Many people wonder what functional medicine is and how it differs from conventional medicine.
In functional medicine we look at the body as a whole integrated system. When that system is functioning optimally you feel healthy and vibrant. When there is an imbalance or blockage somewhere in that system you develop symptoms or feel sick. By understanding how all the different parts of your body’s system interconnect, functional medicine can trace the cause of your sickness or symptom back to the source of the imbalance, address that imbalance, and allow the body to naturally come back into a state of wellness. In contrast, conventional medicine will often just treat your symptom directly, without looking further upstream to find the root source of that symptom.
For example, you and I may both have a headache, but your headache may be because your magnesium levels are too low, whereas my headache may be because I have high levels of mercury in my body. The treatment we each need to get rid of the source of our headache will be completely different. You need to take more magnesium; I need to get rid of the high mercury. Taking an Advil as prescribed by conventional medicine may help to temporarily manage the pain but will do nothing to address the underlying cause of each of our headaches. In this way, using a functional medicine approach, there is no “one-size-fits-all” treatment for any given symptom. The root cause of your symptom is going to be unique to you.
On the other hand, because you and I are unique individuals, with our own unique genetics, environmental exposure and life history, we may both develop a similar root cause imbalance in our body but we may manifest it with very different symptoms. For example, you may come to the doctor with symptoms of gas, bloating and diarrhea every time you eat; I may come to the doctor with joint pain and skin rashes. When the doctors look for the underlying cause of each of our symptoms, they might do a biopsy of our small intestines and find that we each have inflammation and damage to the tiny villi that line our small intestines (celiac disease). We have the same root cause, but experience very different symptoms. In this way, using a functional medicine approach, we understand that one root cause can present with many different symptoms depending on the unique individual and you cannot make a diagnosis purely by symptoms. This is why often in conventional medicine, diagnosing and treating by symptoms does not lead to lasting relief.
Hopefully the examples I gave help you to see that functional medicine takes a highly personalized systems-based approach to your unique history, genetics and symptoms in order to optimize the functioning and wellness of your unique body.
Our genes do not determine our health. The degree to which we feel well — or not— depends not just on what specific genes we inherit from our parents, but also on what unique life experiences and environmental exposures we have, and what unique life-style choices we make. All of these factors affect our body at a cellular and biochemical level to determine our state of health. "Genes load the gun but environment pulls the trigger"