Conventional and Functional Medicine — compared and contrasted
“By shifting the traditional disease-centred focus of medical practice to a more patient-centred approach, Functional Medicine addresses the whole person, not just an isolated set of symptoms”
- Institute of Functional Medicine
One of the best ways to understand functional medicine is to contrast it with conventional medicine. Conventional medicine has some amazing attributes. It is brilliant for acute care, infectious diseases, trauma and emergency medicine, but it is not very effective at treating chronic disease, which is the number one problem we face today.
Functional medicine is investigative. It treats symptoms by addressing the root of the problem, which leads to more profound and longer-lasting results, whereas conventional medicine tends to be more superficial, in that it masks or suppresses symptoms but doesn’t address the underlying cause, and this tends to create patients for life. For example, if you have high blood pressure, you get on a drug to lower it, and you’re basically told to take that for the rest of your life, and the same is true for high cholesterol.
Functional medicine tends to be safer. Its treatments typically have fewer side effects, risks, or complications. It emphasises diet, lifestyle, supplements, and herbs, and unrelated complaints often will improve spontaneously in treatment. Conventional medicine tends to be more dangerous. Drugs and surgery can have serious side effects and complications, including death. I cant find the equivalent statistic for the UK, but in US, medical care is the third leading cause of death.
In functional medicine, the patient is respected, empowered, educated, and encouraged to play an active role in their healing process, whereas in conventional medicine, the patient’s opinion is often discounted or ignored, little time is spent on education, and the patient is even sometimes actively discouraged to play a strong role in their healing process.
Functional medicine is preventative. It is guided by the ancient Chinese proverb “The superb physician treats disease before it occurs,” whereas conventional medicine tends to be more reactive. It really aims to manage disease after it occurs and often doesn’t intervene until disease has progressed beyond a certain point of no return.
Functional medicine is more holistic. It treats the body as an interconnected whole, and recognises that to treat one part, all other parts must be addressed, whereas conventional medicine views the body as a collection of separate parts. In fact, there’s a doctor for every different part of the body, and there’s often very little communication between these doctors or acknowledgement of a connection.
Functional medicine is patient-centred. This means the patient is treated and not the disease. It recognises the individuality of the patient, and that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, patients with the same condition, like ulcerative colitis for example, may get a completely different treatment based on the set of causes of their condition. Conventional medicine, on the other hand, tends to be more disease centered. It treats the disease and not the patient, and patients with the same disease will usually get the same treatment.
Functional medicine is integrative. It combines the best of all approaches to healing, conventional, alternative, herbal, Chinese, Ayurvedic. It doesn’t exclude drugs or surgery when they’re necessary but tends to focus more on diet, lifestyle, supplements, and botanicals as the primary interventions, whereas conventional medicine is more limited in its scope. It typically relies almost exclusively on drugs and surgery despite risks, and while it does pay some lip service to the importance of nutrition and lifestyle, doctors are undereducated on these topics and often don’t have much time to devote to them in the typical patient interaction.