Functional Medicine
What is Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is an evolution of ‘modern’ medicine in that it doesn’t focus solely on treating symptoms, but instead focuses on treating the root cause.
By treating the root cause, symptoms naturally improve. Every human’s biology and makeup is so vastly different. Functional Medicine treats the individual by diving into each patient’s genetic, biochemical and lifestyle factors and then finds how the body’s imbalance has manifested itself into illness or disease. Imagine a pipe has burst. You could either spend your days constantly managing flood waters or you could find out what started the leak and stop it at its source. That’s what functional medicine does. It finds out where and why ‘the leak’ happened in the first place (using your genetics, biochemistry, current lifestyle and nutrition) and uses that information to personalize treatment plans and treat the individual.
On the Institute for Functional Medicine’s website, it states:
As healthcare costs become increasingly unsustainable, it is apparent the heart of the problem faced by patients and payers is the frequency with which costly disease management strategies are applied before exploring the potential of disease reversal. Rather than looking beneath the assortment of diagnoses to find the underlying causes of their health problems, patients with chronic conditions are encouraged to follow costly, often lifelong medication regimens and hope for occasional days of freedom from symptoms.
Functional medicine offers the potential for achieving unprecedented levels of health restoration and financial savings. By uncovering and addressing the underlying causes of the common conditions that afflict a growing number of people—autoimmune diseases, diabetes, and digestive issues, to name a few—functional medicine brings the potential to liberate patients from their dependence on costly medications that are not designed to address the root causes of their disease.”
What is functional medicine used for?
Conditions such as:
- Autoimmunity (i.e.,Hashimotos, Multiple Sclerosis, Graves’ Disease, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriasis, Crohn’s Disease)
- Adrenal fatigue and burnout
- Intestinal discomforts, digestive problems and irritable bowel syndrome
- Heart Disease
- Tinnitus (ringing in the ears)
- Diabetes
- Migraines and Headaches
- Sleep Disorders
- Metabolic syndrome
- Weight problems
- Mold toxicity, problems with detoxification
- Hormonal imbalances
- Joint and body pain