Back to Blog Homepage
Spotting issues. We do it everyday. It helps us foresee and prepare for what lies ahead.
Sometimes, we get it wrong and it has nothing to do with effort. Sometimes, we’re approaching the problem with a faulty or weak analytical process.
For example, can you spot the fault in my title to this post? It stems from a faulty analysis. It’s the way I framed the title as a competition, a battle royale, between conventional medicine and Functional Medicine. This isn’t Monday Night Football. This isn’t partisan politics. One is not mutually exclusive of the other.
Yet, medical professionals have been trained (I know because I’m one of them) to spot symptoms and to treat those symptoms. There’s no question this works well as westernized medicine has prolonged life expectancy and is at the forefront of medical breakthroughs.
But what works better than well in terms of health? Life altering.
Functional Medicine attempts to accomplish this by changing how we spot issues. Instead of focusing almost exclusively on symptoms, Functional Medicine focuses on the root causes of one’s symptoms. This involves an analysis of one’s personalized and therefore unique standing in this world: his or her environmental exposure, genetic history/predispositions and lifestyle including critically diet.
This type of analysis Functional Medicine advocates, in conjunction with conventional medicine, is where the rubber meets the road in placing yourself in the best position to battle and defeat a disease.
