Why Functional Medicine?

While traditional medicine is brilliant at treating acute disease and injury, it’s not so efficient at treating chronic illness, and lifestyle diseases like Diabetes, IBS, Alzheimer’s, Depression, Heart disease or Chronic fatigue. The traditional medical model is based on chasing symptoms, finding a diagnosis, and treatment of that diagnosis, rather than hunting for the root cause of dysfunction. On the contrary functional medicine is an exploratory process that recognises that no two people are the same, and thus seeks to identify your unique disruptions in health. For example classically depression is treated with anti-depressant drugs whereas the functional medicine model recognises that depression is a disorder of inflammation that could be occurring due to disruptions in circadian rhythm, hormones, blood sugar, exposure to toxins or an inflammatory diet. 

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Chronic disease and a general lack of wellbeing is a growing epidemic and in most cases is completely reversible or preventable. In our highly stressed and busy lives, we often struggle to juggle key pillars of health like nutrition, hydration, recovery, good quality movement, and a balanced mental and emotional state.  As these seemingly simple lifestyle factors shift out of balance, our bodies start to provide us with vital feedback and symptoms, indicating that we need to make some changes.  

Pain, fatigue, digestive trouble, headaches, poor sleep or disease, are all cries from a body that needs some serious help. Although symptoms may be accepted as normal because they are so common in modern society, they are an indication that our health is starting to slide towards disease. Chasing symptoms or pain, and consequently ignoring the root cause of dysfunction, often takes us further away from health. In order to feel our best, we need to get to the root cause of illness, and address all lifestyle factors.

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