What is the body's capacity to heal itself? How functional medicine views repair

Functional medicine: treat the person first, then the disease

Functional medicine works like a master detective, carefully gathering clues from your life and combining them with your history and symptoms to find what might be making you unwell. Just as in solving a case, it links every clue together into a map of what is going on in your body. Say, for example, that you eat well at one meal and carelessly at the next, that stress has been piling up for years, that you joined a gym but can never be bothered to go, and that you rarely get enough sleep — habits you are perfectly aware of but cannot seem to change. You go for a health check every year, the numbers look broadly fine, yet your body keeps feeling off and you have no idea how to fix it. That is the point at which functional medicine may be exactly what you need.

Functional medicine is a map, it's a GPS system, a way of navigating through the landscape of an illness. It's the medicine that connects the dots between all the things that are going wrong in our biology. - DR. Mark Hyman

"Functional medicine is a map and a GPS system that helps us find answers inside the maze of an illness. It connects all the elements that have gone wrong in our bodies so that we can see the whole picture." Dr. Mark Hyman pioneer of functional medicine, personal physician to former US President Clinton

When the body takes damage from within and without, compounded by toxins in the environment, the immune system can be compromised, gut bacteria fall out of balance, the endocrine system becomes disordered — and ultimately disease can follow. Environmental toxins means the chemicals, microorganisms, radiation and other elements we encounter daily that may harm health. They can come from air, water, soil, food, household products, cosmetics, plasticizers, medications and more. Functional medicine therefore analyzes your lifestyle and environmental factors, and uses scientific testing that differs from conventional methods — such as environmental hormone and heavy metal testing — to help you find the root cause of illness and build a personalized health prescription that addresses how you feel.

You might ask: if I already have a chronic condition, can functional medicine still help me? Absolutely. Functional medicine focuses on understanding each person's underlying risk of dysfunction and working with your doctor to rebalance the body's basic physiological systems and adjust the lifestyle driving the illness. Whether medication is ultimately adjusted remains your doctor's decision. From total reliance on medication, to medication at 80% and lifestyle at 20%, to medication at 40% and lifestyle at 60%. Can someone with a chronic condition ever come off medication? I would say it is absolutely possible.

Through the many-sided testing functional medicine offers, we can reduce the body's inflammatory state and let function return to normal. Blood sugar, triglycerides and cholesterol gradually come back into range, endocrine disruption is corrected, stubborn weight slowly comes down, energy levels rise markedly, and pain and discomfort ease and resolve. The fog in your head lifts and trouble sleeping gradually improves. All of it achieved naturally and safely.

"Every person is unique, and health care has to be precise and close to real life"