Functional Medicine vs. Conventional Medicine

What is functional medicine? If you want to focus on why your symptoms exist in the first place, functional medicine is for you. Alternatively, conventional medicine just focuses on the person’s symptoms without really delving into the underlying causes. Traditional medicine focuses on treating illness and trauma, but functional medicine is holistic and focused on wellness rather than illness. It goes beyond your symptoms to look deeper.

Functional or integrative medicine is better for addressing chronic illnesses like diabetes and chronic pain because doctors try to determine root causes. Very often, there is a nutritional or exercise remedy that helps, but traditional doctors are not skilled in these techniques.

Functional medicine focuses on the whole patient, looking at your genetics and family history, and current lifestyle choices like diet and exercise. Genes for disease are always in your DNA but can either be expressed or not depending on your stress levels, diet and environment.

The Functional Medicine Practitioner

Rather than looking at isolated symptoms, a functional medicine doctor looks for interactions between body systems. Everything is related. When bundled, all of these factors play a role in your relative state of health.

Functional medicine uses three foundational principles:

• Care is centered on the patient. Practitioners listen to the patient’s issues of body, mind and spirit.
• Care is integrative. All body systems are interconnected and have complex interactions.
• Care uses all best practices. The best techniques of traditional Western medicine are combined with nutritional and dietary interventions, exercise, detoxification, stress management and more to treat the whole person.

All of these techniques are designed to optimize your health to trigger your body’s innate healing ability.

Visit Reed Chiropractic in Solon Today

Want to see if functional medicine is right for you? Contact our team at Reed Chiropractic by calling 440-248-2866. We have the tool and experience to diagnose and treat your pain.