Thinking Differently · Sports Medicine
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking for a physician who goes beyond the usual medical approach.
Peak Athletic Performance
When a healthy-looking athlete goes to the doctor, it can be challenging for the doctor not to assume they’re perfectly fine just because they look fit, exercise regularly, and eat well. Traditional medicine primarily deals with immediate problems and doesn’t dig deep into what might be affecting the athlete’s performance and potential.
Functional sports medicine takes a different approach that considers the athlete as a whole person. It looks to prevent issues, identify and address their root causes, and make use of non-operative orthopedic therapies to promote healing. Functional sports medicine aims to help athletes achieve peak performance by uncovering and resolving any underlying health limitations.
We do this through three main steps:
We Listen:
To understand where your issue is coming from, we need to ask many questions. Many health problems are complex and need a deep investigation to find their source. We can focus on fixing the issue once we determine what’s causing it.
Our approach starts with an initial conversation. We learn about your athletic activities, how you train, how you recover, your sleep, your diet, your nutrition, your lifestyle, and how your body systems like the heart, lungs, digestion, and immune system are doing.
We Test:
After the initial assessment, we recommend advanced lab testing. These lab tests are necessary to our program, as we believe in “testing instead of guessing.” Functional laboratory testing and evaluation is a critical component in gaining a more comprehensive understanding of how your body is functioning.
We Support:
Athletes often push their bodies to the limit, leading to injuries and long recovery times. Functional medicine can significantly impact an athlete’s performance and injury recovery because it takes a whole-body, whole-person approach. Instead of treating the symptoms with medications, functional medicine addresses the root causes of health issues, thereby supporting the body to heal and recover itself.
OC Sports and Wellness uses functional medicine to help athletes recover and avoid injuries:
- Nutrition: We use advanced tests to see if athletes lack certain nutrients or have imbalances in their diet. By fixing these problems and giving personalized nutrition advice, functional medicine can help the body heal itself. In this way, eating the right foods becomes vital for recovery.
- Hormones: Functional medicine looks at how hormones work in the body and tries to make them work better. Because hormones can affect how well athletes recover, functional medicine may involve hormone treatments to help athletes recover faster.
- Gut Health: A balanced gut can help the immune system and reduce inflammation. A healthy gut is crucial for overall health and recovery. By fixing gut problems, functional medicine supports the body’s healing, which helps to prevent future injuries.
- Personalized Plans: Each athlete has a unique body, genes, and lifestyle, which makes it vital to create an individual plan for each athlete’s needs. Functional medicine can help athletes recover and avoid injuries by tailoring treatments to the individual.
- Integrative Therapies: Functional medicine uses a variety of treatments that can help recovery and prevent injuries. These therapies can make athletes recover faster and perform better.