The western approach to medicine has been widely scrutinized because it’s based more around the insurance system and not so much around effectively treating patients. Doctors have limited time with their patients, while symptoms are often overlooked, and pharmaceuticals vastly overused. While western medicine does have its issues, it’s amazing in emergency medicine in treating broken bones and wounds, among many other things. The problem with western medicine is it lacks treating the whole person — it sees a concern or symptom and only that one aspect is addressed.
This is where people have been turning to eastern approaches, such as Chinese medicine and other medical modalities as functional medicine, for more in-depth answers and treatments that stray from traditional pharmaceuticals. So, where is functional medicine’s place?
Functional medicine has a place in both modern and western medicine by transitioning the health care system back to the whole person and treating the root cause of a patient’s symptoms. Functional medicine is the future, and at Lee Acupuncture, we offer comprehensive, patient-focused care that includes functional medicine. In our last post, we had a brief musing on what functional medicine is, and today we’ll further examine what it is and how it’s used in modern medicine.
Functional Medicine at Lee Acupuncture
Functional medicine, at its core, looks at the root of a patient’s symptoms and not just the symptoms. If someone has heart disease, it’s putting them on a cholesterol-lowering pharmaceutical, it’s asking the question “why do they have heart disease?” If it’s a result of poor lifestyle habits, then the functional medicine treatment would be addressing the person’s diet and activity.
Chronic disease is rampant in the US, and functional medicine seeks to address the major influences that contribute to this epidemic. Functional medicine helps bridge the gap between conventional medicine by reframing treatment options and looking at things, such as:
- Poverty
- Poor nutrition
- Poor activity levels
- Chronic Stress
- Environmental toxins
- Mental health
- Chronic infections
- Aging population
To better understand the whole person, functional medicine has set up a model, called the “GOTOIT system,” to address each person uniquely.
G – Gather information
O – Organize information
T – Tell the story and confirm the facts with the patient
O – Order and prioritize
I – Initiate treatment
T – Track outcomes
Functional medicine: one condition, many causes.
Having one condition with multiple causes is often the culprit of many health issues. For example, if you’ve been diagnosed with depression it could be as a result of specific deficiencies such as omega-3 or vitamin D, while low thyroid levels and heavy antibiotic use can also trigger the mental health issues.
Functional medicine: one cause, many conditions.
Oppositely, you may be struggling with chronic inflammation (one cause), but its root is in many conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer.
Functional medicine will hugely change conventional medicine by treating root causes of a patient’s symptoms, looking at the factors that contribute to chronic disease, and implementing the GOTOIT system upon a patient’s first appointment.
Over the next couple of posts, we’ll cover functional medicine extensively, so stay tuned!