What is functional medicine?
For many “Functional Medicine” is an unknown healthcare opportunity.
So, I thought I would explain what it is and why it offers many a very real opportunity to re-discover their lost health.
Modern medicine is great at emergent and acute care for helping us get back on our feet. If we have an infection or have a broken arm, IU North or one of the other local hospitals is the right place to go! But, when we have more of a chronic problem…it is here where functional medicine shines. The reason being is that chronic problems commonly don’t fit into the pharmaceutical based modern medicine box.
Chronic problems such as brain fog, irritable bowel and other chronic gut problems, depression, inflammation, diabetes, obesity, hypothyroid, auto-immune disorders and neurodegenerative disease are almost never from a single cause. Medication is designed to address single causes like microbes. If there is not one cause than how can medication provide lasting relief and benefit. Invariably, they can’t. So instead medications are recommended that only decrease symptoms. But, because they are not addressing the underlying physiological causes for the condition, these conditions only get worse.
Most conditions that Functional Medicine can benefit are associated with diet, lifestyle and environmental exposure. For example – as you know, a poor diet can lead to blood sugar dysregulation that can lead to diabetes type 2, obesity and potential heart disease.
But for some, the effects of a poor diet might not play out that way. Because the same poor diet in others might create increased gut permeability that allows the diffusion of food stuffs into the body. The immune system can get turned on to attack these foreign substances but might confuse the food particles with its own tissue. The genetic make up of some foods mimic the genetic make of some of your tissue. We call this immune cross-reactivity. Your own immune system is now attacking your own tissue based solely out of confusion. We call this an auto-immune reaction and where-ever the tissue is that is being attacked; brain, thalamus, pancreatic cells, gut, skin etc. becomes that particular auto-immune disorder.
For others, blood sugar dysregulation can lead to decreases in neurotransmitters, or the turning on of microglial cells in the brain, or increases in cortisol and any of these can lead to brain-fog, depression and memory loss. And the list can go on and on.
Keep in mind that this is only one system and its impact on the body. Each system or process can impact the health of the other systems or processes including the digestive and elimination system, brain and nervous system, circulation and cardiovascular system, defense and immune system, cellular communication and energy production etc. So… What is functional medicine?
Functional medicine is the process of evaluating all systems of the body to establish which are involved. And then going about addressing each system involved. Usually addressing the worst contributing problem first and then moving onto the next. It is a process of unraveling or undoing the damage, when possible, that has been done by all contributing factors. It is also to help you identify those contributing factors to prevent further exposure.
This explains why the experience of going to a functional medicine doctor is different than going to a medical doctor.
When you go to the medical doctor with a chronic complaint, he/she listens to your symptoms and provides you with a prescription to address those symptoms. Occasionally they will evaluate basic markers like cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides, TSH, or glucose in the blood. But, it is not common practice to dig deeper because it doesn’t make sense to if their treatment is going to be the same regardless of further testing. An example of that would be hypothyroidism. Most medical doctors, hearing that you have symptoms of hypothyroidism, will request a limited thyroid panel to evaluate TSH levels. If elevated, you will be prescribed thyroid medication. They won’t dig deeper because their treatment is limited to the medication. Measuring TSH alone does not convey pituitary function, whether your thyroid hormones are working normally throughout the body, or whether you have an autoimmune disorder such as Hashimoto’s. The answers of which would create differing treatment for the functional medicine doctor.
When you go to a functional medicine doctor the intake form is longer and more thorough because we don’t just want to hear your symptoms, we want to know about the health of each system. We then commonly order tests to know how best to serve you. These tests may include urinalysis, complete fecal analysis, complete blood panel, lipid panel, adrenal stress index, viral load panel, complete thyroid panel or autoimmune panel etc. Treatment then is directed towards addressing the underlying causes. As it may take months to treat each contributing cause so may have need to see someone like me, the functional medicine doctor, repeatedly. Re-testing is common using the tests that are most appropriate to evaluate progress.
Where as a nutritionist looks predominantly at a single nutrient deficiency model, functional medicine uses a systems biology model for evaluation first and then a single nutrient deficiency model second. Treatment is non-pharmaceutical based. In some rare cases functional medicine doctors will treat patients in conjunction with a medical doctor if their condition will benefit from medication as well. Functional medicine doctors use dietary changes along with bio-available flavenoids and other nutritional supplements to promote the health in each system.
Read that list above again and realize that these are some of the conditions where functional medicine can be of great benefit.