Functional Medicine:Your Complete Guide to why you need it

Having an understanding of areas of nutritional gaps or general ‘decline’ in your body, can allow you to ensure you maintain your energy levels, weight and positive mood into any age.

How do we do that however, when we have a public health system focussed only on diagnosing disease and prescribing pharmaceuticals. In fact, your Doctor won’t alert you when your health is declining, nor will your GP know how to help. Why? Because health care is there to help you when you’re sick. Your Doctor is not trained in lifestyle medicine, preventative medicine or nutrition. This is where Functional Medicine steps in.

In this article, we’ll explain why Functional Medicine can be so much more effective, life changing and transformative in day to day health concerns.

What is functional medicine?

Functional medicine takes the absolute latest we know of the science, picks that apart, then applies it to your health case. What this means is, we’ll look at your health symptoms, your health history, and take our time to put the pieces of puzzle together to understand the roof cause of your health issues. Conventional medicine is there for us in cases of emergency medicine and surgery. However, when treating chronic illnesses such as thyroid, IBS, constipation or unexplained weight gain - traditional medicine has limited tools available.

Functional Medicine is an integrative approach to healthcare which involves understanding the prevention, management and root causes of complex chronic disease, The ultimate goal is to heal disease and promote a healthy life. A healthy life is not defined as simply an absence of disease, but rather a positive vitality filled with energy, joy, gratitude and balance.

What are the benefits of Functional Medicine?

The Functional Medicine model evolved from the insights and perspectives of a group of influential scientific leaders who realised the importance of a personalised approach to disease causes based on the evolving research in nutritional science, genomics, and epigenetics.

Functional medicine is a holistic, patient-focused, science-based, collaborative approach to health that looks at the origins and the underlying causes of the illness and symptoms. It is a comprehensive approach that emphasises not just restoring health, but also preventing disease in the first place.

Think of functional medicine as a map or a GPS system that navigates the landscape of illness through physiological pathways and mechanisms, not diseases. Functional medicine looks at patterns that are present in our whole system. It’s the medicine that connects the dots between all the things that are going wrong within our biology. Something that conventional medicine isn’t able to do as many of the specialisms are separated from each other. If you have a problem with your gut, you see a gastroenterologist, if you have a problem with your skin you see a dermatologist. Functional medicine looks at the person as a whole. Very often, for example, major problems with the skin are actually rooted in the gut. Problems in the gut may be coming from poor nerve activity in the brain and so on. Investigating and understanding how the different biological systems work, and how they are all interlinked, allows us to intervene upstream at the cause of the problem, rather than just trying to manage the symptoms.

The Functional Medicine model:

Looking for root-cause imbalances

• We investigate and address the underlying causes of disease. These usually include:

• Toxin exposure

• Nutritional gaps

• Allergens

• Acute or chronic stress

• Microbes and gut pathogens

  
  

Functional Medicine digs (much) deeper into what makes you You

We dig a little deeper and study the patient’s genetic make-up and how it interacts with the given environment. We will consider:

• Metabolomics: the study of what has been ‘happening’ in your body, including what your bacteria produced

• Genetics and nutrigenomics: predisposing factors that can help explain your ‘settings’ or blueprint

Reviewing of your body-systems

We review all system imbalances:

• Digestive system and microbiome

• Immune system: too alert or not reacting appropriately

• Sluggish detoxification

• Energy production and mitochondrial function

• Imbalances in the hormonal system (easily disrupted by our modern diet and lifestyle)

• Compromised structural integrity of the skin, connective tissue and bones

• The mind and nervous system. Your ‘happiness molecules - the neurotransmitters.

Functional Medicine for Thyroid Health

Functional medicine is an excellent approach in addressing a number of thyroid issues:

• Hypothyroidism without a ‘cause’ (i.e no autoimmune disease or other disease)

• Supporting levothyroxine medication, ensuring it remains as effective as possible

• Recovering from active autoimmune conditions

How does Functional Medicine help in Thyroid issues?

We look at nutrition and your digestion and absorption to see if there are any gaps, impacting the body’s ability to make thyroid hormones effeciently.

A number of nutrients are crucial:

1. Iron

2. Selenium

3. Iodine (should be tested if you’ve just been diagnosed with autoimmune thyroiditis)

4. Sufficient protein in the diet

5. Magnesium

Again it’s important to look to the research on this topic and to really understand how the thyroid works. There is a huge amount of information online that may be conflicting or a fad. Make sure what you read is based on science.

Functional Medicine for Healthy Weight Loss

We LOVE applying functional medicine principles when helping our ladies kickstart their weight loss. We think of weight loss as simply being a problem of being of low caracter, and you ‘just need to be good’! This couldn’t be more wrong! Science tells us that many weight loss obstacles lay in our way:

• emotional eating and emotional attachment/reward centre (brain)

• insulin resistance

• Hormone imbalance, oestrogen

• Stress hormones

We look at the individual blockages that is preventing you from sticking to your diet, and work on resolving these.

Functional Medicine for endometriosis, PCOS,

We get great results in normalising periods in our PCOS clients - simply by working on gut health. There is a strong correlation with insulin as well as gut bacteria and constipation in PCOS. A whole-body approach is absolutely essential.

Functional Medicine for Gut Health

Probably one of the major areas we work in is digestive health. The impact of poor digestive health is enormous. If you can’t enjoy food and is suffering with severe pain or discomfort on a daily basis, your life really is quite limited.

Functional Medicine for Auto Immune Conditions/Inflammation

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Functional Medicine for Acne and Skin issues

You can read more on how we help HERE.

Should you see a Functional Medicine Doctor or Nutritionist?

We outline some information around this in this article.

A functional medicine nutritionist is a nutritional therapist who works within the functional medicine framework. Here at Advanced Nutrition Clinic, all of our practitioners are degree qualified in the principles of functional medicine.

What causes disease or poor health?

Did you know that two people with the same disease, can have different set of causes. Meaning, your disease may have the same name as another person with the same condition, but when we look behind the scenes, you don’t share the same imbalances and functional problems.

Could this be why we’re still struggling to understand the root cause of ALL chronic diseases - expect those caused by microbes? By personalising our approach and listening to the client, this gives us a whole new perspective.

Functional medicine practitioners’ aim to “treat the person who has the disease, not the disease itself”. Our practitioner constantly seeks to understand why?

• Why does this person have these symptoms?

• What is the root cause, creating an imbalance in other body systems?

• Where is the body overwhelm or blockage?

• What does this persons genetics tell us about potential weaknesses? 

• What are the potential causes for this person, and how can we rule them out one by one?

At Advanced Nutrition pride ourselves on clinical excellence and innovative delivery of a healthcare experience designed to inform and empower our clients to be in control of their own health.

Should you see a Functional Medicine Nutritionist

A great strength of functional medicine is its relevance to all healthcare disciplines and medical specialties. Any of them could apply the functional medicine model to provide a more effective approach to preventing and supporting complex chronic disease.

In the UK, most functional medicine practitioners are nutritionists and nutritional therapists who become functional medicine practitioners following their nutritional training. Some of these practitioners may certify with the Institute of Functional Medicine and some of them gain functional medicine knowledge and experience through coaching and mentoring. Nowadays, most nutritional practitioners need to have a very good understanding of functional testing in order to have a successful practice and many ‘lab test’ companies provide extensive training and support to all nutritionists and nutritional therapists. Training relating to functional tests is widely available.

Here, at the London Clinic of Nutrition, some of our practitioners are certified with the Institute of Functional Medicine but all of us work under the functional medicine framework.

Can I get a Functional Medicine Doctor on the NHS?

No is the short answer. Despite having the name ‘medicine’ in it, Functional Medicine is not part of our traditional medicine. Functional Medicine is complimentary medicine, meaning ‘alongside’ traditional medicine - not instead of.

Does insurance pay for Functional Medicine?

You will need to enquire with your insurance company, but to our knowledge, only a couple of insurers cover our sessions as well as tests. Some MAY cover some tests, and we are happy to provide specified invoices if you need to demonstrate to your insurers.

We are unique in that we are a science-degree qualified clinic, with degrees both in Personalised Nutrition and Functional Medicine. Many practitioner claim to have Functional Medicine training, but without research skills in scientific literature, this will merely be by learning from other practitioners who do have that skills. In other words, only as good as the latest protocol copied from another practitioner.

Get in touch to speak to a member of our enquiry team, where they can match you with the most suitable practitioner based on your needs.