As we have talked more about Functional Medicine a lot of families ask us if we could refer a practitioner. I am grateful to have been introduced to Dr. Ray Andrew of Prestige Wellness Institute in Springville and Moab, Utah. A spry 56-year-old who loves to mountain bike and be active outdoors, he is super passionate about wellness.
Dr. Andrew has been in private medical practice since 2002. He graduated from the University of Utah and then went on to earn his medical degree at Saint Louis University. He completed his residency at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
You can check out his website at https://prestigewellnessinstitute.com/.
We talked about how Dr. Andrew found Functional Medicine and how he continues to be passionate about learning. A member of the A4M fellowship since 2009, he attends 6-8 conferences each year, never able to learn too much to help his patients turn their health around.
Dr. Andrew’s practice is cash-based. This enables him to spend the time with each patient that is required to get to the bottom of their health challenges instead of sending them out the door with prescription drugs in six minutes, as insurance medicine does. Most people who see Dr. Andrew’s team have already seen a handful of insurance doctors, including specialists, and have not gotten the help they need.
With annual U.S. healthcare spending currently at $4.3 trillion, Americans have nearly the poorest health of the developed nations. Our financial priorities are completely backward.
At the Pure Living Family Foundation, one of our goals is to help families in need obtain the kind of timely health care Dr. Andrew’s offices provide. Families can apply for The Pure Living Family Foundation health and wellness grant here:
The Pure Living Family Foundation Health and Wellness Grant
Dr. Andrew shared with me an article on autism that he has not yet sent to press. The following segment really stood out to me:
"In a twist of irony, we are told that substances (vitamins, minerals, herbs, hormones, amino acids, fatty acids, peptides, etc.) that have supported human health for thousands of years may be dangerous and should be subjected to government approval, but the thousands of new chemicals we inhale, touch, eat, drink, and put on our skin every year require no safety testing whatsoever."
This led us to talk about the toxic soup that we live in today and how it impacts our special needs kids.
Dr. Andrew referenced the book, The Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine, and a Man-Made Epidemic, by Dan Olmsted and Mark Blaxill.
Following is a short excerpt:
"But consider for a moment a commonsense test of the hidden horde hypothesis. By one estimate, in the history of mankind, well over 100 billion people have been born on Earth, 99 billion of them before 1930. If autism rates were truly 1 in 150 throughout that period, then we would expect to have seen close to 700 million autistic people born before Leo Kanner's first case in 1931. Yet, try as we might, we find no mention of these people in the history books, in literature, in folklore, or in family records of any kind. How could this many cases go unnoticed and unrecognized for so long? How could this many severely ill people have remained hidden, much less functioned adequately without help for so many years?...
... The reason reported rates are higher is because the real rate is higher. Some may find it hard to accept, the the truth is inescapable; something new and terrible is happening to a generation of children."
Studies referenced:
S.K. Katusic et al., "Case Definition in Epidemiologic Studies of AD/HD," Ann Epidemiol, 2005, 15(6): 430-7.
Carl Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?" Population Today, February 1995, www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleEverLivedonEarth.aspx.