When Used Together With Conventional Medicine, the Health Benefits of Functional Medicine are Vast

Traditional medicine provides conventional care that is geared towards diagnosis of a disease or trauma over a limited duration, and provision of acute care. It therefore deals with conditions such as heart attacks and broken limbs. 

Doctors in conventional medicine usually use surgery or drugs to treat the symptom as well as the condition. If, as a sufferer of a chronic disease, you’ve grown tired of being cycled through diagnoses and medication without experiencing lasting improvement, another powerful medical strategy and alternative treatment available to you is functional medicine.

• Why functional medicine is becoming increasingly popular

Chronic diseases usually affect multiple body systems, and the conventional model of care isn’t equipped to handle them. Furthermore, traditional medicine neither addresses the individual’s unique genetic makeup, nor does it consider the effects of environmental factors and modern lifestyles.

Factors that greatly affect your overall wellness include stress, exposure to toxins, exercise, diet and sleep. Since conventional medicine doesn’t address all of these, it isn’t equipped to treat the underlying causes of chronic illnesses.

Functional medicine provides a new methodology and approach to preventing chronic diseases and treating them in the event that they occur. From a chiropractic standpoint, the most crucial principle of the profession is identifying the root cause of the health issue by looking at how function is affected by the structure.

Both conventional doctors and functional medicine practitioners (such as Active Edge Columbus Functional Medicine) benefit from each other’s ideas by either collaborating or through a formal setting that incorporates both practices. Functional medicine practitioners create an individualized program for you to address the interaction between the internal and external body environment. 

• Functional versus conventional medicine

In functional medicine, the main factors to take into account when assessing a patient’s lifestyle include their sleep, exercise, diet, genetics, interpersonal relationships and stress level. In turn, these factors are influenced by ongoing physiological processes and isolated events that disrupt the body’s homeostasis.

Conventional medicine concerns itself with the host of symptoms presented by the patient, and uses these group of symptoms to diagnose a particular disease. After diagnosis, the conventional medicine practitioners then prescribe one or more medications, or therapy in some cases for the purpose of mitigating the symptoms.

Typically, conventional medicine doesn’t offer support for healing beyond this point. Therefore, the traditional model of treating diseases leaves out essential parts of your health, and these parts may be at the root of your health condition. Furthermore, conventional medicine groups together people with identical symptoms and signs, thereby neglecting the individual factors that could have led to the disease.

In contrast, functional medicine practitioners usually focus on the patient more than they focus on the disease. As a result, the evaluation level in functional medicine is closer to a chiropractic intake exam than a standard medical exam. The functional medicine practitioners learn about the underlying factors of the patient by looking at the history of illness, everyday habits, history of trauma, genetics, and exposure to toxins in the environment.

When used in conjunction with conventional medicine, the benefits of functional medicine are vast as the disease is not only treated, but also the likelihood of recurrence is minimized.

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