Functional Medicine

The link between food and health has been well documented over many hundreds of years.  Hippocrates, considered to be the father of western medicine, wrote numerous texts which collectively are known as The Hippocratic Corpus.  In these, he discusses the role of food as it relates to health.  Whether or not he actually said "Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food" may be up for debate (1), but this quote is widely attributed to him because of his connection between food and health.

 

Functional medicine is a discipline which embraces the food-as-medicine approach along with other lifestyle factors.  The core tenet is that chronic disease often results after a period of declining function in the body, but often this can be restored to normal function by improving the conditions which caused the decline in the first place.  For example, a person who develops symptoms of irritable bowel may have an unhealthy gut.  This may be due to overgrowth of unfriendly bacteria or yeast, insults to the lining of the gut due to eating processed foods or lack of fiber (which feed the good bacteria), stress, etc.  The body can tolerate some of these issues for a while, but eventually symptoms develop indicating a problem.  Instead of using prescription medication to stop the symptoms, a functional medicine approach would be to remove the insults to the gut and repair it so it can function optimally and normally again.

 

Although almost all clinical guidelines for chronic diseases suggest starting with dietary and lifestyle changes first, this is rarely done in practice because doctors often don’t have the time, training or staff to support patients to be successful with these.  Functional medicine also considers how stress, as well as quality sleep, or lack thereof, impacts health.  Many people don't realize that while you are sleeping there are numerous highly important functions that occur in the body.  If we don't get the quality sleep our bodies need, we may be missing out on those critical functions which may result in dysfunction and chronic health issues down the line.

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(1) Cardenas, eSPEN Journal, 8, issue 6, 2013: e260-262.