Medical professionals use tests and procedures to aid their diagnosis, and ultimately prescribe medications, procedures, or surgeries to “fix” the problem.

The body is compartmentalized and viewed as many different organs that work separately from one another as there are doctors that specialized in each organ system. There have been great advances in the fields of emergency medicine, diagnostic procedures, and surgical interventions, but ultimately it has failed at chronic disease management. People can live longer, but they are having a poorer quality of life. Medications are used as a bandaid patch over the symptoms rather than trying to get to the root cause of the disease.

Doctors unfortunately are being trained to follow algorithms that usually help the majority of people. Who usually suffers are the minority on each side of the bell curve and get kicked out of the conventional system to self navigate.

It starts with a detailed understanding of a person’s genetic, lifestyle, and biochemical makeup through in-depth history taking and questionnaires. Visits are usually longer due to the fact that practitioners have to dig deep into the past as to why, when, or how the symptoms have come about. Functional Medicine practitioners tend to do a lot of different types of functional laboratory tests and diagnostics to find the root cause of symptoms and treat the whole person and not just the disease. For example, comprehensive stool analysis, organic acid testing, nutritional evaluation, genetic SNP testing, heavy metal testing and different types of specialized testing may be used to find the true sickness, and treatments are personalized and individualized based on the patient’s background, lifestyle, and genetic factors. Practitioners empower patients to work on their diet, environmental toxins and uses labs as a motivator and diagnostic as it tries to get patients to optimal range and not just the “normal” lab range.