What is Functional Medicine?

What Is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a form of practicing medicine that seeks to find the root cause of disease and views the body as one system. Often times individuals with chronic illness and difficult to treat conditions seek out functional medicine practitioners because we do not isolate symptoms and treat them separately but rather address the whole person.

Functional medicine recognizes that disease can manifest from a combination of a person’s genes, environment, and lifestyle. When a functional medicine practitioner first sees a patient, time is spent understanding the patient’s history chronologically over the course of their lifetime to help identify factors that predispose, provoke and contribute to dysfunction and pathological changes in the body.

Functional medicine practitioners focus heavily on restoring gut health and dietary & lifestyle interventions instead of prescription medications. Functional medicine recognizes the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) and trauma on the development of disease in the body and the role of spirituality in healing.

A functional medicine based practitioner will have undergone additional training outside the original scope of their credential through The Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) to be able to effectively treat patients from this integrative whole body approach.