What is Functional Medicine?

It is an integrative, science-based healthcare approach that treats illness and promotes wellness by focusing on the bio-chemically unique aspects of each patient, and then individually tailoring interventions to restore physiological, psychological, and structural balance.

By shifting the traditional disease-centered focus of medical practice to a more patient-centered approach, functional medicine addresses the whole person, not just an isolated set of symptoms. Functional medicine practitioners spend time with their patients, listening to their histories and looking at the interaction among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health and complex, chronic disease. In this way, functional medicine supports the unique expression of health and vitality for each individual.

There are seven basic principles underlying functional medicine which include the following:

1. Science-based medicine that connects the emerging research base to clinical practice.
2. Biochemical individuality based on genetic and environmental uniqueness.
3. Patient-centered care rather than disease-focused treatment.
4. Dynamic balance of internal and extemal factors that affect total functioning.
5. Health as a positive vitality, not merely the absence of disease.
6. Web-like interconnections among the body's physiological processes also affect every aspect of functionality.
7. Promotion of organ reserve.