Functional Medicine

The conventional heath-care practice of a “pill for an ill” is not only antiquated, it has failed in the arena of disease resolution. Because all health problems and diseases are multi-dimensional, with many underlying roots, attempting to tackle human ills with a magic bullet doesn’t work.

Traditional western medicine, or reactive medicine, is a paradigm whereby pharmaceutical drugs are given to eliminate or change a person’s symptom and/or pathology. This is traditional disease care. The emphasis is only about changing symptoms, or eliminating biomarkers found on some routine test, i.e., treating high cholesterol with a statin drug.  This is a disease-specific approach. While that form of medicine is needed, it is reactive-care, not health-care.

Functional Medicine (FM) is a patient-specific approach. It is a detailed approach to uncovering the causes of disease and its symptoms. The goal of this form of patient care is to understand the physical and environmental roots to the person’s illness or disease.  This paradigm of care looks to reverse each person’s physiological dysfunctions through individual treatment.  This science-based field of health care is based on the premise that each person is a bio-individual with unique genetics; it is patient-centered, not disease-centered.  The FM approach also understands that the body functions as an orchestrated network of interconnected systems, and disease is created from and imbalance in these systems.

The fascinating thing about Functional Medicine is that doctors will find themselves treating two patients having identical symptoms with entirely different treatment programs. For instance, tests might reveal that two patients with apparently the same osteoarthritis might have entirely different physiological, biochemical and metabolic abnormalities predisposing them to arthritis. Anyone who tries an "arthritis treatment" on these two patients would necessarily fail in at least one of the cases. The reason for failure, obviously, is that no consideration is given to what might be the causative factors. Functional Medicine has proved that discovering the underlying physiological, biochemical and metabolic glitches unique to the patient is one way to restore and maintain health, regardless of what symptoms the patient.

Resources:

http://www.functionalmedicine.org/about/whatis.asp

Functional Medicine