All about intergative health with Cornerstone Integrative Wellness
Cornerstone Integrative Wellness was started in 2022 in Columbia, SC by two women who saw the need for a different way to approach health and wellness.
Christina is a medical doctor who completed medical school at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston and then went on to complete her Internal Medicine residency at Emory University in Atlanta. After spending a decade in the hospital setting, she realized her passion was to help patients dig deeper and look for root causes for dysfunction and disease in their bodies.
She walked her own health journey through her 20s and 30s that led her to the integrative medicine space. In 2020, she began her functional medicine studies through the Institute of Functional Medicine.
Ansley Westbrook's undergraduate and graduate degrees are in education and she was an elementary school teacher prior to having her children.
Ansley also walked her own health journey after having her three children that led her to more holistic practices and nutritional and lifestyle optimization to support her health and quality of life.
Both women are Nutritional Therapy Practitioners, trained by the Nutritional Therapy Association. Cornerstone's primary focus is to work in a coaching model with their patients to uncover the many nutritional and lifestyle factors that play into imbalance and dysfunction.
"We believe that every person has a unique body and that we must optimize many facets of lifestyle and wellness to help bring the body back to an optimal state of health."
Keep reading as the duo explains what integrative health is and how it can be used in combination with conventional medicine.
Q. What is integrative health?
A. Integrative health is a holistic approach of looking at whole body wellness for the individual person. It takes the physical, emotional, social, and nutritional needs of each person into account. Integrative health seeks out root causes for dysfunction in the body rather than focusing on symptoms and quick symptom remediation.
It is truly seeking "health care" instead of "sick care." We ask, "What causes the symptoms" instead of saying, "Let's get rid of the symptoms as quickly as possible."
Integrative health uses different modalities to support wellness (ie; functional lab reviews, nutrition, functional testing, referrals out for counseling, chiropractic, massage, physical training, acupuncture, other medical and holistic specialists, etc).
Q. What led you to start your own practice?
A. Cornerstone Integrative Wellness has been a dream of ours for several years now. We have known each other for about 10 years and we had many conversations over the years about integrative health and root-cause approaches to wellness.
When we both were in our Nutritional Therapy Practitioner program, we realized that starting a business together was our best way forward. Our goal was and is to do our best to help patients make a lasting difference in their own health and wellness.
We accomplish this goal by helping each person discover the practices and foods that nourish their own bodies. Success for our patients looks like personalized empowerment, with each patient carrying the knowledge of their own body and practical tools and nutrition practices that promote vitality and longevity.
Q. How does integrative health differ from conventional medicine?
A. Integrative health is different from conventional medicine in the approach to the patient: rather than seeing symptoms or disease from the perspective of a single body system, the integrative approach sees the body as a whole being.
Everything is interconnected in the body and what impacts one system also impacts other systems. This approach doesn't look at each system in a silo (ie; heart health, hormone health, brain health, etc), but rather how dysfunction in the body affects all systems and how we can discover root causes to symptoms and address these root causes to help bring the body back into balance.
Integrative health doesn't discount that conventional medicine is necessary, particularly for acute illnesses and emergencies. We believe there is a space for an acute care medicine approach and we have a high respect for our colleagues in the city taking care of patients day in and day out.
Our goal at Cornerstone is to come alongside the practitioners in the Columbia area and lean into the chronic disease space, using the integrative lens to offer individualized coaching and functional medicine analysis for a variety of diseases.
Q. What should someone look for in an integrative health practitioner?
A. Everyone is different, so we recommend talking to the integrative health practitioners you're considering working with first to see if the two of you (and their practice models) are a good fit for your goals.
Here are some criteria we recommend when looking for an integrative health practitioner. You need someone who has holistic training/certifications and will:
Listen to you and validate your symptoms
Dig deep into your symptoms to discover all of the different contributors
Take nutrition and lifestyle into account
Be willing to say, "I don't know," but will research and talk to other practitioners to learn more when needed
Q. Can integrative health be used alongside traditional medical treatments?
A. Integrative health absolutely can be used alongside traditional medical treatments. People don't have to choose one or the other because both serve a purpose. In fact, in our practice model at Cornerstone, we practice integrative health coaching, but we do not take the place of your conventional medical team.
There are instances in which we need to refer back to conventional medicine because that is in the best interest of our patient (ie; rheumatology, cardiology, gastroenterology, etc). We believe that the two can operate in conjunction with one another for the optimal health of our patients, which is always our goal.
Our ideal situation is where we can have open-minded conversations with our patients' other providers to act as a team in the care of our patients. We believe that lifestyle and nutritional practices always have a place in wellness plans for our patients.