Functional Medicine

Chronic disease is climbing globally at an alarming rate. In the UK six out of ten adults over the age of 65 have at least one chronic disease, 16% have two or more conditions.  The global cost of treating chronic illnesses is projected to reach £34 trillion by the year 2030, unless something can be done to stop this epidemic. That’s where Functional Medicine comes in. 

The human body’s natural state is one of balance and sustained wellness and vitality (wellness, by the way, includes our entire experience - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual). Believe it or not, our basic, foundational lifestyle habits are the primary determinant of long-term health maintenance. These are what create or destroy our delicate balance across the multiple systems in our body. Everything in the body and our life experience is interconnected. Everything. And when our body is in a state of homeostasis, it creates resilient vitality - a state that naturally repels disease.

Disease is preceded by dis-ease, where there is evidence of imbalance, blockage, or some sort of impairment in one’s natural functioning. The root cause and the symptoms of disease may be notably distance from one another - in the body, in time and in biochemistry. And the root cause (or causES, as there is virtually always a number) is unique for each person, for we are all biochemically quite different. Thus effective and comprehensive health care has to be customised for each person.

So what is Functional Medicine?

“Collaborative, holistic, patient-centred, healing-focused—this is the Functional Medicine approach to healthcare. If it sounds different than what you’ve experienced in the conventional setting, that’s because it is. Purposely. Our current medical model can’t stop the chronic disease epidemic, the biggest health threat we face today; it was never designed to. But Functional Medicine can, precisely because its methodology addresses the root cause of chronic illness to foster real wellness in its patients.

By using ancestral health strategies to align our bodies more closely with our environment, Functional Medicine shifts the focus away from treating illnesses as they occur to preventing them from developing in the first place. The Functional Medicine approach deals directly with the underlying cause of a health issue and treats each patient as a whole, unique individual. Practitioners work together with health coaches, nutritionists, and other allied health providers to support patients as they make their journey toward wellness.

While the Functional Medicine approach is all about preventing or reversing chronic illnesses, the conventional approach focuses on disease management. Rather than encouraging true health, conventional doctors simply diagnose an illness and try to suppress the symptoms with prescription drugs. Those drugs seldom address the root cause of the problem. Instead, they mask symptoms and sometimes even suppress vital bodily functions, leading to unintended side effects—and additional prescriptions to deal with them. That medication treadmill effectively creates patients for life, and it never solves the underlying cause of the illness. It’s the wrong paradigm and the wrong delivery model. Conventional medicine evolved during a time when acute diseases, like infections that were relatively simple to cure, brought people to the doctor. Now, most patients visit the doctor with a full-blown chronic problem that is difficult to treat.” - Chris Kresser

How does Functional Medicine work in practice?

Functional Medicine is not alternative.  It is not complementary.  It is evidence-based cutting edge medical science applied in a different way.  The practitioners are like medical detectives, working on what is going on underneath the disease or dysfunction.  Getting a diagnosis of heart disease doesn’t tell you everything.  Heart disease, diabetes, dementia – these are just labels we give to a set of symptoms.  But knowing the label name doesn’t tell you the cause.  For example, if you have diabetes it means that you have high blood sugar, but why?  Is it caused by too much starch or sugar in your diet, or environmental toxins, or an inflammatory microbiome, or nutritional deficiencies – or all of them? 

Your symptoms form merely one layer of information – there is much else to be considered, including your lifestyle, environment (particularly exposure to toxins), diet and genes.  A long and detailed clinical history is therefore the part of the process.

If the answers are not emerging, the clinician will undertake state-of-the-art laboratory tests, which will show very precisely where things are out of balance and indicate the mechanisms that may have caused the malfunction.  

Medicine is undergoing an incredible scientific revolution, a massive transformation.  We now know that the body isn’t just a collection of separate organs and parts, all to be treated separately by different specialists.  It is one integrated, dynamic interconnected system.  In Functional Medicine, instead of treating thousands of diseases as separate things, it looks to restore balance in the basic functional systems of your body – your nervous system, immune system, digestive system, endocrine system, metabolic system, circulatory/drainage system, all of which  are connected.  When they are in balance, you are healthy, and when they are not you are sick.  

The key to health and optimal ageing is remarkably simple.  It is to treat the whole system, removing those things that create imbalance and providing those things that restore balance and optimal function. The body does the rest.  This can be done at any age and any state of disease.  The sooner you start the better.