Conventional medicine is focused on acute illness, trauma, suppressing the symptoms of chronic illness, or heroic end-of-life interventions using a disease-based model: you either have the "disease" and are treated, or you don't meet all the criteria and are ignored or placated with treatment of symptoms, (i.e., taking an antidepressant for PMS or Ibuprofen for joint pain, or an acid-blocker for indigestion, or a cholesterol pill, or a blood-pressure pill). Yet, you may still feel sick, you need help and you don't want to take drugs indefinitely to treat symptoms. Functional Medicine can help in these cases. Functional Medicine works to diagnose these conditions at a much earlier stage and to reverse them, hopefully preventing or even curing the full-blown disease state.