“Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”
- Hippocrates
Functional Medicine is a patient-centered approach to health based on restoring foundational biochemical function through working with individual life influences, rather than just controlling signs and symptoms. Functional Medicine, much like chiropractic, is the study of health over disease and allowing the body to utilize its innate healing capacity.
The Functional approach acknowledges that chronic disease is preceded by a period of declining function in one or more of the body’s systems. Each patient has a unique and interwoven set of influences on their system from lifelong interactions with the environment, lifestyle and genetic predispositions. If these systems are left dysfunctional long enough, clinical imbalances may progress to more significant symptoms that can be diagnosed as the onset of a more serious disease.
Functional Medicine focuses on preventing the full onset of disease through returning body systems to their dynamically balanced state by adjusting the environmental inputs that nurture or impair them. The body was born with the intelligence of how to heal itself - it just needs the proper resources to do so.
Working from the roots up, Functional Health starts with the most foundational components of lifestyle such as movement, nutrition and stress. These experiences have direct influences on our genetic predispositions and determine which genes are activated in the body (epigenetics). Through providing the body what it needs to create energy, build up, break down, transport, communicate, defend and eliminate, the branching organ systems begin to rebalance themselves and the system comes back into a state of ease rather than dis-ease.
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