How can functional medicine help?
Using a comprehensive approach to prevention, health, and well-being, functional medicine expands the communication and evaluation process for patients and practitioners and prioritizes lifestyle-based therapies that enhance the existing care plan. Functional medicine blends conventional care with a personalized framework that treats the root causes of disease and restores healthy function for each individual.
A Functional Approach to Your Health Concerns
Designed to improve a variety of health outcomes, functional medicine addresses all dimensions of your well-being—body, mind, and spirit. Explore patient health topics to learn how a functional medicine–trained clinician provides whole person care for some of the most common conditions.
Working With a Functional Medicine Clinician
Functional medicine clinicians are trained healthcare practitioners who pursued additional years of study in the field. Using a full complement of tools and practices based on current evidence and clinical reasoning, they partner with you to create personalized treatments tailored to your health.
Modifiable Lifestyle Factors: The Building Blocks of Health
Functional medicine expert Kalea Wattles, ND, discusses how making small but meaningful changes to health behaviors can have a big impact on long-term health.
Focus Areas of Functional Medicine Care
The patient becomes a partner
As a patient, your voice and choice in how you receive care matters. When you see a functional medicine clinician, you become an active partner in improving your health and changing the outcome of disease, working together with your functional medicine provider to determine the best pathway for your healing.
An emphasis on evaluation
Functional medicine practitioners focus on the interconnectedness of bodily systems and their impact on health, working together with patients to personalize care. Evaluation involves extensive patient histories, assessments of lifestyle factors, and social determinants of health and helps practitioners identify patterns that may contribute to imbalance and disease.
Expanded treatment options
You will work with your functional medicine practitioner to personalize a treatment plan that suits your health needs. Therapeutic interventions may include a combination of therapeutic diets, exercise, stress management, pharmaceuticals and botanicals, and other lifestyle modifications.