The Wellness Repair Plan comes from medical doctors, Ph.D.’s and nutritionists who take a functional medicine approach.

Functional medicine is a structured plan for identifying and eliminating the root causes of disease. I am routinely hearing it referred to as root cause medicine.

Since the concept is so new to many, here’s a way to visualize how it works. If you sit on two tacks, taking a pain killer isn’t nearly as helpful as removing the tacks.  Also, only removing one tack won’t make you feel 50% better. You need to find and eliminate all causes of the problem. Removing the tacks is intuitively more effective than treating the pain symptom.

Functional medicine practitioners include Harvard, Yale and other traditionally trained medical doctors (M.D.s), Ph.D’s and clinicians that have gone on for additional years of training in nutrition, as well as the endocrine (hormone), immune, adrenal and nervous systems.

Dr. Mark Hyman is the Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine, the Founder of The UltraWellness Center, and a ten-time #1 New York Times Bestselling author. He does a great job of introducing functional medicine.

The gold standard for functional medicine training is the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM). IFM now collaborates with the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. IFM maintains a database of certified practitioners.

As I dug into what the IFM certified doctors and their patients were saying, I quickly noticed patterns for nutrition and lifestyle. The Wellness Repair Plan is my summation of those patterns and will give you a giant head start in understanding the path to wellness.

The Four R Program

Jeffrey Bland, Ph.D. is often referred to as the Father of Functional Medicine. In 1995, Dr. Bland, and his associates at IFM, developed a simple four-step program to guide doctors. It’s called the Four R Program, because there are four steps that each start with the letter R.

According to Dr. Bland, “If I had only one clinical tool to teach doctors how to become successful with, it would be this therapy. Any person who suffers from symptoms such as chronic fatigue, pain and low energy that is accompanied by digestive problems is a candidate for a twelve week application of the Four R Program. We have found that in most people with chronic symptoms twelve weeks is a good target for the time it takes to restore proper physiological function.”

Here are the four R’s.

Remove

• Toxins in food (synthetic chemicals, GMOs, antibiotics, heavy metals, oxidized fat)
• Gastric irritants (e.g., caffeine without fat, alcohol, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs)
• Food allergies, sensitivities, or reactions (Do a standard elimination diet to find out which ones effect you.)
• Chronic low-grade infections in the gut (e.g., fungi and parasites)

Replace

• Stomach acid (or stimulate stomach acid with bitters)
• Digestive enzymes

Reinoculate

• Restore beneficial bacteria to reestablish a healthy balance of microflora in the gut.

Repair

• Provide nutrients to heal the gut wall or lining.
• Support the immune functioning of the gut.

Renew or Rebalance

(a bonus R added in recent years by some doctors)

• Pay attention to lifestyle choices – sleep, exercise and stress can all affect the GI tract.

Some steps are foundational for other steps, so the order is important (like pulling out the tacks first is important when you sit on tacks).