While conventional medicine focuses on treating symptoms with pharmaceuticals, functional medicine gets at the root of the disease. Like a tree, it looks at the whole body to understand what basic systems are out of balance. With this approach, doctors can often reduce or eliminate a patient’s symptoms without pharmaceutical medications, thus improving their quality of life.
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Personalized Treatments
Unlike conventional medicine, which treats symptoms separately, Denver functional medicine provides a holistic approach that allows doctors to look at your health from all sides. This includes your lifestyle, diet, and genetics. Doctors will also ask questions that help them understand how your body works and why you’re experiencing specific symptoms. For instance, they might inquire about your family history of digestive problems, stress levels, and sleep patterns. They might also perform a detailed examination of your blood work to understand the root causes of your condition and which basic systems are out of balance. This helps them plot your signs and symptoms on a functional medicine matrix, showing you how they relate. Because they’re not limited to the same tools that conventional physicians use, functional medicine practitioners can find a better solution to your problem. This could involve dietary changes, exercise, nutritional supplements, detoxification programs, or stress reduction techniques. This often results in much better outcomes than standard care.
Reduced Risk of Harmful Side Effects
In functional medicine, doctors look for underlying causes and imbalances contributing to your symptoms. This can help them find solutions to treat your condition more effectively and offer you long-lasting results. Many people turn to functional medicine out of frustration with their symptoms and the lack of help they get from traditional health care. They have a combination of ailments their primary care doctor can’t seem to piece together into a single diagnosis. Functional medicine practitioners often have a more well-rounded view of how genetics, diet, environment, and lifestyle influence your long-term health and complex, chronic diseases. They can spot the root imbalances that may be causing your symptoms and use treatments like dietary changes, nutritional supplements, mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques, or detoxification programs to address them. Functional medicine puts the patient-clinician relationship first. They conduct in-depth consultations, typically lasting an hour or more. They take an extensive medical and personal history, looking at the big picture of how multiple factors could contribute to your health struggles.
Better Long-Term Results
Functional medicine practitioners look at your entire health picture to identify and treat underlying imbalances that may be causing or contributing to illness. They usually spend much more time with you than conventional doctors and collect more detailed information about your history, diet, lifestyle, and health. This helps them find the root causes of your disease and offer solutions that address those causes instead of simply suppressing symptoms. Standard medical care treats disease as a collection of symptoms and uses pharmaceutical drugs to manage those symptoms. This can yield positive results for urgent care patients, but it often fails to meet long-term health goals. A functional medicine practitioner will consider your unique circumstances and history to design a health plan supporting your best possible wellness and vitality outcome. This could include diet changes, exercise recommendations, nutritional supplements, herbal treatments, and, in some cases, limited prescription medication use.
Personalized Care
If you’re suffering from a particular health issue, such as chronic fatigue or gastrointestinal problems, functional medicine can help. A recent study compared patients treated through the center to those seen in primary care and found that the center’s model yielded better health-related quality-of-life scores. During your initial appointments, your practitioner will consider many factors contributing to your symptoms, including nutrition, sleep patterns, toxins, stress levels, and genetics. The idea is to look at the roots of the problem, which can then be addressed more quickly. Think of it like the tree analogy. Root imbalances lead to signs and symptoms, leading to organ system diagnoses. Treating the roots can prevent more severe health issues from developing. This is why functional medicine tends to be a more proactive approach than conventional treatment.
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