Functional Medicine Case Studies

“The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease”.

- Sir William Osler

Case Study No 1 – Mark Hyman Functional Doctor, patient ‘Elise’

Elise suffered from intractable psoriasis. With red, weeping, raw skin from head to toe since she was six months old, her parents had taken her to the top medical schools and she had been given the most advanced drugs including powerful immune suppressants and chemotherapy to shut off inflammation. When Dr Hyman first saw Elise she was four years old.  She had just emerged from a month in the intensive care unit after fighting a life-threatening Staphylococcus infection triggered by her medication, Enbrel, which suppressed her immune system.  Rather than enquiring about the root cause of her inflamed skin, doctors had used medication to suppress symptoms.  Still she was no better.  No one asked about her diet or thought about how her history of antibiotics as a baby might have affected her delicate gut flora, thus setting up the conditions for inflammation.  

Functional Medicine led Dr Hyman to a different set of questions.  Rather than asking what drug he should use to treat the symptoms, he asked what caused the inflammation in the first place – a simple idea that is foreign to our medical training.  The causes of inflammation are few – microbes, allergens, toxins, poor diet, stress.  And he asked what the immune system needed to regain balance.  Then he applied these principles to her by removing a common cause of inflammation in our diet – gluten, known to be linked to psoriasis – and cleared out bad microbes (yeast in this case) in her gut that resulted from years of antibiotics and steroids.  He also added a few supplements to support proper immune function – omega 3 fats, zinc, vitamin D, and probiotics to help balance her gut flora.  

Within two weeks her skin, red and raw for over three years, was clear.  Not a miracle, but a repeatable result that is a natural outcome of employing the principles of Functional Medicine.