Functional Medicine:
Functional medicine is a holistic approach to patient care. While traditional medicine has a focus on a specific disease diagnosis as the end state, functional medicine looks to find the underlying causes for those disease symptoms. For example, a conventional doctor may stop after writing a prescription of an anti-depressant after diagnosing depression, their job is done. The functional medicine doctor will look for the underlying causes of the depression by taking extra time listening to patient histories, ordering specialty metabolic and nutritional lab work, and looking at the complex interactions among genetic, environmental, nutritional, metabolic, diets and lifestyle factors that influence long term health and chronic diseases.
