WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE?

A functional medicine approach to health and medical treatment is a different way of thinking. Instead of just treating symptoms, we look upstream as far as we can to find the cause of health problems and not just ways to treat the symptoms or complaints. It is this approach that may discover a dairy or wheat allergy as a trigger for recurrent ear infections which had been treated many times previously by just giving an antibiotic. It is this approach that treats eczema, not by just giving a hydrocortisone cream for the rash, but by looking deeper for the cause. We may look at intestinal permeability and an unregulated immune system reaction. By addressing vitamin D and essential fatty acid undernutrition, we can improve intestinal friendly bacteria which actually treat the triggers for the eczema.

The functional medicine approach not only uses normal western medicine as a bridge to help or treat conditions, but also uses food as medicine, natural products as healing agents and nutrients and vitamins as components to encourage health of the client. It is this functional medicine approach that also acknowledges that what we wash our genes in everyday, affects our health. It appreciates the epigenetics of our lifestyle, how our lifestyle affects our genes. It appreciates the fact that over 90% of people who geographically live above the 35th parallel are vitamin D deficient, and that 50% of Caucasians have problems activating folate. By looking at an individual’s cellular function we can change and improve health.

Everyone is unique. We are each as unique as our fingerprint. No one in the history of mankind has the same fingerprint, the same physiology, the same influences while growing up, or the same life experience. We know this is important. Our approach to each patient tries to honor this uniqueness. We try to get to the root causes of chronic medical problems instead of just trying to treat the symptoms. This requires a different way of thinking. For every chronic condition there is usually a malfunction in two or three different major physiologic areas of control. We try to address the seven different areas of what we call the functional medicine matrix.