What is Functional Medicine?
Despite a recent surge in popularity, functional medicine still manages to evoke deep curiosity from many of my friends and patients. According to the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM), 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”.
But what does that really mean?
It’s patient and provider dependent. Let’s use hypertension as an example. Joe walks into my clinic and states he wants to fix his high blood pressure. This is where the skill of the practitioner really comes into play.
How motivated is Joe to change?
Clinically, we need to balance the severity of his elevated blood pressure and understand his desire to both investigate potential root causes and willingness to make lifestyle changes. If he’s motivated, we could do some bloodwork to investigate for physiologic contributing factors, for example, magnesium deficiency.
Institute for Functional Medicine 2015
Talking to Joe further reveals he has anxiety and insomnia for months related to work stress. And just prior to the onset of his high blood pressure, he had taken a month long course of antibiotics.
OK, now we’re getting somewhere.
If Joe is willing, we can implement a gut health restoration plan, along with stress management and sleep hygiene techniques to start to heal his nervous system, while we keep his blood pressure in the safe range with medication until we can safely discontinue it.
The approach to acute illness does not work for chronic disease.
Our healthcare system is built for acutely ill individuals. It is excellent at stabilization and damage control. However, complex chronic disease like mental illness, heart disease and autoimmune disorders are on the rise. Most healthcare providers are not adequately trained to implement strategies like personalized diet and lifestyle recommendations and it can take decades for research to make its way into medical guidelines and practice. This is where functional medicine shines.
