Lifestyle & functional medicine approach to health

Dr. Sepideh Moayed is a board-certified musculoskeletal radiologist who leads Preventative Medicine, Inc., in Silicon Valley, where she emphasizes whole patient care. Her areas of focus include evidence-based methods that enable behavioral change through life style modification tools and techniques. Although she performs ultrasound guided diagnostic and therapeutic procedures such as knee, shoulder and small joint injections, she believes these modalities merely “manage” but don’t prevent or effectively treat the underlying contributors: inflammation, degeneration and damage caused by excessive oxidative stress. In order to effectively treat and more importantly prevent disease, she believes life style modifications and personalized functional medicine approach to health are ultimately more effective solutions. Chronic systemic inflammation is linked to a myriad of disease processes including type II diabetes, heart disease, cancer, osteoarthritis, other inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, dementia, etc. Commonly prescribed medications, joint injections and surgeries may help pain relief for one joint but they don’t prevent disease progression or coexisting systemic inflammation. Case in point, as the disease progresses and attacks various other organs, the individual may temporarily be free of the particular joint pain (due to the injection or prescribed pain medication), but typically they get more and more “ill” physically, emotionally and mentally. Lifestyle medicine involves helping an individual achieve ideal health by eating a diet that is appropriate for their genotype and genetics, the right kind of exercises that support their bodies to thrive while detoxifying from environmental insults and learnable stress reduction techniques that can help cortisol management. Cortisol excess can rob the body of needed restoration, calm and the ability to repair itself. It is the underlying trigger of many chronic diseases and results in insulin resistance, cancer, sugar lability, mood disorders, mental, psychical and emotional distress-all of which further cause unhealthy lifestyle choices and cause the vicious cycle that is hard to undo. By treating the whole person holistically, Dr. Moayed follows a functional medicine model of health preservation where the patient is empowered to change habits and behaviors and thereby dampen certain non helpful genetics and augment genetic expressions that can support health. Awareness, acceptance and action are on a continuum and when utilized collectively, they provide more than temporary relief of an acute exacerbation; they help prevent disease in the first place.