The 5 Principles of Functional Medicine (2024)

The term “Functional Medicine” can seem rather ambiguous. Although this field is becoming more mainstream due to voices like Dr. Frank Lipman and Dr. Mark Hyman lauding it as the future of health care, functional medicine is still generally unknown to the public. The term and field of functional medicine refers to something completely different than what we have now come to know as conventional medicine or the standard model of care. To fully understand what functional medicine is, it is important to contrast it with conventional medicine.

Traditionally a medical doctor uses drugs or hormones as therapeutic tools to deal with dysfunction or disease. For various conditions including low thyroid, diabetes, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and so on, the standard model of care is generally all the same. Your general practitioner could decide to treat you, or could elect to refer you to a specialist. A GP and specialist have access to the same basic tool: medication. The training in the standard model of care is to diagnose a disease and match that disease with a corresponding drug. The standard model of care works well for acute diseases, trauma, infection, and emergencies. Sadly, it fails miserably in the care of the chronic diseases that affect over 125 million Americans.

Chronic conditions—such as allergic, digestive, hormonal, metabolic and neurological problems—which most Americans suffer from on a daily basis, are finding solutions in the field of functional medicine.

So what exactly is functional medicine and how can it assist the millions of Americans dealing with chronic disease?

Here are 5 basic principles that define Functional Medicine:

Here lies the clear distinction and definition of Functional Medicine. Instead of asking, “What drug matches up with this disease?” Functional Medicine asks the vital questions that very few conventional doctors ask: “Why do you have this problem in the first place?” and “Why has function been lost?” and “What can we do to restore function?” In other words, Functional Medicine looks to find the root cause or mechanism involved with any loss of function, which ultimately reveals why a set of symptoms is there in the first place, or why the patient has a particular disease label.