Functional Medicine/Nutrition

Conventional medicine tries to stop the symptoms of disease. Functional medicine recognizes that symptoms happen when your body isn’t working right, when the function has deviated from normal. So we look for signs of altered function, and work to fix those, trusting that your symptoms will resolve when your function improves. We use diagnostic tools like laboratory tests and other measurements of things like digestive function, hormone balance, detoxification ability, and nutrient status, as well as standard blood and urine testing, and our treatments involve nutritional and lifestyle interventions rather than pharmaceutical drugs. With these approaches we can often help with chronic conditions like allergies, fatigue, fibromyalgia, migraines, and irritable bowel, as well as “diseases of civilization” like obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and perhaps even cancer.

Functional medicine uses nutrition as a major form of treatment, because it is clear to us that many chronic illnesses stem in large measure from a diet of foods we are not designed to eat, grown in soil that has been depleted and poisoned by harsh chemicals, and the foods themselves genetically modified and tainted by the varied chemicals used on them, and often processed in a way that removes beneficial nutrition to promote longer shelf life, then packed with additives and preservatives, and shipped long distances. Because of this, the functional medicine approach uses both dietary changes and targeted nutritional supplements to help you be your best.