Have you been to countless doctors who don’t truly listen? Are you sick of pills and surgeries being pushed as a cure-all for your ailments? Are you exhausted from having more questions than answers? If this sounds like you, you aren’t alone. Many patients have run the gamut of the traditional healthcare system, only to end up empty-handed. Functional medicine takes a different approach, focusing on the patient through a holistic lens.
Many people inquire about integrative medicine vs functional medicine. While similar, integrative medicine focuses on optimizing one’s overall health. Functional medicine is ideal for patients who present with complex, long-standing conditions. Functional medicine explores core causes of illness to drill down a diagnosis, while integrative medicine supports healing through yoga, acupuncture, and other proven therapies.
What is Functional Medicine?
Functional medicine is a modality that prioritizes identifying the root cause of the patient’s illness rather than solely treating symptoms. You may be asking yourself, “Is functional medicine legit?” Through the core pillars of functional medicine, you can see how this modality is a viable path to healing and wellness.
While traditional medicine takes a disease-focused approach, functional medicine places emphasis on the patient. Functional medicine recognizes the impact that one’s mental health, genetics, life stressors, and environment can have on disease presentation. Treatments are tailored to the patient’s lifestyle factors, rather than a one-size-fits-all regimen.
Whole-Body Healing
Through the lens of functional medicine, everything is not always as it seems. This type of medicine looks beyond the surface to determine the core cause of a disease. A functional medicine doctor may look to the digestive system for answers about chronic headaches or rashes, because they view the body as a connected system. Lifestyle factors like sleep, diet, and stress are weighed heavily when making a diagnosis. Your functional medicine doctor will take an in-depth patient history to uncover the root cause of your illness.
Focus on Lifestyle
Why treat the disease itself when you can eliminate the cause of the disease? This is the question that functional medicine seeks to answer. After answering questions about your sleep, diet, environment, stress, and relationships, your doctor may recommend changes that will improve these areas. For example, instead of prescribing a pill to treat headaches, your doctor may suggest dietary changes, additional supplements, or specific exercises.
Thriving as the End-Goal
While the conventional approach to medicine prioritizes the elimination of disease through prescriptions and surgeries, functional medicine takes things a step further. Vitality is a core pillar of functional medicine. Doctors practicing this modality believe feeling energized is just as important as the absence of disease. Through lifestyle improvement, functional medicine seeks to help patients truly thrive, not just survive.
Patient-Centered Approach
Conventional medicine focuses on treating the disease at hand with very little consideration for patient-specific factors. In conventional medicine, diseases like lupus are treated almost identically in all patients, regardless of factors like diet, stress, and exercise. Little to no lifestyle modifications are recommended. In functional medicine, doctors take the time to get to know a patient’s history to get a complete picture of their health. This allows the patient to take charge of their own health through diet, exercise, and stress management, and recognizes their struggle as unique.
How to Find a Functional Medicine Doctor
If you’re looking for a functional medicine doctor, you can start by browsing the registry at the Institute for Functional Medicine. On their website, you can search by city to find a functional medicine doctor in Chicago.