Are you a high-performance seeker who wants to live longer and healthier? If so, consider functional Medicine.
Conventional healthcare practitioners typically look at the leaves – examining symptoms to make a diagnosis and create a treatment plan. Functional Medicine starts with the roots and soil – focusing on underlying dysfunctions and imbalances.
It Addresses the Root Cause
Many people seek out a functional medicine practitioner because they are frustrated with the lack of results from conventional medical approaches. They want to find a way to address their health issues without medication and its residual side effects.
Rather than treating a disease, functional medicine focuses on the fundamental systems out of balance. This includes how your genes, environment, diet and lifestyle interact with your body to create health or disease.
Most practitioners, including Trivida functional medicine, listen to you, exploring your history and unique biological makeup. They look for underlying factors like stress, toxins, poor nutrition, sleep and exercise contributing to your condition. They help you develop a plan to reduce or eliminate these underlying causes so your body can heal. The goal is not only to eliminate symptoms but also to restore your vitality and well-being. This is why they promote health as a positive state of well-being, not just the absence of disease or illness.
It Addresses the Whole Person
When you meet with a functional medicine practitioner, they take the time to understand your whole health history. This includes family and lifestyle history and detailed information about your diet, exercise, sleep and stress levels, relationships and environmental factors.
Functional medicine aims to find and treat the underlying causes of your illness. This is why it differs from conventional treatment, which focuses on recognizing symptoms and prescribing medications.
A good analogy for this is the roots and soil of a tree. Conventional medicine looks at the leaves and branches to determine a diagnosis but fails to look at the root cause. Functional medicine is like the roots and soil, getting to the underlying dysfunctions that create disease and designing a personalized treatment approach for each patient.
Because of this individualized approach, it isn’t easy to perform randomized controlled trials on functional medicine. However, recent cohort studies have shown promising results.
It Addresses the Environment
Functional medicine seeks to understand and treat the underlying cause of disease for each unique patient. It integrates best medical practices with traditional and “alternative” therapies, focusing on prevention through diet, exercise, nutritional supplements and positive stress management techniques.
These doctors know that the underlying imbalances result from multiple causes, including genetics, lifestyle choices and environmental influences. They can identify how these factors interact with each other to create disease.
The good news is that this new healthcare model can help prevent and cure the many conditions that ravage our country. Whether it’s heart disease, diabetes or cancer, we are in the midst of an epidemic that requires a completely different approach to healthcare. A new paradigm is needed to recognize the individual’s genetic uniqueness and support their natural expression of health and vitality. Functional medicine is the solution. It is a powerful new operating system and clinical model for assessing, treating and preventing chronic diseases.
It Addresses the Mind
Most of us know the drill regarding conventional medicine: We visit our doctor with symptoms, diagnose the condition at hand and prescribe a treatment that alleviates those symptoms. But what needs to be addressed is the cause.
Functional medicine is a practice that addresses the cause. Practitioners search “upstream” and consider your medical history, genetic makeup, physiology, diet, environment, and other factors to determine why you are experiencing symptoms.
This includes assessing your dietary habits, exercise routines, sleep hygiene, and other lifestyle behaviors. It also examines food allergies, sensitivities, hormone imbalances, and genetic influences.
This is a different healthcare approach, requiring patients to spend more time with their doctors.. This allows for in-depth, personalized conversations and more targeted care.
