Patient: Brian M., age 78
Provider: Amber Warren, PA-C | Adult Functional Practitioner
“Functional medicine reduces the inflammation in your body. COVID-19 attacks inflammation in your body. And that’s the sole reason, I’m convinced, that I had minimal symptoms. My wife also had minimal symptoms. We feel very, very fortunate that we were able to go through the exposure of COVID-19 and not really suffer from it.”
– Brian M.
Brian presented with episodic ataxia, a neurological disorder that causes episodes of poor coordination and balance. This caused him to experience difficulty walking, as well as consistent joint pain and body aches.
As a former physician himself, Brian understood that his sugar intake was affecting his gait. He came to Functional Medicine of Idaho to seek out help making dietary changes that could help his condition. Brian began working with Amber Warren, PA-C, in 2019.
By completing a comprehensive elimination diet, Brian and Amber were able to identify food allergies and sensitivities he had not known about previously, and remove them from his diet to reduce the inflammation within his body. Within only 3 weeks, Brian began to notice improvements in his gait, his morning joint pain and body aches decreased, and he stopped taking anti-inflammatory medication.
“It was amazing, within 3 weeks, how I started to feel!”
Brian continued to work with the Functional Medicine of Idaho team to maintain his new dietary and lifestyle choices. One evening in 2020, Brian and his wife received a call that they had been exposed to COVID-19 three days earlier. Both were surprised by the news, because neither were experiencing any symptoms. To be safe, Brian came into the clinic to get tested for the virus, and, to his shock, tested positive. He and his wife quarantined responsibly, but only experienced minor body aches (and no other symptoms) during their quarantine!
Brian attributes his pain-free COVID experience entirely to functional medicine. The COVID-19 virus thrives on inflammation within the human body. Thanks to Brian’s work with the Functional Medicine of Idaho team and the lifestyle modifications he made prior to his virus exposure, Brian not only survived COVID-19 (despite being in his 70s and having other comorbidities), he did so with minimal symptoms!
“Our immune systems were prepared for some outside virus coming into our bodies, and it attacked it and developed our own antibodies. And I think that’s, again, 100% because of functional medicine!”
