NNJ-CS-Gourdine-JAN19

Getting a Good Long Look Under the Hood

by Martin Miron

The Functional Medicine Center for Personalized Care (FxMedCenters), serves Bergen County in four locations: two in Hackensack, Paramus and Ramsey. Owner Dr. Vanessa Gourdine explains the three parts of the organization of FxMedCenters, Specialized Therapy Associates and Xceptional You. “The functional medicine center is focused primarily on the physical or biological aspect of health and the specialized therapy is centered on the mental and emotional health; there’s another component, Exceptional You, is the health coaching part of the organization. You can go to any location and receive any one of the services.”

The practice began in 1994. The functional medicine center was started about five years ago, and has grown substantially. “We have a large population of patients who hope to overcome the frustration that they’ve been feeling in traditional medicine where they receive medicines that basically offer symptom relief, but don’t move them towards health and a cure,” notes Gourdine.

She advises, “Our main focus is to help people get an in-depth assessment of their health status, which includes an evaluation of all their symptoms, their lifestyle, their health practices and if they so choose, their genetics. We actually look at all aspects of health, which can be any part of the biological system. It can be your [overall] health, your hormonal health, your thyroid—and we do using laboratory study as required.”

Although the center can take a traditional approach and go by the recipe, so to speak, in the practice of medicine, the clinical picture of the patient may be different than what the tests indicate. “The numbers can say you’re fine, but you’re not doing well physically, and in functional medicine, we’re more concerned with making sure that the patient is well, so that may require some intervention,” says Gourdine. The first intervention is making sure that the systems of the body are working normally, with good gut health and absorbing all the proper nutrients without having any autoimmune responses.

“I have a tendency to see in my practice that people because they’ve been round robin on various medications, they have seen various doctors, they feel like they’re not getting better. I think that everyone should have a functional medicine health assessment, because if you want to prevent disease, it’s a lot easier than treating disease; what functional medicine can do that traditional medicine cannot do is help to identify those metabolic processes that are not working as well as they should and help put them back in line so that you are protecting your health,” notes Gourdine. “It’s always been the case that people come to me and they say, ‘You know, this is the first time in my life I feel really vital, I have lots of energy, I can focus, I can sleep well,’ and they notice the difference in how they feel.”

What makes the tri-part organization of Functional Medicine, Specialized Therapy and Exceptional You different is that it enables them to not only to provide the client with functional medicine, but also with specialists in the area of behavior change, with psychologists on board that can help them with any mental or emotional issues that can affect their health. “We provide what I believe is necessary for the full process of change in order for people to achieve health,” confirms Gourdine. “For example, the vast majority of people do not comply with making substantive changes in their lives in order to achieve health. So you go to the doctor and the doctor says do x, y, and z, but they have a hard time following through psychologically and behaviorally to make those substantive changes in their life. This is what makes us different—that we actually help people to make the change.”

Gourdine always had a fascination with how the brain works. She recalls, “I started off with a study in psychoanalysis and received my doctorate degree from one of the top institutions in the practice of psychology; this has helped me to progress further in my understanding of how people’s minds work, and therefore help to achieve what I’ve come to recognize as one of the most important elements of achieving health, which is using one’s brain power to actually achieve health. I started a proprietary program called the brain power program that is basically about utilizing the ways in which your brain works and your mind works in order to achieve the change that you want to achieve in your life. I progressed further in my education with an advanced degree in medicine because the mind and body are one system.”

For appointments and more information, call 1-855-693-9633 or visit FxMedCenters.com, SpecializedTherapy.com or XceptionalYou.com.