The International Academy of Nutritional and Metabolic Medicine (IANMM):

 The Academy has been borne out of the need in Asia Pacific to educate and promote functional medicine in a region where the discipline is still in a fledgling stage. It is incorporated in Hong Kong and is a joint venture between Pacific Wellspring Asia and Dr. David M. Brady, the Vice Provost of the Health Sciences Division and the Director of the Human Nutrition Institute at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Many doctors who are trained in mainstream medicine are rather skeptical when doctors in the US and Europe claimed that they have healed or “graduated” patients out of chronic diseases such as psoriasis, ulcerative colitis and chronic arthritis through the practice of functional medicine.

What is functional medicine? There is an Institute of Functional Medicine in the US that represents the interest of a group of healthcare practitioners engaged in this practice.

The definition from their website:

Functional medicine is personalized medicine that deals with primary prevention and underlying causes instead of symptoms for serious chronic disease. It is a science-based field of health care that is grounded in the following principles:

• Biochemical individuality describes the importance of individual variations in metabolic function that derive from genetic and environmental differences among individuals.
• Patient-centered medicine emphasizes “patient care” rather than “disease care,” following Sir William Osler’s admonition that “It is more important to know what patient has the disease than to know what disease the patient has.”
• Dynamic balance of internal and external factors.
• Web-like interconnections of physiological factors? an abundance of research now supports the view that the human body functions as an orchestrated network of interconnected systems, rather than individual systems functioning autonomously and without effect on each other. For example, we now know that immunological dysfunctions can promote cardiovascular disease, that dietary imbalances can cause hormonal disturbances, and that environmental exposures can precipitate neurologic syndromes such as Parkinson’s disease.
• Health as a positive vitality and not merely the absence of disease.
• Promotion of organ reserve as the means to enhance health span.

Functional medicine is anchored by an examination of the core clinical imbalances that underlie various disease conditions. Those imbalances arise as environmental inputs such as diet, nutrients (including air and water), exercise, and trauma are processed by one’s body, mind, and spirit through a unique set of genetic predispositions, attitudes, and beliefs. The fundamental physiological processes include communication, both outside and inside the cell; bioenergetics, or the transformation of food into energy; replication, repair, and maintenance of structural integrity, from the cellular to the whole body level; elimination of waste; protection and defense; and transport and circulation. The core clinical imbalances that arise from malfunctions within this complex system include:

• Hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances
• Oxidation-reduction imbalances and mitochondropathy
• Detoxification and biotransformational imbalances
• Immune imbalances
• Inflammatory imbalances
• Digestive, absorptive, and microbiological imbalances
• Structural imbalances from cellular membrane function to the musculoskeletal system

Imbalances such as these are the precursors to the signs and symptoms by which we detect and label (diagnose) organ system disease. Improving balance in the patient’s environmental inputs and in the body’s fundamental physiological processes is the precursor to restoring health and it involves much more than treating the symptoms.

Functional medicine is dedicated to improving the management of complex, chronic disease by intervening at multiple levels to address these core clinical imbalances and to restore each patient’s functionality and health. Functional medicine is not a unique and separate body of knowledge. It is grounded in scientific principles and information widely available in medicine today, combining research from various disciplines into highly detailed yet clinically relevant models of disease pathogenesis and effective clinical management.

Functional medicine emphasizes a definable and teachable process of integrating multiple knowledge bases within a pragmatic intellectual matrix that focuses on functionality at many levels, rather than a single treatment for a single diagnosis. Functional medicine uses the patient’s story as a key tool for integrating diagnosis, signs and symptoms, and evidence of clinical imbalances into a comprehensive approach to improve both the patient’s environmental inputs and his or her physiological function. It is a clinician’s discipline, and it directly addresses the need to transform the practice of primary care.

Functional medicine has its foundation on nutrition and metabolic medicine. For that reason, the International Academy of Nutritional and Metabolic Medicine is established to focused on these 2 pillars of the Functional Medicine foundation. The academy seeks to train healthcare practitioners on the fundamentals of nutritional and metabolic concepts in functional medicine. The 12 modules cover a comprehensive range of the concepts and principles that would prepare a practitioner to embark on functional medicine practice with a solid evidence-based best practice. Individuals who complete the coursework will be provided with a certificate of completion by the University of Bridgeport, Division of Postgraduate Studies.

The bold statements of the paradigm shift to chronic disease management offered by functional medicine suggest that there are critical gaps in current medical practice. Conventional medical practice does put a great emphasis on disease management.

The early philosophers knew how important food is. "Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine by thy food" Hippocrates; "No illness which can be treated by diet should be treated by any other means" Maimonides.

Metabolic dysfunctions are not detected and dealt with early. It is almost an incredible notion that vitamins and cofactors deficiencies could happen with even the rich and well-to-do population segments. However, greater understanding of genetic and biochemical individuality suggests that this indeed not only possible, but common. Technology today allows us to assess the critical functional roles of vitamins and cofactors instead of measuring the blood levels. The “deficiencies” are apparent due to the sensitivity and accuracy of the tests that set out to measure the level of critical vitamins needed to drive certain metabolic process. For example, the elevated methylmalonate is a sensitive marker of Vit B12 deficiency as the precursor needs Vit B12 to be converted to succinyl CoA in the Kreb’s cycle. The urine marker appearing as early as 10 days of deficiency is the gold standard for the early detection of Vit B12 deficiency. Clinical signs of the megaloblastic anaemia only become apparent after four months of deficiency.

Mainstream medicine does not train doctors to assess the detoxification process in the liver – the 2 phases of detoxification and how deficiencies in certain nutrients could impair the detoxification efficiency. Other biochemical cycles such as the urea cycle, the de-saturation and elongation of fatty acids, the synthesis of cholesterol and CoQ10, the hormonal synthesis cycle all play a role in physiological dysfunction and addresseing core processes, such as detoxification, may allow these complex pathways to suddenly come alive and could explain elegantly underlying dysfunctions prior to disease state. All these critical metabolic functions would be covered in detail in the educational modules in IANMM.

IANMM aims to provide the critical foundation for the practice of evidence-based nutritional and metabolic medicine that form the basis for functional medical practice, which has helped many patients with chronic disease such as fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, autoimmune diseases such as ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, and others.