Image Credit-Institute of Functional Medicine
Functional Medicine is a systems biology–based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness.
As the graphic illustrates, a diagnosis can be the result of more than one cause. For example, depression can be caused by many different factors, including inflammation. Likewise, a cause such as inflammation may lead to a number of different diagnoses, including depression. The precise manifestation of each cause depends on the individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle, and only treatments that address the right cause will have lasting benefit beyond symptom suppression.
MY STORY WITH FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE
Im an allopathic Medical Doctor with over twenty years’ experience in the fields of pediatric and urgent care medicine. I trained at a well-known traditional medical school and had what I felt to be a firm understanding of biochemistry, pathophysiology, and pharmacology. Unfortunately, over the years since becoming a physician, I have seen steady decline of health both in the patients I see regularly and in the population at large. Despite the number of new medications and treatment, the rates of chronic disease from atopic conditions such as allergies, asthma and eczema to those of gastrointestinal origin to include IBS, obesity and chronic recurrent abdominal pain, and finally the really worrisome conditions like autoimmunity and cancer have all had a steady, seemingly inexorable, increased incidence. As this total disconnect became apparent to me, I admit that I felt a bit helpless. Even applying the best “medicine”, I was simply not able to help my patients overcome the epidemic of chronic disease that was making itself apparent at ever young ages. Gratefully, due to investigation of potential answers to health problems one of our daughters was having, my wife found some help that was based in a medical specialty with which I was completely unfamiliar: Functional Medicine. Because of the difference in lexicon and approach I was apprehensive at first and felt uncomfortable with the thought of treating a patient without “medicine”.
Over the last three years, I have discovered that medicine is so much more that what comes in a bottle from the pharmacy. With this expanded approach, my current recommendations also include meditation and stress management, exercise, sleep, nutrition, nutraceuticals and supplements. More importantly, each of these modalities is recommended for reasons that address a person’s underlying deviation from health in a unified way to both reestablish a person’s wholeness and reinstate one’s purpose.
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