I am often
asked to explain what Functional Medicine is and why it is so different from
conventional American medicine. There is
so much I want to tell you about this amazing discipline and how it can help
transform your life.
Functional Medicine is a roadmap for
health. If I only look at a patient’s current
symptoms, then it is often very difficult to know how to best help them. What I do instead, is look at the whole
map. I need to see where they came from
and which roads they took to get to their current state. Functional Medicine is often called “upstream”
medicine. It is critical to understand
the lifestyle, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to someone’s
current condition. The goal is to discover the root causes of the current
symptoms. This is a place where conventional medicine falls very short. Conventional medicine focuses on how to
manage or mask current symptoms, usually with pharmaceuticals, without concern
for what driving factors led to the disease in the first place. This creates a big problem, because with this
approach the disease process is not changed.
Different patients can end up with similar symptoms that come from
different causes. Conventional medicine
tries to apply the same protocols and drugs to all of these symptoms, rather
than individualize the approach to target the actual cause.Functional Medicine recognizes an often forgotten fact: our bodies were designed to be healthy. Over the past few decades, Americans have gotten so used to being sick that many just accept that they don’t feel well. I have had so many patients say things like, “Well, I am forty now, so I figured it was normal to start having problems.” With the average life expectancy close to 80 should people really resign half of their life to not feeling well? Health should be the norm, rather than a rarity.
Functional medicine focuses on
helping the body regain balance to promote health and vitality.
By really listening to the patient’s story, I am able to piece together
a restoration plan that often involves extra attention to nutrition and
movement. The plan can also utilize integrative, preventative, lifestyle, and even
conventional treatments. Developing a
therapeutic relationship with the patient is critical in order to give them new
tools and help motivate them on their path to wellness. Practicing this way allows me to offer
patients the best of all worlds for optimal results.
Functional medicine takes time, care,
and patience. I spend between 60 and 90 minutes with all of
my new patients in order to have enough time to really listen to a patient’s
story and then begin the detective work to uncover their path back to
health. The rapid pace of conventional
medicine does not allow for this.
Conventional medicine is great for managing medical and surgical
emergencies, acute infections, and trauma.
But the majority of illness today is due to chronic diseases such as
diabetes, autoimmune diseases, fatigue, heart disease, digestive problems,
etc. The Functional Medicine roadmap
allows me to help patients improve, and often reverse, chronic diseases by
addressing the inter-related biological networks that are not limited to just
one organ system. Addressing the entire
person is the key to helping a patient regain health.Functional Medicine is 21st Century medicine. This is how American healthcare can be transformed. Imagine the money that can be saved, the energy that can be felt, and the life that can be enjoyed by embracing a personalized approach to health. There is hope. Come and find out what my practice can do for you.
