Living a healthy life that is free from any ailments, disease, or illness is dependent on various genetic factors and lifestyle decisions. Some of the most common include getting the recommended 7 to 8 hours of sleep daily, drinking at least 8 cups of water a day, eating a well-balanced diet, and taking time to engage in physical activity.
Everything that we do on a daily basis contributes to our overall health and wellness. And with that, good medical care should be able to target every area of a patient’s life and recommend habit or lifestyle changes to foster improved health. This is what is referred to as functional medicine.
Functional Medicine: An Overview
When asked “what do doctors do?”, the usual answer is that they treat illnesses or disorders and assist in patient recovery. This is the traditional route to healthcare, where doctors identify problems in a patient’s body and implement focused treatment plans to alleviate them.
Traditionally, doctors view body organs as artificially separated. For example, if they diagnose a problem with a patient’s liver, every treatment or procedure will revolve around liver treatment. Often, without considering the other parts of the body and how they contribute to liver health.
But a problem with the liver can point to various other issues, such as the patient’s diet, metabolism, etc. Different parts of the body communicate and work together — and the failure of one can create effects in other body parts that it’s intertwined with.
This calls for a more holistic approach to healthcare, which doctors are beginning to refer to as functional medicine. Instead of treating body parts and organs as separate from each other, functional medicine considers the body as a whole, identifying how different factors affect each other and diagnosing the root of an illness or disease.
Functional medicine takes lifestyle factors into consideration, including the patient’s diet, stress levels, hormones, toxins, and lifestyle changes, in order to create a treatment that targets each area of life. This approach to medicine is prevention-focused instead of treatment-focused, meaning that it doesn’t only treat pre-existing conditions, but overall helps a patient foster better health and wellness to prevent problems in the long run.
In short, functional medicine is about transforming lifestyles, supporting the body’s ability to heal, and supplying its unique requirements through habits and lifestyle changes.
What Functional Medicine Requires From Doctors
Doctors need to shift from traditional healthcare to a more holistic functional medicine approach to help a patient live healthier lives and prevent illnesses or diseases. It requires a change in mindset and thinking outside the bounds of traditional treatments and medicine.
Instead of focusing on the patient’s condition, functional doctors should put all the pieces together, perusing the body’s connected systems and treating the whole person — not just the illness itself. It requires realizing that not every patient is the same, which may call for unique courses of action from person to person.
A practitioner of functional medicine asks the following questions when treating a patient:
- Why does the patient have this condition?
- Is it because of factors such as their weight, hormones, toxins, stress, or diet?
- Is this condition linked to other parts or functionalities in the body?
- Aside from direct treatments, what changes can the patient make to prevent the condition from resurfacing?
By adopting a more functional mindset, doctors can better prevent problems from recurring and promote overall health and wellness that lasts.
Experience Functional Medicine at Elevated Concierge Health and Wellness
The doctors at Elevated Concierge Health and Wellness are functional medicine practitioners who provide an individualized approach to healthcare and offer a personal experience for each patient. We look not only at the illnesses or disorders themselves but take an initiative to find and address their root cause and optimize your health from the inside out.
Experience a more holistic approach to healthcare with Elevated Concierge. Schedule an appointment today.