What is Functional Medicine?
Functional Medicine is an integrative, science-based healthcare approach that treats illness and promotes wellness by focusing on the bio-chemically unique aspects of each patient, and then individually tailoring interventions to restore physiological, psychological, and structural balance. Functional Medicine focuses on understanding the fundamental physiological processes, the environmental inputs, and the genetic predispositions that influence health and disease so that interventions are focused on treating the cause of the problem, not just masking the symptoms.
Functional medicine is an evolution in the practice of medicine that addresses the healthcare needs of the 21st century by focusing on prevention and uncovering the underlying causes of serious chronic disease. Instead of just suppressing symptoms it deals with the root causes of disease (the total load) and is less concerned with making a diagnosis and more concerned with the underlying imbalances, which are the mechanisms of the disease process. Functional Medicine incorporates the latest scientific research about how our genetics, environment, and lifestyle all interact with each other to diagnose and treat disease processes based on patterns of imbalance and dysfunction, rather than treating the disease specifically. It treats the person who has the disease rather than the disease the person has. As opposed to Western Medicine, Functional medicine provides a framework for the practice of medicine that uses all the tools of healing, both conventional and alternative, to address the
