While traditional Western Medicine typically focuses on alleviating symptoms (take an aspirin for your headache, when you get another headache, take another aspirin), like Eastern Medicine, Functional Medicine’s goal is to identify and treat the root cause of your headaches so that you stop having them entirely. Combining Functional Medicine with acupuncture and herbs often results in a more rapid healing time, as Asian Medicine has a strong effect on the adrenals, digestion, and hormonal imbalances.
Functional medicine is a systems biology–based approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the root cause of disease. Each symptom or differential diagnosis may be one of many contributing to an individual’s illness.
A diagnosis can be the result of more than one cause. For example, depression can be caused by many different factors, including inflammation.
