Functional Medicine and Clinical Nutrition

Functional medicine involves testing for the root causes of disease and designing a treatment plan to address the root cause of the disorder, not just the symptoms.  Functional Medicine views and treats the body as a whole system.

The use of the word "functional" is key to understanding the functional and integrative medical approach.  Functional lab tests help determine how the body or organ is really working, or functioning, as opposed to other medical tests which measure pathological breakdown and disease.

A sub-optimal functional medicine test may indicate a need for correction even though traditional testing may show everything is within the normal range. This is a subtle but important difference as many sub-optimal health conditions will cause symptoms that get us to the doctor, but then no reason can be found for what is causing our health problem.