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Functional Medicine
FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE
Functional Medicine is a very different way of looking at illness and health.
The traditional medical model focuses on diagnosing an illness and then prescribing a drug to manage the symptoms of this illness. Functional Medicine focuses instead on looking upstream, and finding the underlying cause of the symptoms or illness. This is a comprehensive approach that emphasizes prevention of illness as well as re-establishing health. Functional Medicine is a science-based approach to healing. The underlying premise is that every person is biochemically unique and therefore each treatment approach should also be individual, not one-size-fits-all. In fact, we say we “treat the person with the disease, rather than the disease itself”. This creates a patient-centered, rather than a disease-centered model of care. Traditional medicine compartmentalizes body parts and organs, in order to diagnose disease and apply drugs to manage symptoms.
Functional medicine instead looks at the person as a whole. Examining how the different biological systems work, and when something goes wrong, how this impacts on the body and the person as a whole. In this way, we can explore and understand the unique combination of genes, life experiences and biochemistry that goes into each person and their health problems.
Finally, Functional Medicine constantly asks the question WHY? The diagnosis of an illness is often the beginning, not the end of the investigative pathway, as the Functional Medicine practitioner seeks to understand WHY this person, WHY this disease, and WHY now? Understanding what happens in the body ‘upstream’ from the symptoms or the diagnosis, allows us to intervene at the cause of the problem, rather than focus on managing just the symptoms.
For more information, please contact us on 020 7584 7000.
Santi London, 33 Thurloe Street, London SW7 2LQ Appointments: 0207 5847000 info@santilondon.com