Functional Medicine

What exactly is functional medicine, and how can this approach help me in my health journey?

Caring for your health properly is so much more than taking an antidepressant for your mood problem along with an acid blocker for your reflux. Since our organs are interconnected and are involved in a complex communication system, this means that we cannot possibly treat them individually and expect to achieve sustainable health results.

Did you know that what you eat is related to how you think, sleep, and perform?  Or that your stress level affects  your gut, brain, hormones, and sleep?   

However, the standard of care hasn’t quite caught up with most of the current science, and conventional doctors are still treating parts of the body separately without taking into account the fact that all these areas greatly impact each other.

When you are healthy, they work together like a symphony in perfect harmony – but when one system is off balance, it can affect nearly every other system.

When you need a “tune-up” so to speak, not only do you need to look at areas that aren’t working right,  but also at the rest of your body.

Sadly, most patients will receive medications to treat symptoms associated with a body part that “isn’t working” – when, in reality, their symptoms are oftentimes due a systemic issue that needs to be treated in a completely different way.

In addition, the conventional medical approach doesn’t consider that each person is born with unique health needs, and that one blanket treatment may not be the best for everyone.  We need to look at genetic factors, the environment, the types of bacteria that populate the gut, as well as psycho-social influences – each person’s body has a very unique health profile that translates into needing an equally unique healing protocol.

This personalized approach is an integral element of the functional medicine approach. We’ve often seen cases in which patients may share the same symptoms but suffer from very different imbalances.

Unfortunately, our current health care system is not set up to handle this.  The average doctor appointment right now lasts 7 minutes.  Clearly, the in-depth approach to finding root cause cannot fit into this model.  That’s why at Reimagined MD, we follow a functional medicine approach that uses nutrition, lifestyle change, and cutting edge lab testing to add that additional layer to your current medical treatment in order to help you rebalance and finally heal.

Functional medicine is the only approach that considers your diet, environment, emotional health and mindset in combination to determine the root cause of your physicial ailments, and as such it’s the only successful way of treating chronic disorders long-term.