What is functional medicine?
- Nancy janssens
- Sep 2
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 4
Mark Hyman: Functional medicine heals by addressing the root cause, not by treating a symptom. Everything in the body is interconnected, and we must learn to understand this.
If you have stomach pain, joint pain, rash, headache and/or sinus problems, you don't have to go to 5 or 6 different doctors.
Everything in the body is interconnected. Functional medicine connects all these issues.
It is a medicine that understands that you have to look at a system and not at symptoms.
It is a kind of medicine in which we research the whole, how the processes in the body work.
Suppression is not healing
Now we have a kind of medicine that is mainly concerned with geography.
Do you have a heart, lung, or joint problem? Then we'll look for the symptom in your body. But we're not interested in geography. We're interested in the underlying mechanisms and the root causes of your symptoms.
Suppose you're sad or in a bad mood. You feel hopeless and helpless. You can't sleep, you have no appetite. If you go to your regular doctor about it, they'll say, "Oh, you're depressed."
Depression is just the name of all those symptoms together, but not the root cause.
It's not the depression that's causing these symptoms. The patient then asks how to treat this. The conventional doctor will then prescribe antidepressants. The symptom's name is blamed. They suppress it with medication. But they don't consider the root cause.
If you have symptoms of depression, there could be several causes, and there are also various treatments. For example, you might have low thyroid function because you eat gluten. Gluten can trigger an autoimmune reaction in your thyroid, triggering Hashimoto's and depression.
You might have been taking beta blockers for your heart problems for 10 years. This interferes with vitamin B12 absorption, which can also lead to depression. You might live in a northern climate and get too little sun. This can lead to vitamin D deficiency and depression.
You might frequently eat fish high in mercury, like tuna. This can lead to mercury poisoning and depression. You might hate fish and not want to eat it. This leads to an omega-3 deficiency, which also causes depression. You might eat too much sugar. This causes prediabetes and depression.
There are many more situations that can trigger depression.
And the diagnosis and treatments for all of these conditions are different.
Functional medicine is tailored to your personal biology and addresses the root cause. It helps your body heal and regain balance.
The Institute of Functional Medicine's mission is to prevent the unnecessary suffering of millions of patients by viewing the body as a system. We do this by considering the root cause of their illness. We provide personalized therapies to help the body regain balance.
We use a powerful model, which we use to train thousands of doctors. We truly help many people regain their health .
Current medicine does not correspond with how our body actually works
Modern medicine is based on an idea from the 19th and 20th centuries.
If you have a headache, you should see a doctor who specializes in headaches. If you have abdominal complaints, you should see a doctor who specializes in abdominal complaints.
Modern medicine is organized around these specialties. But the worst part is that they have nothing to do with how the body actually organizes itself.
If we view the body as a system, as an ecosystem, all these diseases become less relevant. As physicians, we need to change our way of thinking. We need to champion what functional medicine has to offer.
So, we need to look for the knots and connections and link them together to understand why someone has become ill. We need to avoid the idea that there's a pill for every illness. If we look for the cause and give the body what it needs, it can heal and recover itself.
Functional medicine focuses on the causes, our systems and our organism
The functional medicine model is incredibly powerful. We've helped people with diabetes and subsequently recovered.
We have helped people with an autoimmune problem, who also recovered from it.
We have helped people with chronic digestive problems who subsequently recovered.
We also see many migraine patients recover. And so on.
What others can't solve and cure, functional medicine can. That's because we think very differently and work with a different model.
Finding a cause is crucial in order to heal someone.
How mainstream medicine thinks:
We are focused on the symptoms, but not on the causes.
We are focused on the symptoms, but not on our systems
We are focused on our organs, but not on our own organism.
We are focused on what disease you have, but not on why we have the disease.
We really need to change our way of thinking if we want to heal.
Instead of treating the disease, we prefer to treat the people.
That's the fundamental difference in functional medicine. Everyone is unique and has their own story. The cause and cure for each condition are different.
Do you find yourself going from doctor to doctor and not seeing a cure for your condition? Then you really need to take a different approach and find a functional medicine practitioner. They can identify the root cause of the problem and make you healthy, while other doctors fail.
I'm the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and I train physicians worldwide in functional medicine. We truly want to heal people. We want functional medicine to become a standard model for all medicine.
Are you looking for a doctor who practices functional medicine? We've developed an online database where you can find one near you. Some doctors are better trained in functional medicine than others. A certificate indicates their level of knowledge and experience. It's best to find someone who has been trained in this area.
Are you a doctor, therapist, naturopath, nutritionist, etc.? Feel free to explore our website. Want to learn more about functional medicine? Join us.
Regular family doctor, later an emergency physician and head of the Center for Functional Medicine. Director of the Cleveland Clinic. He suffered severe mercury poisoning himself and began delving into nutrition and neurological problems.
Mark Hyman made a documentary about neurological damage and how to repair it ("70 Doctors Share Their Stories"). He offers online programs to cure chronic illnesses, runs a detox program, sells his own supplements, and is the author of seven books, including the "10-Day Detox Diet Cookbook."
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