What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a personalized, systems-oriented model of integrative medicine. It maintains the patient-centered approach, especially focusing on the interactions among genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors that can influence long-term health. Functional medicine provides a flexible and adaptive structure for clinicians to gather and sort information into the seven biological systems in which core clinical imbalances are found:

• Assimilation: digestion, absorption, microbiota/GI system, respiration

• Defense and repair: immune, inflammation, infection/microbiota

• Energy: energy regulation, mitochondrial function

• Biotransformation and elimination: toxicity, detoxification

• Transport: cardiovascular and lymphatic systems

• Communication: endocrine, neurotransmitters, immune messengers

• Structural integrity: subcellular membranes to musculoskeletal integrity

The Core Principles of Functional Medicine:

• Acknowledging the biochemical individuality of each human being, based on concepts of genetic and environmental uniqueness

• Incorporating a patient-centered rather than a disease-centered approach to treatment

• Seeking a dynamic balance among the internal and external factors in a patient’s body, mind, and spirit

• Addressing the web-like interconnections of internal physiological factors

• Identifying health as a positive vitality—not merely the absence of disease—and emphasizing those factors that encourage a vigorous physiology

• Promoting organ reserve as a means of enhancing the health span, not just the life span, of each patient n Functional Medicine is a science-using profession

For additional information on Functional Medicine: www.ifm.org