What's it like to work with a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner?

Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioners work with bio-individual human physiology and function every day.

The results for health and wellness for their clients are profound.

Here's what you can expect during a session.

First, your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will ask you to fill out some fact-finding paperwork:

1. An initial interview form with general questions.
2. A Nutritional Assessment Questionnaire. This is an on-line form that contains 300 questions that you tick as you go and takes around 30 mins to complete.
3. A 3-day food diary.
4. A disclaimer for you to sign, so you know exactly what your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner is certified to help you with.

This paperwork is used in the first session with your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, where they will ask you in-depth questions about your history. Did you grow up near farms where pesticides were being sprayed? What kind of birth did you have? Did you have colic as a baby? These are all topics a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will cover in order to get to the roots of your health issues.

You may never have experienced being with someone this interested in the intricate details of your overall health, but that's what Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner do. They collect facts like a forensic scientist and use them to solve a crime – in this case, the depletion of your vitality.

After the fact-finding mission is complete, a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will perform some simple tests. Termed a Functional Clinical Assessment, this may include:

1. Taking your blood pressure and pulse
2. Palpating reflex points and testing the muscle fibers of your limbs to stimuli

You will be asked to lay on your back on a therapy table, and your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will request permission to touch you for the purposes of evaluation only. Using their knowledge of the innate connection between the nerve endings at skin level and the body's internal organs, your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will ask you to rate the level of tenderness as they palpate the reflex point*. Most reflex points are throughout the torso, on your abdomen and rib cage.

The aim is to understand which organs are demonstrating stress and contributing to your body's overall dysfunction, never to hurt you. Your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will encourage open communication at all times to ensure you are comfortable. If you are not comfortable with this part of the process, your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner can simply just work with the information they have collected from the forms and initial interview and make general recommendations.

1. Lingual Neural Testing

Using the results of the fact-finding and the initial examination, your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will test several nutrients that you may wish to consider to assist your body's recovery. This is performed either by placing a small sample of a nutrient in your mouth or by testing the nutrient with your body’s Biofield. You can learn more about the bodies energetic Biofield here:

The biofield hypothesis: its biophysical basis and role in medicine

Biofield Science and Healing Dr. Shamini Jain; Sages and Scientists 2016 (Video)

When the message from the nerve endings on your tongue (your taste buds) or Biofield has travelled to your brain and out to your external nerve endings surrounding your organs (around 15 seconds), they will re-test the reflex points that were most sensitive.

You will be amazed at how the tenderness rating will change when your body senses the right nutrient to help it heal. That's what we mean about the "body's innate intelligence" – we are incredibly complex organisms with the ability to heal ourselves if only given the chance.

This allows your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner to address for nutrient deficiencies, food sensitivities, foods that best support your body, assess if your current supplementation is supporting your body and identify when you have reached sufficiency with a dietary or supplemental protocol.

Your Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner will then make their recommendations (either in the same session or the next) and help you to understand the reasons for those suggestions. In understanding why you might need to make them, you will be far more committed to the process and will move closer to your health goals with each session.

Working with a Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner is an ongoing process, with visits anywhere from 2 weeks to 8 weeks apart, depending on where you are in your health journey.

Our aim is to work ourselves out of a job and get you self-sufficient within a minimum time frame. However, some people choose to stay with their Functional Nutritional Therapy Practitioner on an ongoing basis to keep themselves fine tuned and in top shape!

* Reflex points connect to the neuro-vascular and neuro-lymphatic pathways which surround every organ system in the body. When an organ is in stress, these pathways accumulate fluid around them (called venous or lymphatic congestion) to support healing. This congestion results in tenderness of the reflex point.