Inside Out

Meet three Hong Kong alternative medicine practitioners who are helping people manage physical, emotionaland even spiritual ailments

- Amalissa Hall

"Functional medicine looks at the body as an interconnected complex of biochemical processes; like dominoes, if you knock one down, everything else has a knock-on effect," says Katia Demekhina, who practises nutritional therapy, a form of functional medicine, at Integrated Medicine Institute Hong Kong.

Demekhina, 42, treats symptoms experienced by many Hongkongers-from the physical, like bloating and lack of energy, to the psychological, like burnout. She also specialises in women's health issues. "Our job is to find where the problem begins, and nutrition is a way to optimise the body's function."

While our bodies have an innate ability to heal, in order to do so, we need to give them the tools, says Demekhina. Besides nutrition, minimising excess demands on the body-like living in a polluted environment or going through a stressful period in lifeis also essential, she adds.

Demekhina has lived through the latter. In her early 30s, while balancing a highly demanding job in finance and becoming a mother, she was getting sick often and had no energy. She'd visit doctors but would leave with "bags of medication that made no difference" and decided to consult a nutritionist.

She began incorporating a wide variety of vegetables in her daily diet-particularly cruciferous varieties-and making them the main component of the meal instead of a side. This not only improved her physical well-being, but also sparked an interest in the field of nutrition.

In 2017, she quit her job to pursue a master's degree in psychology at Harvard University; this was followed by a master's in nutrition at Middlesex University in the UK. She became a nutritionist in 2021.