Functional Medicine Under the Microscope: Science, Scrutiny, and Balance
A Growing Movement Functional medicine is growing quickly. More patients are seeking it out, and more providers are offering it. At its best, functional medicine is about finding the root causes of illness and creating personalized plans to restore health. Patients often love it because it makes them feel heard, empowered, and involved. But as the […]
Mental Health and Lifestyle Integration: Treating the Whole Person
More Than Just the Mind For many years, mental health was treated as something separate from the body. You went to one doctor for physical problems and another for stress, anxiety, or depression. But research now shows what patients have always sensed: the mind and body are deeply connected. Functional medicine takes this truth seriously. It […]
Performance Medicine: Optimizing Wellness, Not Just Fixing Illness Beyond “Not Sick”
Beyond “Not Sick” Most of us think of healthcare as something we use when we’re sick. You go to the doctor, describe your symptoms, get some tests, and walk away with a diagnosis and treatment. That model works for infections or emergencies—but it leaves out something important: what if you don’t just want to avoid […]
The Future of Healthcare: Personalization and Prevention in Functional Medicine
Why Healthcare Is Changing For most of the past 100 years, modern medicine has focused on fighting disease after it shows up. If you get an infection, you’re given an antibiotic. If you have a broken bone, you get surgery or a cast. This approach has saved millions of lives. But when it comes to chronic […]
What Really Counts as Health? Functional Medicine’s Ontology
When you go to the doctor, you probably expect them to “find what’s wrong.” In conventional medicine, that usually means looking for a thing: a tumor, a broken bone, a clogged artery, a lab value that’s out of range. Health is defined by the absence of those things, and treatment is aimed at fixing or […]
Upstream vs. Downstream: Why Functional Medicine Looks at Causes, Not Just Symptoms
Most of modern medicine is downstream. We pull people out of the river after they’ve already fallen in—after the heart attack, after the autoimmune flare, after the diagnosis has taken hold. This kind of rescue work is essential. Emergency rooms save lives every day. But what if we spent more time asking the upstream questions: […]
Why Functional Medicine Has a Different Purpose: The Teleology of Health
When most people think about medicine, they think about fixing what’s broken: lowering blood pressure, shrinking a tumor, killing a bacteria. Traditional medicine is excellent at crisis response. But what if the real goal of medicine is not simply to remove disease, but to restore your body’s ability to thrive? This is where functional medicine […]