In the past 2 weeks, I have been asked to explain what functional medicine is several times and I thought it would be a good time to review why this is so different than traditional medicine.
When I started practicing functional medicine over 18 years ago, functional health was a new term and nobody understood it. One husband finally exclaimed after he saw his wife’s transformation that he didn’t know what kind of voodoo or witch doctor spells I was using but to keep doing it! Most people still don’t understand it but are starting to have at least heard of it.
Here are 6 ways functional medicine is different…. READ ON
Root cause: Simply put… a functional health approach is looking for the underlying cause of your symptoms/disease. For example, you go to your primary care physician with the symptom of reflux. You are given a proton pump inhibitor (Nexium, Prilosec, etc) and maybe get a referral for an EGD scope. The GI doctor does the scope and says you have some mild irritation and just stay on the medication.
A functional health approach asks the question…why do you have reflux? Do you have a food sensitivity, do you have high stress in your life increasing acid production, do you have low acid production, do you have small bowel overgrowth etc. It doesn’t mean we don’t reach for the medication or send you for an EGD, we just look at other causes for the irritation and sometimes we can treat this naturally without medication!
Optimal labs: Some of the other aspects that make functional health unique is aiming for optimal numbers on your lab tests rather than just focusing on what is in “normal range”. There is a huge difference between optimal and normal in how you feel on so many different parameters!
Testing: Functional health utilizes tests that are not mainstream. Many of the tests are not covered by insurance which is one of the reasons traditional physicians don’t reach for them. Interesting fact is that many of the tests we use were covered by insurance at one point but due to all the cut backs from insurance companies the lab companies no longer offer insurance billing.
Treatment options: Our treatments are often varied and are tailored to the person. Combinations of medications and nutraceuticals (high quality supplements) are married together for an optimal approach.
Prevention: I cannot tell you how many people I see who go to really good physicians and are told they are doing great and we find some underlying red flags that when dealt with early can prevent some serious medical conditions in the future!
Time: The last and probably the most important difference is our appointments are not governed by insurance telling us we can only spend a limited amount of time with someone. When I first meet someone, we are face-to-face for an entire hour! It is so important to have this time to listen as often the last thing said is the final nugget I need to figure out what is going on!
Traditional medicine is still very important and there is definitely the need for our amazing main stream physicians and some of the really good ones do include some of what I mentioned. The take home point is we need BOTH!!
I love being a sleuth trying to figure out all the moving parts to a person’s symptoms. If you are struggling, have been diagnosed with some vague entity like thyroid disease, autoimmune disorder, IBS, etc then give us a call. We would love to help!
To your health,
Laura
