What is Functional Medicine?
If you keep up with news about health, you’ve likely seen the term functional medicine popping up more and more lately. But what is functional medicine and how is it different from the conventional Western model?
According to the Institute For Functional Medicine, functional medicine is an approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. This is a distinctly different approach than the conventional Western model of medicine as we will see.
The Problem With Western Medicine
Does this scenario sound familiar? You see your primary doctor for your yearly check-up with a list of problems you’ve been noticing. After you mention one or two, your doctor is glancing at the clock while typing out your responses to the same questions you already answered on the stack of forms you filled out before your visit. Before you’ve even had time to ask all your questions, your 15 minutes is up and your doctor is heading out the door, handing you a prescription for a medication you’ve never heard of and an order for a panel of basic blood tests. See you next year! This is the conventional Western medicine model most Americans know as the norm.
If you have a chronic illness like diabetes, coronary artery disease or an autoimmune disease, you might also see specialists who help you manage the symptoms of your illness—often with medications that may help alleviate symptoms but which can also have side effects. These side effects might then need to be managed with other medications in the future, adding to the growing list of health problems you experience. When something goes terribly wrong and you have a health crisis, you land in urgent care, the ER or admitted to a hospital.
Conventional Western medicine is grounded in the use of medications and interventions like surgery instead of wellness and prevention of disease. It’s not the fault of physicians and other practitioners. The dysfunction is built into the system itself. Practitioners in private practice and in hospital systems are restricted in what they can do for patients by regulatory and accrediting agencies and insurance companies.
Even doctors who keep up with the latest medical research may be limited in what they can apply in their practice, reigned in by what these agencies consider necessary and reimbursable. When physicians accept insurance, they’re forced to follow the dictates of the insurance companies which generally don’t cover preventative practices. They do, however, cover medications as well as surgeries and admissions once you’re already sick.
Chronic Diseases Are On the Rise
Let’s say you have coronary artery disease with inflammation and a buildup of plaque in your arteries that puts you at high risk of having a heart attack. In our conventional Western medical model, you might be prescribed medications like statins, anticoagulants, ACE inhibitors, beta blockers or calcium channel blockers all of which can have serious adverse side effects and lead to further health problems. While these treatments are sometimes needed, they don’t address the chronic systemic inflammation at the root of the heart disease. If you continue on with the same habits that lead to the inflammation—eating a diet high in sugar and unhealthy oils, not enough physical exercise, poor sleep habits and high levels of chronic stress— it’s likely you’ll eventually need an intervention like a cardiac catheterization or cardiac bypass surgery. But conventional practitioners don’t have the luxury of time to educate their patients. In fact, physicians are increasingly pressured to see more patients than they can reasonably manage. Thus the hurried 15 minute visits we’ve all become accustomed to.
Despite all the medications and interventions available, the incidence of chronic disease is not going down. In fact, chronic illnesses of all kinds are only increasing yearly in the US. According to the CDC, in 2022, 11.3% of the US population has diabetes. That’s 37.3 million people, an increase from the 34.2 million people who had diabetes in 2021. According to the American College of Cardiology, deaths from cardiovascular disease are also steadily increasing. Currently, about 1 out of every 4 deaths in the US is due to cardiovascular disease. Other types of largely preventable chronic illnesses that are on the rise include autoimmune diseases, allergies, Alzheimer’s, obesity and some types of cancers.
It’s clear the conventional medicine model is not working. We can all see the problem here but how can we change it?
How Functional Medicine is Different
Functional medicine offers a different choice in outcomes. The goal of functional medicine is to stop and reverse the progression of chronic illness and can even prevent it from developing in the first place. Instead of simply managing the symptoms of a disease, functional medicine practitioners are interested in finding the root cause of an illness and treating that cause before it becomes a major problem. This requires a big picture overview that can’t be gathered in a 15 minute visit.
Functional medicine MDs often take 90 minutes or more per visit to get to the bottom of what’s really going on with your overall health. Because no health problem is isolated to a single organ or system within your body, they integrate the latest research in all fields contributing to health including nutritional science, epigenetics, and biochemistry.
The most up to date research indicates that many chronic disease states stem from a list of common culprits: inflammation, imbalances in the microbiome that lead to a compromised and unhealthy gut, and hormonal imbalances caused in large part by by our toxic and nutritionally deficient Western diet. Some other major factors are a sedentary lifestyle, lack of sleep and chronic stress.
Nutrition is an area of special focus for functional medicine practitioners since nutritional deficiencies greatly impact our health through disrupting our microbiome and the function of our cells and our genes.
Functional medicine is individualized and science-backed care and guidance. It helps people make lifestyle choices that can turn back the clock on chronic disease states and even the signs of aging. It’s about developing the habits, knowledge and understanding to keep yourself healthy and thriving, keeping chronic disease at bay and enjoying vibrant good health as long as possible.
It’s the difference between learning to manage your wellness or having to manage an illness.
Functional Medicine Solves the Problems the Current Healthcare System Can’t
A crisis is looming in American healthcare. Yes, the pandemic accelerated it but it’s been in the making for decades. There’s a critical shortage of providers to care for the growing number of people with chronic diseases. Add to that the mass exodus of healthcare workers who left the field for good due to the pandemic’s grueling physical and emotional toll. The situation is unsustainable.
Functional medicine practitioners have a role to play here.
Drastically reducing the number of people with preventable chronic illnesses would not only greatly improve the lives of those people but would also take pressure off the healthcare system, allowing all practitioners and caregivers more time and more resources to give better quality and more personalized care.
This is where functional medicine fills in the gaps in the current healthcare system and will continue on to become the core of a new healthcare paradigm where prevention is acknowledged as the crucial missing piece of the puzzle.
The Future of Healthcare
The future success of healthcare in this country depends on the average person having access to trustworthy and useful health information with a focus on preventing chronic and preventable diseases. If we continue on the way we’re headed there simply won’t be enough resources, practitioners and caregivers to go around for everyone who needs them.
Preventing disease from happening the best we can is the only rational approach. Prevention—not just treatment—of chronic disease must become the cornerstone of healthcare.
This means nothing less than a complete paradigm shift in a system that is almost impossibly complex. It will require an overhaul in payer systems and shift in perspective from everyone involved including physicians, medical schools, accrediting and regulatory agencies. While that sounds like a long shot, the most important players are patients themselves. Educating yourself about your health is how it starts. When enough people understand what it takes to stay healthy, the priorities of healthcare will have to change. Instead of more demand for pharmaceuticals and procedures, the demand will increase for access to nutrient rich foods, a healthier environment and holistic and preventative therapies. Supply follows demand. We all cast votes every day with our wallets, our behaviors and actions.
Functional medicine practitioners are well positioned to start this shift through the education and empowerment of their patients.
How to Find a Functional Medicine Practitioner
To learn more or to find a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can check the website for The Institute for Functional Medicine.
You can also get more information from functional medicine practitioners through their books, blogs and social media platforms. Check out Dr. Frank Lipman, the author of The New Rules of Aging Well, for daily inspiration on Twitter. Some other good reads are Deep Nutrition and The Fatburn Fix by Dr. Catherine Shanahan.
