What Is Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is the practice of medicine that better addresses your healthcare needs. Instead of a disease-focused approach, Functional Medicine is a patient-centered approach that addresses the whole person.
Functional medicine practitioners spend time with their patients, listening to their histories and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic diseases.
In this way, functional medicine supports the unique expression of health and vitality for each individual.
Why Do We Need Functional Medicine?
Our society is experiencing a sharp increase in the number of people who suffer from complex, chronic diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, mental illness, dementia, autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, and troublesome conditions like irritable bowel syndrome.
The treatment that patients receive for these and other chronic conditions is often inadequate.
How Is Functional Medicine Different?
Patient-centered care
- The focus of functional medicine is on patient-centered care, promoting health as a positive vitality, beyond just the absence of disease.
Integrative, science-based healthcare approach
- Practitioners look “upstream” to consider the complex web of interactions in the patient’s history, physiology, and lifestyle that can lead to illness.
- The unique genetic makeup of each patient is considered, along with both internal (mind, body, and spirit) and external (physical and social environment) factors that affect total functioning.
A combination of the best medical practices
- Creating a focus on prevention through nutrition, diet, and exercise
- Using the latest laboratory testing and other diagnostic techniques
- Prescribed combinations of drugs and/or botanical medicines, supplements, therapeutic diets, detoxification programs, or stress-management techniques.
