Importance of Adopting Functional Medicine
You may have by now come across the phrase functional medicine. Functional medicine has been misunderstood by some to mean alternative medicine. In reality, functional medicine is the more advanced medical practice that touches on all aspects of a patient’s life that affects their health and wellbeing, from genetic composition to biomarkers from blood samples.
Functional medicine takes a more individualized, patient-centered approach to finding out what caused the patient to become sick. It has its roots in science, thus disqualifying any idea that it is alternative medicine. It enables patients and medical practitioners to collaborate towards improving one’s health. Functional medicine is health-oriented, while conventional medicine is disease-oriented. Being health-oriented introduces that aspect of an individualized approach, while disease-oriented results in a uniform approach since the disease is the same.
There is a bigger appreciation for functional medicine, with the industry set to adopt it fully in the future. Conventional medicine does not take into account so many things affecting a patient’s wellness, like their nutrition, daily activities, stress levels, and such. Most of its solutions are pharmaceutical. Functional medicine considers the entire body, and first attempts to get the body to heal itself, by adjusting how a person lives. There is more emphasis on fitness and wellness. Technology has made available apps to help people, along with those concerns. You can, therefore, better monitor your nutrition, activity levels, and mental health status.
There is also more appreciative of the fact that we are all differently constituted, and that dealing with the conditions we have in the same way will not yield good results each time. There is, therefore, a need for better monitoring of each individual’s status. With such data, drawing up a better and personalized approach to their treatment will yield much better results than anything else one might try.
The increase in the number of chronic health conditions among the population is evidence enough that conventional medicine is not yielding the results it promised. We live at a time when medicine is at its best level, yet in terms of development and capabilities. People are poised to live longer. What concerns most is the fact that more people are also poised to live with chronic conditions for most of that period. Such a life is undesirable, to say the least. The dependence on pharmaceutical solutions has them at that stage. The statistics show that the situation will get worse before it gets better, even with more support for the efforts to adopt a more functional approach instead of the conventional ones most people rely on. There are also high expenses associated with trying to solve and manage some of those conditions. There is, therefore, an economic incentive included in the efforts to adopt a different strategy.
You will find plenty of sources that show just how bad things can get under the use of conventional medicine in handling chronic conditions. Therefore, it is high time functional medicine was given a chance to turn things around. A holistic approach ensures better balance, more prevention of most of those conditions, and a higher quality of life throughout one’s time.