How is Functional and Integrative Medicine different from what doctors are doing today?
Functional and Integrative Medicine is focused on correcting underlying causes of health problems. In traditional medicine, doctors are trained to diagnose and then use a variety of drugs that can help relieve a particular symptom. This approach usually does not address the cause of the problem, but may significantly improve the symptom. A good example of this method is migraine headaches. The traditional approach would be to treat the symptom with aspirin or other painkiller. A Functional and Integrative Medicine approach is to test for food allergies or a magnesium deficiency since both are common causes of migraine headaches. Functional and Integrative Medicine might also attempt to determine some other possibility (such as toxicity) that could be causing the headache.
