When it comes to addiction, Functional Medicine can offer a comprehensive approach to treating the whole person. 

Mind, body, and spirit need to be taken into account, as well as diet and lifestyle interventions and the ever-so-essential aspect of a supportive and uplifting community. With a systems-based approach, we can cover all of these areas and more, to create long-term recovery.

On today’s Broken Brain Podcast, our host, Dhru, talks to Dr. David Haase, a leading educator and innovator in the emerging field of personalized systems medicine. He graduated from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and completed his medical residency at the Mayo Clinic where, despite the undeniable brilliance and dedication of the doctors around him, he saw countless instances of patients getting better not because of medical advances, but in spite of them.

After years of turbulent reflection, Dr. Haase founded the MaxWell Clinic in Tennessee with the expressed goal to better understand and enable the human body’s miraculous ability to create health. He treats a wide range of conditions and has a special expertise in neurodegenerative and other brain-related challenges, fatigue, and other conditions caused by mitochondrial, inflammatory, and immune dysregulation. Dr. Haase also teaches internationally, including for the Institute for Functional Medicine.

In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Haase talk about how Functional Medicine is a great way to address complex chronic conditions like substance use disorders. They discuss how early life trauma impacts brain development and increases the likelihood of stress, pain and addiction. They also talk about how we can use Functional Medicine to transition from acute care to long-term sustainable recovery.

In this episode, we dive into:

-The connection between stress, pain, and addiction (13:15)

-How opioids affects the gut-brain interaction (19:07)

-Addiction as a chronic disease (22:44)

-How early life trauma impacts brain development (28:19)

-How nutritional deficiencies impact stress, pain, and addiction (35:18)

-Environmental toxins and the susceptibility to stress, pain, and addiction (42:02)

-The importance of community when it comes to our health (51:46)

-Dr. David Haase’s story of how he got into systems-based medicine (57:26)

-How a Functional Medicine doctor can play an important role to support someone in their recovery (1:08:08)

-Learn more about Dr. Haase and his work (1:13:49)

For more on Dr. David Haase, be sure to follow him on Instagram @davidhaasemd, on Facebook @davidhaasemd, and on Twitter @davidhaasemd. Check out his website https://drhaase.com. You can find his book, Curiosity Heals the Human: How to Solve “Unsolvable” Medical Challenges with Better Questions and Advanced Technologies, right here.

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