Functional Medicine vs. Traditional Medicine

As healthcare evolves, we find ourselves in a transitioning era where more and more medical providers are looking into functional medicine. But as patients, understanding the fundamentals of functional medicine can be tricky. Most patients are only accustomed to 5-minute doctor interactions that are relatively common among traditional medicine practitioners.

Functional medicine is sometimes mistaken for alternative medicine. While that misconception has some value to it, it’s not the whole picture. Looking into the different variables between functional medicine and traditional medicine can give us a better outlook and understanding of what these two practices truly entail.

Functional medicine focuses on a comprehensive approach to wellness. Through functional medicine, one condition can have many causes. Just as one cause can cause many conditions. Essentially, functional medicine relies on identifying the root cause of the issues presented at any given point in time.

Functional medicine believes that the manifestation of each symptom, cause, and condition are the result of a myriad of elements. These  include genes, lifestyle, and environment. Only by considering all the elements present, the right diagnosis and treatment can provide symptom suppression and relief.

The idea behind functional medicine is to provide an individualized, scientific approach to total wellness, which is precisely what Bion Aesthetics and Med Spa supports.

With its long history, traditional medicine is what most people know about health care. In essence, traditional medicine encompasses the skills, practices, and knowledge based on the experiences, beliefs, and theories of different cultures. Traditional medicine has been used to prevent, diagnose, improve, and treat physical and mental illnesses for decades.

Traditional medicine deals with specific diagnosed conditions and then proceeds to analyze such condition based on its pathophysiology and the effects it can have on the body. Basically, the purpose of traditional medicine is to control that specific condition through pharmaceutical medications, surgery, or other approaches.

Instead of assessing a diagnosis through all the potential signs, symptoms, and environmental factors, traditional medicine follows a guideline of possible scenarios and what has worked in the past to treat these conditions.

There are numerous different points to analyze when it comes to comparing the effects of functional medicine vs. traditional medicine. This includes both the health level and a patient-provider interaction level.

Functional Medicine: From the moment you start filling a functional medicine assessment, also known as the Functional Medicine Matrix, the approach builds up your medical history based on your lifestyle. This assessment includes questions about:

• Diet
• Mood
• Digestive health
• Detoxification
• Food sensitivities
• Environmental factors
• Exercise
• Dental health
• Water consumption
• Relationships
• Stress levels
• Coping skills
• Sleep

The assessment is designed to give medical providers insight into the patient’s life, not their condition. As we said before, one condition can mean many causes and one cause can mean many conditions.

Traditional Medicine: Most adults will be familiar with the traditional medicine health questionnaires. These are often filled previous to your interaction with the doctor and typically focus on the condition itself, rather than the patient’s lifestyle. A traditional medicine health assessment includes questions like:

• Previous conditions
• Current symptoms
• What makes symptoms better or worse
• Family history
• Medications

Notice these questions focus on the disease itself. Sometimes traditional medicine providers do not even read these questionnaires, or will only ask generic medical history questions.

Functional Medicine: One of the most significant differences between these two approaches is the time medical providers spend with patients. At Bion Aesthetics and Med Spa, our functional medicine approach allows us to spend 1 hour with our patients. Our provider  considers all the variables that are possibly interfering with our client’s health.

Traditional Medicine: Believe it or not, today, the average medical appointment lasts about 7 minutes. This doesn’t come as a surprise for many since they’ve experienced this many times as medical providers try to go through their symptoms as quickly as possible, sometimes not even asking about previous treatments or conditions.

Functional Medicine: By looking at wellness from a more holistic perspective, our functional medicine provider uses comprehensive diagnostic testing to measure markers that can help her make informed decisions to help you optimize your health.

Traditional Medicine: When a patient’s symptoms fall under a specific condition or pre-existing diagnosis, sometimes traditional medical providers won’t even perform diagnostic tests to confirm the diagnosis. Their results are based on your description of symptoms, the signs present at the moment, and a long list of pre-existing conditions that basically describe your symptoms.