Like all things once considered alternative, functional medicine is quickly becoming mainstream.
That’s fueled by demand. About six in 10 U.S. adults have a chronic disease, which includes everything from lung and heart disease to diabetes. Four in 10 of those adults have two or more such diseases.
Dr. John Heary explains that such prevalence has led to a sharp rise in those seeking functional medicine care as a more comprehensive approach to treating complicated and long-lasting conditions. In 2020, there were around 40,000 professionals practicing functional medicine in America. In 2010, there were just 5,000 practitioners.
Part holistic treatment and wholly personalized, functional medicine focuses on identifying and treating the root causes of a particular disease — and managing care based on those multiple factors. It also represents a sea change in how the world approaches medical care in the 21st history.
How Functional Medicine Works
Though it was formally named in the early 1990s, functional medicine’s roots run deep. Holistic and integrative medicine has been practiced in some form for thousands of years.
Functional medicine’s central tenants reflect its ancient roots. Broadly, it explores the potential root drivers of different chronic illnesses and considers a body’s whole health rather than separating it into different components to identify and treat conditions.
Several different factors may be at play with chronic disease. Stress, gastrointestinal imbalance, a dysfunctional immune system, and poor diet are among the most common causes of illness that inform treatment approaches used in functional medicine.
Functional medicine practitioners believe that an array of underlying causes — hormone imbalance, inflammatory imbalance, stress-inducing toxic emotions — can contribute to such chronic diseases as arthritis, auto-immune conditions, and obesity.
Core Principles
There are different forms of functional medicine, but it generally adheres to a handful of core principles. The first step for practitioners is getting a thorough understanding of a patient’s unique biochemistry, taking into account environmental and genetic factors.
Armed with an awareness of treatments that are centered on the patient rather than the disease itself, functional medicine explores ways to balance key elements within the mind, body, and spirit, as well as how balance is essential to long-term positive health.
Functional Changes
Depending on a patient’s needs, functional medicine takes a wide range of approaches to improve physical and mental health.
These may include pinpointing needed changes to lifestyle, such as better sleep and more exercise, revamping a diet to eschew processed foods in favor of whole foods. Nutritional deficiencies and hormonal imbalances, in addition to family health history, often guide additional treatment approaches.
This information is informed by longer visits with functional medicine doctors compared to shorter appointments with traditional doctors.
Functional medicine doctors are also more inclined to use treatments such as nutrition, dietary supplements, herbal medicine, and acupuncture as part of a treatment plan for chronic disease, especially if traditional techniques have not been able to manage an illness.
That’s part of the personalized experience that comes with functional medicine. Each patient is addressed individually and comprehensively, and treatments are unique. Chronic illnesses impact each person differently, and the causes are often just as complex and unique as the disease itself.
