What is functional medicine?

The begining of my Functional Medicine learning journey began with nutritional interventions. I am grateful to the people who have supprted my learning aliong the way. I got a running start with Pharmacy Innovations.

I have mentioned functional medicine in my about me and other spots on my platform. I would like to dedicate this blog post to explainaing a little more. Functional medicine is as much of a paradigm shift as it is a novel approach to therapeutic intervention. Functional medicine looks at the root cause of disease as opposed to controlling or treating the result or symptoms of disease.[1] The best way I heard this explained was from a speaker at the institute of functional medicine who said something along the lines of “depression is not because of a lack of Prozac but another underlying cause.” For me it was a realization that 15 years ago, when I was in pharmacy school, we had a handful of oral medications to treat type 2 diabetes and now, 10 to 15 years later, we have even more diabetes and more diabetes meds! So, the meds are not solving the problem but treating the symptoms. Functional medicine is an approach to healthcare where time is taken to delve into the patient's life, background experiences, habits, lifestyle, home and work environments, exposures to toxins and chemicals, stress, psychosocial support, and overall Wellness and health. This approach to health and Wellness takes time and patience. There are no quick fixes in functional medicine. In most cases chronic disease develops overtime and then it takes time to undo that properly. Now, don't get me wrong, medications are used by functional medicine doctors and the standard of care should always be deployed for proper patient care. However, while you are being treated with standard of care you can start to dial back the reasons why there is disease in the first place. Modern medicine is exemplary for treating acute issues. For example, if a patient breaks his arm or has a heart attack, modern medicine is the intervention that is best suited to intervene. But when it comes to chronic disease the modern medicine model does not work as effectively as it does in the acute situations. If it did, we wouldn't have more and more chronic diseases. Take autoimmunity as an example. Autoimmune conditions were rare when I was young, an incidence of 11% in the early 2000s, 10 years later,  it’s now at almost 16% incidence.[2]  That’s a decent jump in just 10 years (that was based on a lab marker for autoimmunity). Functional medicine is grounded in science. A lot of times we are looking at the biochemical processes that run the functions of the body to get to the root cause of why there is a disturbance or dis-ease. Let’s take the example of type 2 diabetes. This disease state is not a result of metformin deficiency, but it is a result of metabolic imbalance or inefficiencies. This disease state can result from a multitude of factors, for example, too many calories in and not enough calories out, or inflammation from a poor diet that also feeds into the first reason. Other reasons could be exposure to environmental toxins that are keeping the body from carrying on its metabolic processes properly. At the end of the day the cause could be different for 10 different patients. The goal of the functional medicine practitioner is to uncover the patient specific root cause and help the patient to reverse the causes of disease and not just treat the results of the disease, which is high blood sugar in our example. If you don’t already know high blood sugar can damage your vascular system. Since the functional medicine approach can take time to have its effect it is very much appropriate to use meds, where appropriate, to pull down the high blood sugar levels until the functional approach has taken hold.

[1] The Instittute for Functioanl Medicine. “The Functional Medicine Approach.” https://www.ifm.org/functional-medicine/what-is-functional-medicine/. 2022.

[2] Dinse GE, Parks CG, Weinberg CR, et al. Increasing Prevalence of Antinuclear Antibodies in the United States. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2020;72(6):1026-1035. doi:10.1002/art.41214