functional medicine and nutritional genomics - American Association ...

AAPI’S NUTRITION GUIDE TO OPTIMAL HEALTH: USING PRINCIPLES OF FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE AND NUTRITIONAL GENOMICS
12
Getting Unstuck
James S. Gordon,
MD
Introduction
Depression is not a disease, the end point of a
pathological process. It is a sign that our lives
are out of balance, that we’re stuck. It’s a wakeup
call and the start of a journey that can help
us become whole and happy, a journey that can
change and transform our lives.
The approach I use challenges the prevailing
‚medical model‛ of depression and the
widespread, even epidemic, use of chemical
antidepressants. This narrow model of diagnosis
and treatment insists that those who feel helpless
and hopeless, unhappy and uncertain have a
disease, like insulin-dependent diabetes that
requires pharmacological treatment. There is
evidence that strongly suggests that this model is
poorly justified, largely inappropriate, limited and
limiting, and, often enough, dangerous to your
physical, emotional and spiritual health. The
antidepressants that it dictates should be used
seldom—as a last resort and generally briefly—not
as a form of primary care.
What I’m sharing with you in the case history
that follows is a newer, more hopeful and far
more comprehensive and effective model for
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healing depression—both the clinical depression
that is diagnosed in sixteen to eighteen million
Americans each year and chronic, low-grade
dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and anxiety that affect
so many more of us. It’s a model you can
incorporate into your work now, one that will meet
your patients’ unique individual needs and give
them positive results that they can begin to
experience immediately.
This Unstuck approach marries modern science
with the perennial wisdom of the world’s great
psychological and spiritual traditions. It makes use
of the remarkable capacity each of us has to
recover—physically, emotionally, spiritually—from the
hurts and trauma we have experienced, to
transform our fears into teachers, and to restore
and renew our brain, body, mind and spirit.
Here is how I used this approach with one
patient. It will give you a feeling for what is
possible, for what you can also do.
Theresa, a 37-year-old African-American civil
rights lawyer, tells me in our first session together
that she has been miserable for a month. During
that time she's dropped weight she can ill afford
to lose and has been sleeping only four to five
2012