Working With a Functional Medicine Practitioner
When you visit me as a Functional Medicine practitioner, you can expect to spend a lot more time than you would with a conventional provider. You can also expect to do a lot of talking, as a big part of Functional Medicine is exploring your detailed personal and family history, the circumstances around your first symptoms and the experiences you may have had with other health care providers.
Functional Medicine teaches practitioners how to uncover the underlying causes of your health problems through careful history taking, physical examination, and laboratory testing:
•In addition to doing a lot of talking about your history, I will ask about your mental well-being, spiritual health, and social factors. Considering these areas helps me see your health in your context as a whole person, not just in terms of your physical symptoms.
• I may do a detailed examination of your body to see if any visible signs provide clues to what is going on under the surface.
• I may also suggest that you submit samples for laboratory testing; some of these tests are the same ones used by conventional clinicians, but others are specialized tests that can help determine the causes of your illness. These tests might include genetic testing, which can show if the genes you inherited from your parents made you more susceptible to certain types of health problems.
A Comprehensive Approach to Treatment
Once I have all the results from your tests, I will ask for your help designing a treatment plan (we discuss your “non-negotiables”). The good news is if the right cases are identified, you can successfully treat most health issues. Some people can be completely restored to optimum function, while others can see substantial improvement in their condition. You can also take steps to help prevent your disease from worsening.
The treatment plan you help design will usually include making some changes in your lifestyle: what you eat, your physical activity, how you deal with stress, exposure to potentially toxic substances, and other factors. The point of these changes is that your genetic makeup, the genes you inherited from your parents, is designed to work well in a specific environment. Sometimes, when genes are exposed to the wrong environment, they don’t work as they should, leading to health problems. The good news is that, although individual genes may make you more susceptible to some diseases, they also may be influenced by everything in your environment, as well as your experiences, attitudes, and beliefs. That means it is possible to change the way genes work in your body. So, changing your environment can make the genes work the way they were designed to, returning you to health.
In addition to lifestyle changes, Functional Medicine treatments may include combinations of drugs, botanical medicines, nutritional supplements, therapeutic diets, or detoxification programs. But you will always have a big role in choosing those treatments because, as a patient of mine, you become an active partner in the design of your treatment plan. This allows you to take charge of improving your own health and changing the outcome of your disease.