What is Functional Medicine
'Common Sense' - not rocket science
Functional medicine practitioners take time to listen and analyse your symptoms of ill-health alongside your medical history, and use this information to identify potential root cause(s) of any presenting chronic conditions. Poor nutrition, stress, toxins, allergens, your genetics and your microbiome (the bacteria living in and on your body), can all be factors contributing to symptoms.
The right nutrition, when combined with lifestyle and behavioural interventions, can help you take charge of your health.
Patient centred
By investigating upstream and addressing the cause of an individual’s symptoms, Functional Medicine looks to resolve and prevent disease, and promote wellness. It looks to address the multiple, underlying factors that may be influencing your health and physiology. Supporting dietary and lifestyle change can halt the progress of many chronic, age-related, lifestyle associated diseases.
Research estimates that more than 70% of chronic disease risk is attributable to diet and lifestyle choices.
Functional Medicine as adjunct to mainstream medicine
It is well recognised that there are ‘effectiveness gaps’ within mainstream medicine for conditions like IBS, metabolic syndrome, mental health, hormone imbalance, cardiovascular disease, eczema and autoimmunity. This effectiveness gap is because a pharmaceutical drug approach is not so suitable for lifestyle-related disease. Functional Medicine’s belief that dietary and lifestyle changes can be more effective at resolving these types of health issues, is now underpinned with robust evidence.
The health of the gut is a common, underlying factor in many of these conditions, even when no obvious intestinal symptoms are felt. So a different approach is needed, because where the root cause is left unaddressed, simply prescribing more and more costly drugs that provide a ‘sticky plaster’ and maintain the diseased state fails to restore health or achieve resolution.
Functional medicine’s holistic approach looks to create individualised treatment plans based on every patient’s unique health history, needs, and circumstances.
Reference; The Institute for Functional Medicine (2009)
