Many people are sick and tired of going to the doctor who treats only the symptoms. The good news is that there is a better way.
Functional medicine is a patient-centered approach to healthcare that looks for the underlying causes of disease. It examines your genetics, diet, sleep, and environmental exposures.
It’s Personalized
Functional medicine aims to identify and treat the underlying causes of health issues. By doing so, it can help you achieve optimal health and wellness.
Unlike conventional medicine, which focuses on symptoms and manages disease once it’s already present, functional medicine seeks to prevent illness and promotes well-being by optimizing lifestyle factors. This approach is efficient for chronic conditions and can reduce reliance on medication.
Functional medicine practitioners are trained to look “upstream,” considering the complex interactions in a person’s history, physiology, and environment that can contribute to their unique condition. Practitioners can develop individualized treatment plans by examining the five pillars of health and finding dysfunctions, deficiencies, and imbalances.
This can include dietary changes, nutritional supplements, exercise, stress-management techniques, and more. You can browse online to learn more about the power of functional medicine.
It’s Gentle
The standard healthcare model focuses on symptom management. Physicians identify an established set of symptoms and use pharmaceutical interventions to minimize them. If you need immediate care, this may yield positive results, but it isn’t ideal for long-term health goals.
Many chronic conditions are caused or exacerbated by seemingly unrelated factors. Getting to the root of these problems requires looking at your entire being – your physiology, lifestyle and environment, genetic makeup, and emotional well-being.
Moreover, Denver functional medicine considers these underlying factors and works with you to uncover the reasons behind your illness. By developing a relationship with you and utilizing various holistic treatment methods, your practitioner will help you make healthy changes to find relief from your symptoms and prevent them from returning.
A study published showed that patients treated with functional medicine exhibited more significant improvements in Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System Global Physical Health than propensity-matched controls.
It’s Evidence-Based
Most of us are familiar with the routine of going to a doctor, getting diagnosed with an illness, and being prescribed medication to alleviate symptoms. However, what if this wasn’t the case?
In contrast to conventional medicine, functional medicine focuses on treating the cause of the issue rather than just its symptoms. It uses a systems approach to understand your health and plots complex signs, symptoms, and laboratory values onto the Functional Medicine Tree.
This allows your practitioner to see the connections between the various parts of your body. For example, the root imbalances causing skin issues can be related to those affecting your digestive system. This enables your physician to address the underlying cause and improve your outcomes.
This approach also examines lifestyle factors such as nutrition, sleep, exercise, relationships, stress, and genetics. These are all incredibly important in creating optimal wellness and preventing chronic disease.
It’s Effective
Our bodies are amazingly designed to heal themselves and do so with less reliance on medications than many of us realize. This is especially true if we take the time to work with a functional medicine doctors to unlock their potential.
Unlike the standard approach to medicine, which looks at symptoms and then prescribes a treatment to make them go away, functional doctors are more interested in what’s causing those symptoms. This means digging deeper and looking at genetics, diet, stress, exercise, and social well-being.
Often, people who visit functional medicine doctors seek relief from a constellation of symptoms their primary care physician can’t seem to put together into a diagnosis. They may also be interested in preventive care to help them avoid chronic health conditions or reverse those they already have. The good news is that research shows that functional medicine is effective.
