HEALTH SERVICES

Functional Medicine

1. What is functional medicine?

Functional medicine is the field of health care that uses laboratory assessment to improve health, including your physiological, cognitive, emotional and physical function. Evaluating how an organ functions reveals the root of your symptoms, enabling me to recommend strategies to solve your chronic problem.

Functional medicine recognizes your unique physiology. Diagnostic tests reveal subtle differences in your biochemistry, allowing for personalized therapy that is focused and precise. Functional medicine takes a whole person view, treating you as an integrated whole, not as a set of isolated parts. The goal is to restore balance and optimal health.

Even minor symptoms may cause slight imbalances in the body that set the stage for chronic degenerative illness. Functional medicine recognizes the ability of advanced medical testing to reveal slight imbalances, allowing for timely intervention to prevent more serious health problems in the future. In this way, functional medicine takes a proactive rather than reactive approach and identifies your susceptibilities to disease.

2. What types of testing are done and for which types of problems?

Tests are non-invasive or minimally invasive, using samples of blood, saliva, hair, urine or stool. Results focus on how well the body is doing its job in seven important areas:

• Digestive function
• Nutrition
• Detoxification function
• Immune system function and inflammation
• Hormonal function
• Cardiovascular function
• Energy metabolism

For more information, see www.functionalmedicine.org, the website for the Institute for Functional Medicine.