Welcome to the Functional Medicine; The future of medicine. Chronic diseases affect 95% of the populations affected by disease and the approaches currently employed to manage them have a reductionist approach which more often than not makes matters worse. It’s analogous to thinking of an overflowing sink and we try to mop up the floor and this gets harder and exhaustive and to think of it,silly. Would it not be better to turn off the tap first (root cause) and then try a mop up of the mess. Unfortunately, physicians thought processes are most often down stream rather than working upstream which is what Functional Medicine does.
The practice of Functional Medicine involves four essential components:
- Eliciting the patient’s complete story during the Functional Medicine intake
- Identifying and addressing the challenges of the patient’s modifiable lifestyle factors and environmental exposures
- Organizing the patient’s clinical imbalances by underlying causes of disease in a systems biology matrix framework and
- Establishing a mutually empowering partnership between practitioner and patient.
A core strength of Functional Medicine is its relevance to all healthcare disciplines and medical specialties, any of which can — to the degree allowed by their training and licensure — apply a Functional Medicine approach, using the Functional Medicine matrix as a basic template for organizing and coupling knowledge and data. In addition to providing a more effective approach to preventing, treating, and reversing complex chronic disease, Functional Medicine can also provide a common language and a unified model that can be applied across a wide variety of health professions to facilitate integrated care.
Functional Medicine is playing a key role in the effort to solve the modern epidemic of chronic disease that is creating a health crisis both nationally and globally. Because chronic diseases are predominantly lifestyle driven, environment- and genetics-influenced phenomenon, we must have an approach to care that integrates all these elements in the context of the patient’s complete story. Functional Medicine does just that and provides an original and creative approach to the collection and analysis of this broad array of information to get to the core issues of the matrix.
If this is what you would like help with,ask for an appointment with Dr. Varghese Zachariah, Integrative GP.
