Welcome to our Functional Medicine Website. In the pages that follow, we hope to answer some very key questions for you, provide you with insight as to what Functional Medicine has to offer, and help you decide if Functional Medicine may be right for you.
"It's not all just in your head."
Many people come to Functional Medicine because they know that "something is just not right". Perhaps they have even visited their primary care doctor who ran some lab tests and then told them "everything came back fine", yet they know "they don't feel fine"!
How can this be? How can your labs come back as "normal" when you know something is wrong? Well, to understand how this could happen, we must first look at something called lab reference ranges. Each lab throughout the country uses lab reference ranges that are unique to their area. How do they come up with these ranges? Labs use samples of blood drawn from certain populations with similar parameters of age, gender, etc... and use this information to generate a bell curve in order to establish upper and lower limits to get a reference range. The problem is that these ranges can sometimes be very broad and most of the samples are from people who are usually already sick when they are getting tested. So, unless your tests come back either higher or lower than the "reference range", they are interpreted by conventional medicine as being "normal". Now in reality, you can be just half of a point from being out of the "reference range ", yet this lab result will still be interpreted as "normal" and you will be told "Everything came back fine".
Functional Medicine uses a much narrower range referred to as the "optimal range". This "optimal range" has been established by studying the labs of healthy individuals and finding what ranges healthy people exhibit. Using these "optimal ranges", Functional Medicine Practitioners can uncover information in a patient's blood work that can help them identify where a patient's health may be headed if the unhealthy upward or downward trend is allowed to continue.
For example: a woman presents to her primary care doctor with fatigue, inability to lose weight, cravings, her hair is thinning, she has brain fog, she's feeling cold, especially in her hands and feet, and maybe she's noticed her nails have become brittle and are breaking easily. Her primary care doctor runs a TSH thyroid test and maybe a T4(which is usually the extent of the panel run) and it comes back on the lowest end of normal on the "reference range" but still technically "within normal limits" and she is told "Everything is fine, maybe try exercising more". Frustrated, she goes home but knows" this all can't just be in her head"!
Here's the problem, running only a TSH or a TSH plus a T4 to assess the functionality of the thyroid would be like only looking to see that the gas tank is full when assessing why a car won't run. TSH only tells you if the pituitary is functioning properly and is telling your thyroid to make thyroid hormones(gas in the tank), it does not tell you which other parts of the "engine" may be malfunctioning. Only by assessing a full thyroid panel can you tell where the problem truly lies. It may be that yes, this patient has enough T4(gas in the tank), but it is not efficiently being converted into the active form of T3 that the body needs to run every cell, or it may be that it is being inappropriately converted into Reverse T3 . This would account for all of the above symptoms in our example, even though the TSH and/or T4 came back as "normal".
Functional Medicine, while it does not treat specific symptoms, does go looking for WHY those symptoms are manifesting and seeks to restore the imbalances that are allowing the condition to continue. As in the example above, Functional Medicine would do extensive testing to identify why the thyroid is not functioning normally and other tests that would identify what nutrients this specific patient is deficient in and any other contributing factors that may be preventing the thyroid from functioning properly. Then a very specific individualized plan of care would be designed for this patient, one that would include diet and/or lifestyle changes, and pharmaceutical grade nutraceuticals(pronounced new-tra-suit-icals) to address any imbalances or deficiencies revealed in their lab testing.
So, if you are dealing with symptoms that can't be explained or a diagnosed disease that doesn't seem to be showing any improvement, or if you are just sick and tired of being sick and tired, or being made to feel like "It's all just in your head", and you want to get to the root of your problem(s), then Functional Medicine may offer the answers you seek.