What is Functional Medicine?

As doctors we were trained to diagnose a patient's symptoms, apply a name to those symptoms, and then provide a remedy for those symptoms. This process is all so very scientific, but is nearly useless. This method does not tell us what is actually wrong with the patient and it certainly doesn't tell us how to cure them. It does, however, tell us how to indefinitely "manage" the disease by suppressing or trying to suppress the symptoms through drug therapy. This wonderfully scientific process of naming and managing is called conventional medicine.Unfortunately, we as Americans are told that this conventional medicine approach is the only scientific way of doctoring. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is where functional medicine comes in.The functional medicine approach looks deeper into the problem by looking deeper into the patient. You may say that functional medicine is patient centered rather than disease centered like conventional medicine. The science and strength of functional medicine begins with blood and urine laboratory panels designed to objectively measure your body's internal physiological pathways of tissue repair, immune function, energy production, detoxification, and metabolic signaling. By beginning at the cellular level and working our way up through each pathway we can identify what is not functioning and how to cure the problem at the precise level of dysfunction.This new approach harnesses the decades of scientific research in nutrition and physiology in the most useful and needed way. This is not alternative medicine, integrative medicine, or holistic medicine. This is functional medicine.