What is Functional Medicine?

What if labeling symptoms with a diagnosis code sometimes prevents us from digging deeper to find the real issues? 

Once the disease is labeled we continue to treat the symptoms according to algorithms and treatment plans. I think illness is more individualized than that and spending time investigating the beginning can prevent wasted resources and time. For example, a woman goes to her doctor with high blood pressure, labs and diagnostic tests come out normal. She is given an antihypertensive medication to bring down her blood pressure. What if her blood pressure is elevated because her husband filed for divorce, her son is taking drugs, she is filing bankruptcy, and has a history of poor nutrition. She is losing her ability to cope. The antihypertensive pill may lower her blood pressure but it really isn’t fixing the underlying cause of her high blood pressure.

“Functional Medicine is a personalized, systems-oriented model that empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working in collaboration to address the underlying causes of disease”, according to Dr. David Jones and Sheila Quinn from the Institute for Functional Medicine.  They go on to say, “Functional Medicine practitioners spend time with their patients, listening to their histories and looking at the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long term health and complex, chronic disease.” Functional medicine is looking at the whole person, putting together a time line of events that may have affected overall health and focusing on a treatment plan that treats current disease as well as working to prevent future health problems.   

 Functional medicine suggests that there are many factors affecting health including Nutrition, Sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, poverty/uninsured, environmental toxicity, indoor living, and an aging population. Functional medicine aims at integrating the science of medicine with the art of clinical practice. It works to restore balance in the complex adaptive system that is the human being.

The Human body has several built in back up mechanisms. We use calcium to relax heart and other muscle, for bone strength, and we can use it as a buffer in digestion. The body can pull mineral stores from many internal sources to satisfy the body’s needs. Imagine that our brain prioritizes where vitamins and minerals are utilized based on critical need. It would make sense that a lack of calcium might affect muscle relaxation, our ability to buffer acid in our stomach and cause brittle bones. A long term dietary deficiency of calcium might relate to indigestion, body aches and muscle cramps. Taking a drug for pain in this case might not be as beneficial as identifying dietary deficiencies, genetic history and assessing lifestyle. To further complicate this example, if we need Vitamin D to absorb calcium and we don’t have enough in our environment,  we might have enough calcium but a decreased ability to utilize it. The calcium deficiency may not be found in a blood test because the brain is regulating the supply of calcium and might find the calcium level of the blood to have a higher priority than calcium in the bone. 

Looking at the whole picture might better identify a timeline of when the body demonstrated it was losing it’s ability to cope and what deficiencies led to the problem. Identifying the cause and treating the true dysfunction might prevent a health problem from continuing to escalate, and prevent subsequent additional system failures. Functional medicine can go into great depth investigating environmental exposures, lifestyle influences, and genetic predispositions to determine an evolving plan of action as the body continues to adapt.

According to the Institute for Functional Medicine,

“Functional medicine is shaped by seven core principles:

1.    Acknowledging the biochemical individuality of each human being, based on concepts of genetic and environmental uniqueness.

2.    Incorporating a patient-centered rather than disease-centered approach to treatment.

3.    Seeking a dynamic balance among the internal and external factors in a patient’s body, mind, and spirit.

4.    Addressing the web-like interconnections of internal physiological factors.

5.    Identifying health as a positive vitality-not merely the absence of disease- and emphasizing those factors that encourage a vigorous physiology

6.    Promoting organ reserve as a means of enhancing health span, not just the life span, of each patient.

7.    Functional Medicine is a science-using profession.”