Lifestyle & Functional Medicine

The highest synthesis of health care management emerging in today’s health care system, integrates two unique styles of practising medicine, known as Lifestyle and Functional Medicine.

These two methods merge key principles of preventative and integrative techniques, drawing from a multitude of therapeutic approaches in order to create a ‘complete’ way of managing a person’s health.

Lifestyle Medicine works on addressing modifiable lifestyle behaviours, such as:

• diet
• exercise & movement
• breathing
• stress management
• sleep & rest
• emotional/spritual processing.

Many lifestyle practitioners will also employ a systems-approach of synthesising health information, using the principles of Functional Medicine. The Functional Medicine approach is a method of thinking and organising health data, and works towards identifying and addressing core issues at the root of health problems.

Rather than focusing on organ system diagnosis, it goes deeper and recognises that several key clinical imbalances are capable of causing multiple organ system imbalances at the same time.  For example, a clinical imbalance of the gut e.g. leaky gut, leads to systemic inflammation, which can result in organ imbalances of the lungs, joints and endocrine system, manifesting as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and insomnia.

A conventional doctor would usually treat you with medications, such as an inhaler for the relief of asthma systems, corticosteroids for the rheumatoid arthritis and sleep medications for the insomnia – while a Functional Medicine practitioner would instead focus her attention towards healing the gut, which would lower the systemic inflammation and thus resolve all the other issues simultaneously. He/she may do this by addressing your diet and removing inflammatory foods, improve your intestinal microflora with probiotics, improve digestive capacity by adding digestive enzymes or extra stomach acid etc, etc. The ultimate aim however is to address what is causing the problems, rather than manage the symptoms that appear downstream.

It is somewhat impossible to practice Functional Medicine without addressing Lifestyle practices also, and thus Functional and Lifestyle Medicine in essence meld into each other, becoming a single entity. A Functional Medicine practitioner would thus address your lifestyle, and choose natural foods and medicines wherever needed, while at the same time integrating more conventional skills into their scope of practice.

The overall intent it to provide a system of integrated practice that allows all current methods of medicine to co-exist and evolve, with a preference for choosing interventions that have a lasting effect by addressing the core reasons for the dysfunction, rather than clearing the system within an organ system.

This approach allows for greater empowerment of individuals, creating a team approach, with the health care practitioner and patient working together, discovering deeper solutions to health problems.

The Institute of Functional Medicine leads the way in educating health care professional along this path.

For a deeper unsterstanding of Functional Medicine, read the explanation below, from The Institute of Functional Medicine.

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is personalized medicine that deals with primary prevention and underlying causes instead of symptoms for serious chronic disease. It is a science-based field of health care that is grounded in the following principles:

• Biochemical individuality describes the importance of individual variations in metabolic function that derive from genetic and environmental differences among individuals.
• Patient-centered medicine emphasizes “patient care” rather than “disease care,” following Sir William Osler’s admonition that “It is more important to know what patient has the disease than to know what disease the patient has.”
• Dynamic balance of internal and external factors.
• Web-like interconnections of physiological factors – an abundance of research now supports the view that the human body functions as an orchestrated network of interconnected systems, rather than individual systems functioning autonomously and without effect on each other. For example, we now know that immunological dysfunctions can promote cardiovascular disease, that dietary imbalances can cause hormonal disturbances, and that environmental exposures can precipitate neurologic syndromes such as Parkinson’s disease.
• Health as a positive vitality – not merely the absence of disease.
• Promotion of organ reserve as the means to enhance health span.

Functional medicine is anchored by an examination of the core clinical imbalances that underlie various disease conditions. Those imbalances arise as environmental inputs such as diet, nutrients (including air and water), exercise, and trauma are processed by one’s body, mind, and spirit through a unique set of genetic predispositions, attitudes, and beliefs. The fundamental physiological processes include communication, both outside and inside the cell; bioenergetics, or the transformation of food into energy; replication, repair, and maintenance of structural integrity, from the cellular to the whole body level; elimination of waste; protection and defense; and transport and circulation. The core clinical imbalances that arise from malfunctions within this complex system include:

• Hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances
• Oxidation-reduction imbalances and mitochondropathy
  
• Detoxification and biotransformational imbalances
  
• Immune imbalances
  
• Inflammatory imbalances
  
• Digestive, absorptive, and microbiological imbalances
  
• Structural imbalances from cellular membrane function to the musculoskeletal system

Imbalances such as these are the precursors to the signs and symptoms by which we detect and label (diagnose) organ system disease. Improving balance – in the patient’s environmental inputs and in the body’s fundamental physiological processes – is the precursor to restoring health and it involves much more than treating the symptoms. Functional medicine is dedicated to improving the management of complex, chronic disease by intervening at multiple levels to address these core clinical imbalances and to restore each patient’s functionality and health. Functional medicine is not a unique and separate body of knowledge. It is grounded in scientific principles and information widely available in medicine today, combining research from various disciplines into highly detailed yet clinically relevant models of disease pathogenesis and effective clinical management.

Functional medicine emphasizes a definable and teachable process of integrating multiple knowledge bases within a pragmatic intellectual matrix that focuses on functionality at many levels, rather than a single treatment for a single diagnosis. Functional medicine uses the patient’s story as a key tool for integrating diagnosis, signs and symptoms, and evidence of clinical imbalances into a comprehensive approach to improve both the patient’s environmental inputs and his or her physiological function. It is a clinician’s discipline, and it directly addresses the need to transform the practice of primary care. [Source]

Links:

• Health care professionals interested in learning these principles can review the IFM education and training options.
• Those seeking practitioners trained in Functional Medicine:
  

  
  

  
  

  • If in the USA visit the IFM website here, or,
    
  • if in South Africa contact Amipro.