Functional Medicine is a personalized medical approach that focuses on the underlying causes of a disease by investigating and treating factors that affect those underlying processes. It is an emerging, science-based, and individualized medical approach that is guided by principles such as:
Biochemical Individuality
Functional Medicine emphasizes an individual’s unique ‘fingerprint’ of biological processes. This variability in metabolic function stems from an interaction of the individual’s genetic predisposition. Just as important to the genetic makeup of the body are its external influences, which influence the activity of genes. Those external influences are factors such as diet and nutrition, water, air, attitudes and beliefs.
The Web of Life
There is a now a large and rapidly increasing scientific documentation on the knowledge that the body is not a set of isolated processes, but rather an orchestrated network of interconnected systems. Every system of the body affects every other system, and the body is a dynamic balance between all those interacting systems.
Patient Centered Medicine
Functional Medicine focuses on the patient as a whole, rather on the disease itself, because it recognizes the interconnectedness of body systems and the . Dr. William Osler, one of the founders of modern medicine in North America brilliantly said: “It is more important to know what patient has the disease than what disease has the patient.”