Many long-term patients feel like they want answers. You feel like you have been ill forever. You can no longer keep up with the same hobbies, and your work is suffering – or you’ve had to give it up completely.
You’ve canceled on your friends so often that they no longer invite you to events. Your adult life was not supposed to be like this, but chronic illness has taken your independence and your joie de vivre away.
However, you may not have tried functional medicine – a viable solution to your chronic illness.
Functional medicine combines contemporary western medicine with an understanding that your body works together as a whole. In the US, there is an emphasis on treating each system or organ separately – for example, seeing a dermatologist for your skin condition, a gastroenterologist for gut issues, and a neurologist for your headaches. With functional medicine, we look at your body as a whole: we assess how diet, environmental impacts, and preexisting conditions can affect your health.
Functional medicine practitioners are not interested in writing out a prescription and sending you on your way – they ask questions and take a full history of your health. A functional medicine doctor wants to assess the root cause of your illness because only then when the root cause is identified and counteracted, can you achieve optimum health.
This way of healing sounds simple, but it is a complex way to look at your body: to truly understand all the ways in which it intersects, and how biochemistry and imbalances can affect the way your body works.
The first time you step into a functional medicine doctor’s office, you may be surprised by the length of time you spend with them, answering questions about your health history, any medications you’ve been on, any dental work, and so on.
We ask these questions because we care, and because often, in the case of chronic illness, we know you’ve already been to see experts and specialists – we have to look at the whole picture, the whole body, in order to identify the problem. This is an in-depth process.
We pay special attention to:
Your treatment is tailor-made to you and your body’s needs. A functional medicine doctor has trained at the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) and is qualified to examine your test results thoroughly, not just checking if you lie within an average range – if there is even a slight deficiency in nutrients or hormone levels, we investigate further, determined to get to the bottom of your illness. Patients with autoimmune disease often have a complex interplay between body systems, and you need a functional medicine doctor to make sense of this.
The most exciting part of functional medicine treatment is when patients realize they’re not going to be handed the same prescription for drugs that may cause significant side effects. Instead, the doctor works with the patient to come up with a treatment plan that often involves dietary changes, supplementation, lifestyle changes, and detoxification. Your body has everything it needs to heal from a long-term chronic health condition, it just requires the opportunity, and a helping hand, to get you back on the road to optimum health.
There is no set timeline for treatment: it takes as long as is needed to improve your daily life. The goal of a functional medicine doctor is to get to the point where the patient is not so dependent on them anymore, and there are long periods of time between visits – because the patient has their health completely in hand. In functional medicine, the aim is to improve your health, not keep you dependent on medication.
If you are wondering how and why your illness occurs and find out how Functional Medicine restores your health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual.
We’re committed to changing your life, and getting you back to your old self. Our systems orientated and personal methodologies are dedicated to helping you feel your best and reaching your full potential – inside and out. Call us on (303) 333-1668 or email us and take the first step in healing yourself.
Functional Medicine determines how and why illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual.
The Functional Medicine model is an individualized, patient-centered, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalized treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes.
By addressing root cause, rather than symptoms, practitioners become oriented to identifying the complexity of disease. They may find one condition has many different causes and, likewise, one cause may result in many different conditions. As a result, Functional Medicine treatment targets the specific manifestations of disease in each individual.
Functional Medicine is a systems biology-based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness.
As the graphic illustrates, a diagnosis can be the result of more than one cause. For example, depression can be caused by many different factors, including inflammation. Likewise, a cause such as inflammation may lead to a number of different diagnoses, including depression. The precise manifestation of each cause depends on the individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle, and only treatments that address the right cause will have a lasting benefit beyond symptom suppression.
What is The Functional Medicine Approach?
The Functional Medicine model evolved from the insights and perspectives of a small group of influential thought leaders who realized the importance of an individualized approach to disease causes based on the evolving research in nutritional science, genomics, and epigenetics. These thought leaders found ways to apply these new advances in the clinic to address root causes using low-risk interventions that modify molecular and cellular systems to reverse these drivers of disease.
If you would like more information, please visit ifm.org or integrativemedicine.arizona.edu
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