driving the systemic
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inflammation, which was in part keeping her spine inflamed and slow to heal, and was almost
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certainly behind the fatigue.
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We corrected her gut function, addressed the metabolic piece, and both the fatigue and the
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flare pattern improved substantially.
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Later, at her follow-up advanced panel, we saw early hormonal decline consistent with
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perimenopause, plus early markers worth tracking on the neurodegeneration side given
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her family history.
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That's what moved her into pillar three, hormone optimization and a physician directed
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peptide protocol focused on tissue repair and recovery.
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Structure was already sound, root cause was corrected, pillar three was now about
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optimizing what was left.
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That's what we call integration.
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Not three separate treatment plans from three separate physicians, but all three running in
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parallel.
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One plan, one data record, adjusting in real time to what her body actually needed at each
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stage.
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Now, here's the problem with the way most people experience healthcare.
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Going back to how we opened today, every time you see someone new, you start over.
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A new intake, a new history, no access to what the last provider found.
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There's no continuity.
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That's exactly what our Total Care membership was built to eliminate.
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It's one membership that gives you access across all three pillars: physical, functional,
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and longevity medicine under one care team with one continuous record.
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If your journey starts in pillar one and your body tells us through actual data that pillar
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two or three is warranted, you're not starting over with a new provider, re explaining your
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history.
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We already have it, we already tracked it, and we're building on it.
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That's the entire point of building a three pillar model in the first place.
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It only works if the pillars talk to each other.
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A membership that silos you into one pillar basically defeats the purpose.
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If any part of what I described today sounds familiar, if you've done physical therapy,
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chiropractic care, you're still stuck, or your labs are coming back normal but you don't feel
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normal, that's usually a sign you're looking at the wrong pillar, not that nothing is wrong.
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Book a discovery call with our team using the link in the show notes.
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We'll walk you through your history and tell you honestly which pillar makes sense as your
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starting point.
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That's the three pillar model.
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Physical medicine, functional medicine, longevity medicine, and the data driven thread
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that connects all three.
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Thanks for listening today at Health Decoded.
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If this episode resonated with you or if you could share this with someone, we greatly
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appreciate it.
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That's how we spread the word here.
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We do not profit off of this show.
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We're simply here to educate and empower our patients and their friends and family.
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Please follow this podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen.
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Share it with someone who needs to hear this.
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Help us spread this message to help people optimize their health.
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I'm doctor Alessi, and I'll see you on the next episode.
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Thank
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you for tuning in to Health Decoded, where we break down the truth about all things health
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and empower you to take charge of your well-being.
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If you found value in today's episode please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with
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someone who needs to hear this.
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For more resources, personalized support, or to have your questions answered live on the show,
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visit Ascend Functional Health and head to the contact page to connect with us directly.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay empowered, and remember your health is in your hands.