Community Q&A – Benefits of Functional Medicine

In this episode, we answer the question: “What is Functional Medicine and how can it benefit me or someone I know?”.

“Functional medicine is a science-based personalized healthcare approach that assesses and treats underlying causes of illness through individually tailored therapies to restore health and improve function.” – The Institute of Functional Medicine.

Sometimes we are asked, “What is Functional Medicine?”, “Is it a new medical specialty?”. As Dr. Mark Hyman puts it, Functional Medicine is not a new area of medicine or a new modality, rather it’s a new way of thinking about the puzzle of chronic disease, how we get sick and how we get well.

While it embraces much of the Integrative Medicine philosophy, Functional Medicine goes deeper by taking a systems-oriented medical approach to identify and understand the root causes of disease. It looks at the organism, not just the organ and focuses on the system, not just the symptom.

The Functional Medicine Care Model is science-based and places the patient in its center. The practitioner and the patient work in a partnership to efficiently and effectively reach the patient’s health goals. Every aspect of the patient’s medical history is reviewed in detail to better understand the individual and the reason illness developed. By thoroughly understanding the patient and cause of disease a patient care plan can be developed that is individualized and unique to them.

In Functional Medicine, we treat the individual rather than the disease.