For the last several years, I have taken more of an interest in my overall health. As part of this, I have started to question how chronic diseases can be prevented in the first place. After all, why worry about treatment and symptom management when you can avoid it entirely?
The problem is, that is not how our traditional “Western medicine” works. In general, in the United States we are more about reacting to health situations rather than preventing them. This is great for acute care, where an accident, trauma, or sudden ailment can be resolved quickly. However, I would argue that health care in the United States does not do a good job in trying to prevent long term diseases such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. What is even worse, in my opinion, is that there is a lot of us making money on those with chronic conditions.
Unfortunately, as a pharmacist, I am one of those people. But, I am trying to find a different way. That is where functional medicine comes in.
I am not going to give a formal definition of functional medicine here, but in a nutshell, functional medicine is all about finding the underlying causes of diseases and well as focusing on prevention. Instead of just treating symptoms and throwing drugs at everything (which happens a lot in the United States), functional medicine digs deeper. The thought is that if you can get to the root cause, you can then deal with the root cause and not always have to live with a chronic condition. I love the concept, and there is more and more people that are jumping into this area. Check out the Institute of Functional Medicine website (easily found with an internet search) for more information if you are interested.
As for me, I am both a patient of functional medicine as well as working to become at least an advocate for it. Ideally, as a pharmacist, I would also like to take patients off as many medicines as possible. Am I totally shunning our traditional Western medicine? No way. If a loved one or me had a major accident, trauma, or infection (to name just a few acute problems), I would be going to an ER or urgent care right away. Instead, I think there is a place for both functional medicine and what most of us are used to. In fact, there may be instances in which they could overlap.
Perhaps embracing functional medicine would allow us to have the best of both worlds – and I encourage everyone to check it out.