About FM
Functional Medicine (FM) is dedicated to the prevention, early assessment, and improved management of complex, chronic disease by intervening at multiple levels to correct core clinical imbalances and thereby restore each patient’s functionality and health to the greatest extent possible.
How can we make our healthcare system work for us? First of all, Functional (or Integrative) Medicine is not entirely new. Its focus on patient-centered diagnosis and the interaction of the patient’s uniqueness and environment has left its marks throughout the history of Western Medicine, starting with Hippocrates through the present day.
Functional Medicine seems “new” to us because we have become stuck in Modern Medicine’s efficient high-tech focus on treating symptoms, finding a diagnosis and a corresponding treatment, usually a medication or a procedure. This approach is useful for acute and critical care, but is ineffective when a more comprehensive approach is needed.
The US healthcare system fails to address the needs of more and more of our citizens. The process is organ-system based. The patient feels left out as a whole person, and feels rushed through an increasingly impersonal process which does not seem to solve the problem. Chronic complex disease is on the rise, as is the cost of healthcare, both in dollars and in human suffering. Patients and doctors are dissatisfied and some have a sense of futility. We have known for years that we have reached a crisis, but don’t know where to turn.
A crisis is a crossroads, a turning point.
We are now poised to comprehend the common underlying pathways of disease as never before. Functional Medicine presents a solution to this crisis by offering a revolutionary approach, known as a paradigm shift, integrating well-established medical traditions with modern science in a patient-centered comprehensive model. This approach addresses the underlying causes of disease or dysfunction, AND the uniqueness of each patient and environment.
Diagnosis is not excluded from the FM model, but the emphasis is on understanding and improving the functional core of the human being as the starting point for intervention.