Every Person is Metabolically Unique.Shouldn’t Your Treatment be as Well?
Functional Medicine is patient-centered care that focuses on the underlying cause of chronic disease using a systems-oriented approach instead of the acute-care medical model that focuses on disease maintenance and symptom management.
Functional Medicine practitioners review extensive health histories and spend time with their patients to identify the interaction between environmental, genetic, dietary and lifestyle factors that contribute to chronic disease.
Today people are dying prematurely and are not achieving optimal health. Wellness and nutrition are about restoring cellular function not simply the absence of symptoms.
Each person’s biochemical individuality exerts a major influence on his or her health. The level of nutrient intake that maintains the best possible health is highly variable from person to person. Lifestyle choices and environmental exposures filtered through genetic predisposition are fundamental factors in the expression of disease, and a successful treatment approach must include investigation into these factors.
Identify where your physiology is not functionally optimally, instead of treating conditions and symptoms separately with medication
Functional medicine identifies and investigates the underlying causes of disease, and views the body as one integrated system and not a collection of independent organs divided up by medical specialties.
As the following picture of an iceberg shows, a disease might be visible above the surface, but the underlying cause is the dysfunctional physiology below the surface.
Most of the time, the cause of the dis-ease and its symptoms is an underlying dysfunction and/or an imbalance of bodily systems.
Unlike conventional medicine, treatments are very personalized based on the patient’s unique needs. We are all metabolically different, and our bodies react to conditions in different ways.
The name of a disease matters less as we understand the cause of the dysfunction. Treatment must be matched to the cause, not the disease.
Conventional medicine creates specialties such as the cardiologist, rheumatologist, neurologist, endocrinologist, and more, who independently treat each of the body’s systems. Functional medicine recognizes that our bodies are made up of a complex interconnected web of biological systems and processes that need to be treated simultaneously as a whole. It’s not bad luck that one person has multiple “diseases” like heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or asthma, ADHD, irritable bowel syndrome and migraines. They are all interconnected. In conventional medicine, when we treat the part and not the whole system, we cannot effectively prevent, treat or change the trajectory of chronic disease. Functional medicine dose not treat disease but creates health and often the disease disappears.
Functional medicine uses science, advanced laboratory testing (ie. nutrient testing, food sensitivity testing, stool testing, hormone testing, heavy metal testing) to restore balance to the patient’s physiology.