What is functional medicine?
Functional medicine is a patient centered system of healing. While a mainstream medicine provider may focus on managing symptoms, a doctor of functional medicine focuses on finding the root cause of the patient’s health problem and addressing it.
In other words, functional medicine is an approach to medicine that asks the questions: Why are you sick? Why did you develop these symptoms or conditions?
Rather than another prescription drug to manage your condition or symptoms, the functional medicine approach is used to address the factors that are leading to or aggravate chronic diseases.
How is it different?
It searches for the CAUSE of the disease, rather than focus on the managing the symptoms. For example, focus on eliminating factors that increase your inflammation, rather than just addressing the pain which is often the result of chronic inflammation.
The focus is on you, the patient, rather than just your diagnosis or condition.
It uses a comprehensive evaluation process which includes the physical, emotional and physiological state of the patient. Information is gathered about your current and past lifestyle and dietary choices, emotional and physical traumas and the way your body related to these.\
Treatment is personalized for each patient, rather than giving the same drug to patients with the same disease symptoms. Treatment protocol might include nutritional guidelines, lifestyle changes, herbal medicine, etc.
Does functional medicine replace my primary care physician?
No. While the functional medicine approach is focused on improving patients’ health and function, it does not replace the need for primary care.
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease, than what sort of disease a person has.
Hippocrates