Functional Medicine

Have you gone from doctor to doctor . . . tried everything . . . and still not felt better? We see this all the time. Partnering with the right provider who asks the right questions, someone who can get to the root cause of why you feel unwell, can get you on the path to living a rich, vibrant, healthy life.

Functional Medicine is a holistic, patient-centered, collaborative approach to health care. With chronic disease skyrocketing, traditional health care approaches aren’t working for many people. And those approaches aren’t even keeping up with the latest research!

The Functional Medicine approach addresses the underlying causes of health issues and treats each patient as a whole, unique individual. Sometimes prescriptions are necessary, but Functional Medicine doesn’t just rely on chemicals to mask symptoms. Treating root causes often means that patients can move away from drug treatments entirely. When we get things like sleep, diet, nutrients, environment, and stress management dialed in properly, the body will move toward healing on its own.

The “Functional” in Functional Medicine means that we are interested in figuring out why your current health state is “dysfunctional.” For example, instead of simply prescribing a pill to artificially alleviate the pain of a headache, Functional Medicine providers look to discover what is causing the headaches and then address those root causes, rather than simply prescribing a pill to mask the pain each time.

Functional Medicine focuses on reversing chronic illnesses (and better yet, preventing them before they occur). Conventional medicine, on the other hand, focuses on disease management.

This approach is good for what it does! But because the conventional approach isn’t focused on preventing and reversing chronic illness, many patients who engage with conventional medicine find that their chronic illnesses linger.

Another important difference is that conventional medicine often divides the body into separate systems, and only treats the system that initially presented troublesome symptoms. The Functional Medicine approach is to view the patient as a whole, with an eye toward how the body’s symptoms interact with one another. Often, we find that resolving a health issue causing symptoms in one system requires addressing deficits in another system entirely!

Finally, Functional Medicine is a collaborative approach between practitioner and patient. Conventional medicine can feel like it’s being done to you. But with Functional Medicine, you and your practitioner are working together on a host of changes that will get you feeling your best.

A Functional Medicine practitioner has a lengthy initial appointment with a patient. Here at Nourish, we take 90 minutes to go through your comprehensive history (not just health, but also social and emotional) and get to know your unique needs and goals.

Next, the Functional Medicine practitioner orders and interprets specialized labs in order to understand what’s really going on in your body.

From there, a Functional Medicine practitioner develops a personalized treatment plan, which can include recommendations for supplements, diet, sleep, exercise, stress management, and environmental changes.

Once a plan is in place, the Functional Medicine practitioner stays alongside you with one-on-one education and support on your journey to wellness.