02/02/2014
Integrative medicine is healing-oriented medicine that takes account of the whole person (body, mind, and spirit), including all aspects of lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship and makes use of all appropriate therapies, both conventional and alternative. Integrative functional medicine provides an architecture to digg deeper into the origins of disease and the determinants of health.
The integrative functional medicine model considers the diagnosis, of course, but also seeks to answer the question “Why does this person have this illness?” The answer to this question is revealed by discovering the antecedents, triggers, and mediators that underlie symptoms, signs, illness behaviors, and demonstrable pathology. Further, medical genomics can identify the phenotypic expression of disease-related genes and their products, affording another lens through which to view illness. Chronic diseases cut across multiple organ systems, and this calls for a systematic method of viewing each patient.
Integrative functional medicine is fully equipped to deliver personalized, systems medicine by adopting practical models for obtaining and evaluating clinical information leading to individualized, patient-centered therapies. It is fine-tuned to detect and reverse alterations in physiological processes, and to maximize functionality at all levels of body, mind, and spirit. It first addresses the patient’s core clinical imbalances, fundamental physiological processes, environmental inputs, and genetic predispositions. The starting point for intervention, then, is first improving this functional core.
