Functional medicine aims to determine how and why illness occurs and to restore health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual.
In conventional medicine, the goal is to arrive at a diagnosis and treat symptoms and conditions with medications and/or surgery. In functional medicine, the practitioner and patient work together to explore the factors underlying health issues and find an individualized approach to reverse disease and promote optimal wellness.
Addressing the root cause often involves lifestyle changes such as eliminating problematic foods, improving sleep, finding ways to move that benefit health, and discovering stress management techniques that work for each individual. It may also involve advanced lab testing to identify nutritional deficiencies, toxin exposures, hormone imbalances, and GI tract dysfunction.
We need functional medicine because the number of people suffering from complex, chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, mental illness, dementia, and autoimmune disorders is increasing dramatically. The conventional medical approach is oriented toward acute care treatment, but this system lacks the proper methodology and tools for preventing, treating, and potentially reversing complex chronic disease.
Functional medicine considers all of the interactions in a patient’s history, physiology, and lifestyle that can contribute to illness. An individual’s genetic makeup is taken into account, as are both internal (mind, body, spirit) and external (physical and social) factors that affect overall function.
Once underlying contributors to illness have been identified, functional medicine combines traditional Western medical practices with what is considered “integrative” or “complementary” practices, such as meditation or t’ai chi. Preventing, reversing, or treating complex chronic disease is attained through nutrition, movement, incorporating results of up-to-date lab testing and other diagnostic techniques, and personalized combinations of drugs and/or botanical medicines, supplements, therapeutic diets, detoxification programs, and counseling on stress-management techniques.