Miami Living Magazine features the best Miami has to offer. Click on any magazine below and enjoy. You can download our free app on iTunes. Ideal for iPad and iPhone users.
Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/1039286
Lincoln Road Wellness Providing Multi-Disciplinary Healthcare Services Words by Joseph Hudson DC A multi-disciplinary office is a modern approach to healthcare. It is based on the principle of having more than one discipline working together to better treat the patient. This means treating a condition using the methodology from more than one type of healthcare professional, with each one contributing to the overall care of the patient. Let's use back pain as an example. Most people would associate this type of pain with a musculoskeletal problem. Musculoskeletal treatments such as spinal decompression or physical therapy should be an obvious starting point since the immediate goals of these modalities are to restore proper motion to the affected spinal region as well as to reduce the pain. It is fair to assume that seeing both of these practitioners together would yield better results than if a patient would simply choose one of them. What may not be so obvious is that there are various other internal systems of the body that may also be systemically contributing to the pain. For our example, we will limit the care to chiropractic, physical therapy, and functional medicine. Functional medicine is the practice of first diagnosing the true source of the patient's symptoms to then directly treat the root cause of the condition rather than focusing on the symptoms themselves. This is accomplished with a full history, physical examination, and diagnostic testing. From there, lab tests are often used to further assess and monitor the patient. Let's further discuss why these additional functional aspects may be important for the long-term treatment of back pain. Studies show that people with an increase in fat mass and fat distribution also show an increase in low back pain and disability rates. 1 A multi-disciplinary practice would address the possible functional aspects of metabolic syndrome. This syndrome has been associated with poor diet, nutritional deficiencies, lack of exercise, increased stress, and other poor lifestyle choices. A doctor who practices functional medicine would include the assessment of these patterns with any patient who arrived with back pain. By including discussions about functional health and lifestyle early on, the patient would be in much better health later in life than if these issues where never addressed. You can see by my example that the patient should be seen by several different disciplines working together with the shared goal of creating an optimal environment for the patient to both recover and thrive. The combination of spinal decompression by the chiropractor, postural rehabilitation by the physical therapist, and healthy weight loss by the functional medicine doctor would all give the patient a significantly better short- and long-term outcome than simply providing one of these services alone. The goal of a multi- disciplinary practice is to provide the patient the best results possible. The whole must be greater than the sum of the individual parts. ML Get to know Dr. Hudson and Lincoln Road Wellness by watching the short video below: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsS-3Rqm1l8 Lincoln Road Wellness Joseph Hudson, DC 305-673-8248 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach www.hudsondc.com Reference 1: Fat mass and fat distribution are associated with low back pain intensity and disability (results from a cohort study): www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28183360