I recently spoke about Functional Medicine in a Coffee Talk and wanted to expand upon it for today’s post. Some people still don’t understand Functional Medicine- what it is, how it works, and the benefits of it.

The Sum of All Its Parts

There’s a doctor for every part of your body; up with your eyes (optometrist) and all the way down to your feet (podiatrist). While specialists have their place, conventional medicine tends to break apart each section of your body and compartmentalize them into a wide assortment of individuals who tend to see things in fragments. With functional medicine, your body is taken in and treated as a whole. Instead of referring you to a psychiatrist, a functional medicine practitioner sees your mind as something tied to your body. Instead of only seeing your body as moving shell, a functional medicine practitioner understands that it too can affect the way you think. The two cannot be separated.
Think of it as one continuous circle: your mind reflects on the state of your physical health, and your body reflects on the mental/emotional state of your mind.

But it doesn’t end there.
A functional medicine practitioner also seeks to understand your entire history, from the moment you were born all the way up to the present. He or she digs deep into finding out what makes you the person you are. For instance, they’re going to ask what kind of environment you live in, your occupation and relationships, the different lifestyle habits you have, and even your sense of purpose. This may seem like invasive probing, but understand that from a functional medicine perspective you are a completely individual and unique being, and need to be treated as such. You aren’t patient #4 who’s going to be addressed for 5 minutes and told to take a prescription and be done with things. You are you based on the way you choose to think, feel, and live.

Somewhere in all this understanding a practitioner will start to uncover all the hidden clues that could be causing any potential harm or disease. According to Sir William Osler, one of the first professors and future Physician-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “If you listen carefully to the patient, they will tell you the diagnosis.”
Ever noticed how quickly most appointments at the doctor’s go? With functional medicine, don’t be surprised if your initial sessions last up to an hour or more. Your practitioner is trying to get to know you, not just another patient. They’re there to listen to you.

Tailor Made for Y-O-U

Of course, functional medicine is more than just therapy. It’s definitely good to talk to someone, but it’s even better if they can also treat you in addition to listening to you. After going through your complicated but very much unique case, the practitioner is then going to perform a physical examination and order a set of tests to determine where you current state of health is. This provides concrete information, preventing any second-guessing or miscalculations when it comes to treatment.

Once the results of these comprehensive tests arrive, it’s time to put everything together and create a plan that works best for you. No two patients are ever the same in functional medicine. So you can be rest assured that your treatment was tailor-made specifically for your bio-individuality. Functional medicine practitioners understand that no two people are exactly alike, and will respond differently. Therefore, it make sense to tweak and adjust treatment according to the differences that make us all unique, from the way we think to how our body processes certain foods.

As Sir William Osler once said, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.”

Digging Deep

While there’s no denying that conventional medicine has and will continue to save lives, that doesn’t mean it should go on without legitimate criticism. A common complaint with conventional medicine is the fact that every ailment can apparently be solved with a bottle of pills. Patients are told to take prescriptions without a word and just blindly follow orders. Again, I am not saying we should give up medications altogether or ignore our doctors, but we should at least question the reason why we have to take something and how it’s supposed to work in the first place. In many cases we can avoid pills if we unravel the mystery behind a diagnosis.

Since functional medicine takes the body in as a whole, in addition to your history, it also will weed out the causes or triggers that are responsible for poor health. Instead of writing you a prescription, a functional medicine practitioner is going to first find out why things went wrong.
This is known as getting to the root cause.

Getting to the root cause treats the disease, and not the symptoms. For example, if you’re someone that suffers from chronic constipation, many times your doctor will tell you to take a laxative or fiber supplement before understanding what’s causing the constipation. With functional medicine, a practitioner is going to dig deep into finding out what’s triggering the constipation. He or she may discover that the constipation is the result of low thyroid function, or a bacterial infection in the colon. After one of those “root causes” is addressed, the constipation (the side effect) should subside and disappear altogether.

A Healthy Overhaul

Times are changing. Our old medical system is trapped in a paradigm of people becoming numbers, and treatment becoming band aids covering up deeper wounds. But thankfully we have good, passionate people vouching for us. In my coffee talk, I mentioned Dr. Mark Hyman, who is the Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Functional Medicine and advocate for functional medicine. What’s more, Dr. Hyman also believes in another proponent of functional medicine, which is holistic treatment. As I said before, prescriptions have their place. But holistic care practices such as food as medicine also have an incredibly important role to play in our overall mental and physical health. This is just another reason why functional medicine has the potential to radically transform the way doctors treat their patients. Before giving their patients a list of pills they have to take, doctors should first sit down and get to know their patients. They should ask about their diet, their relationships, and whether or not they feel fulfilled with their jobs. All of these things paint a picture for their doctor to look at and interpret as a potential cause for their patient’s illness. If the patient is in an abusive relationship, maybe a doctor should help their patient to get out of it before telling them they need to medicate themselves. If the patient is always sick after eating gluten, maybe the doctor should first ask the patient to stop eating it before telling them to take a prescription.

Listening to the patient and treating and seeing them as a unique whole is what’s going to change healthcare for the better. Functional medicine, which practices this, is going to empower us all and help us to understand we capable of so much more. We can be healthy and happy. We’re not broken; we’re different, and should be proud of that.

And more power to the doctors and practitioners who champion this way of thinking.

Tell me- what do you think of functional medicine? Do you practice or follow it? Does your doctor? Let me know!