In conventional or allopathic medicine, there is a specialist for every part of your body. Neurologists for the brain, Gastroenterologists for the digestive system, Cardiologists for the heart and so on. This compartmentalization of body systems results in a more disjointed approach to addressing disease, with one doctor focusing on solely one body system and not addressing the patient in a holistic manner.
When we create these artificial divisions, we lose sight of the body as an interconnected whole and we fail to understand how different imbalances in different systems may actually all be related to a common underlying cause. Treatment then becomes based on the presenting symptom and not the cause of the symptom. While there is a place for conventional medicine at times, functional medicine will be addressed first to address the “root cause”.
Functional Medicine provides individualized, personalized medical care that focuses on discovering the underlying factors that cause symptoms and affect your health. As a functional medicine practitioner, we understand that you must treat the body as an integrated whole in order to treat the specific disease or imbalance — we look to understand the root cause of disease and then treat the cause in order to remove the symptoms, not just alleviate them.