Functional Medicine starts with the premise that your body is a complex group of systems that are all connected and work together as a whole. Another way of describing this is “what is causing what?” For example, a person can have liver disease and it shows up on the skin as “liver spots” or in the eyes as jaundice. By fixing the liver, it improves the skin and the eyes without ever actually treating the skin or the eye. This simple premise is the foundation of functional medicine, and hundreds of examples could be only by finding the cause can you obtain optimal health.

Functional medicine treats the same health problem that traditional medicine treats, but it’s the approach that makes it different. From the common cold all the way to cancer, any health problem can benefit from the functional medicine approach. Patients seek out functional medicine doctors who are looking for a more natural approach as opposed to traditional drugs and surgery.

An example of functional medicine could be a patient with high blood pressure. If the blood pressure is high, then something is raising it. All health care providers agree that high blood pressure is serious and can cause several issues including kidney disease, heart attack and stroke. Traditional medicine would prescribe a drug to lower the blood pressure. The drug doesn’t address the cause of the blood pressure, it just forces it down. If the cause is not addressed, the blood pressure can get worse, and the person may need a higher dose or another prescription. Furthermore, if the patient stops taking the blood pressure medication the blood pressure would elevate once again. Functional medicine would seek to find the cause of the high blood pressure. If the cause is found and addressed, then the blood pressure starts to normalize and return to normal. Then medications can be reduced and often times eliminated. Functional medicine always seeks to find the cause and relationships in the body that must be addressed to return to vibrant health.

Integrative medicine is a practitioner who chooses to practice both functional medicine and traditional medicine. This can be ideal for those patients who are on prescription medications and are wanting to change their lifestyles, lose weight, and incorporate functional medicine so their medications can be lowered or eliminated if appropriate.

Functional medicine is different in that it does not seek to treat or suppress symptoms. An example of this could be your warning light appears on the dashboard of your car. The warning light is telling you something is wrong, although you may not feel anything is wrong with the car when you are driving it. Placing a piece of colored tape over the warning light would now make it look like the car is fine, but we all know it is not. Finding out why the warning light came on and addressing it so the light turns off would be how functional medicine works. If the problem is addressed and handled, then the symptom disappears. Simply put, we believe functional medicine is the correct way to properly handle your health. Medications and surgery can be crucial to get through a crisis, but masking symptoms over a long period of time does not help your health and only allows the underlying problem to get worse.