Functional Medicine is a systems biology–based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness.
A diagnosis can be the result of more than one cause. For example, depression can be caused by many different factors, including inflammation. Likewise, a cause such as inflammation may lead to a number of different diagnoses, including depression. The precise manifestation of each cause depends on the individual’s genes, environment, and lifestyle, and only treatments that address the right cause will have lasting benefit beyond symptom suppression.
A small group of doctors who realized the importance of an individualized approach to disease causes, based on the evolving research in nutritional science, genomics, and epigenetics, developed the Functional Medicine Model. These brilliant doctors found ways to apply these new advances in the clinic to address root causes using low-risk interventions that modify molecular and cellular systems to reverse these drivers of disease.They were able to apply new research in a way that often brought dramatic results to patients who had previously received unsuccessful treatments. Part of this advance was a return to scientific principles of finding new ways to look for unifying factors at the cellular and systems levels that underlie organism-wide problems. Over time, it became necessary to systematize the approach so that it could be taught to a wider group of practitioners of differing backgrounds. In 2014 the attendees at the annual seminar that I attend in January topped out at 150 and over 100 of them were chiropractors. January 2019 the seminar maxed out at 400 and consisted of doctors of chiropractic, functional medicine, allopathic medicine, naturopathic medicine, osteopathic medicine, nutritional medicine, and some PhD’s. This is the medicine of the future and everyone knows it!