Integrative & Functional Health vs. Traditional Healthcare: What's the Difference?
If you’ve been looking for alternative forms of natural medicine, you’ve probably come across a wide variety of practices and professional doctors. You may have found naturopathy, integrative health, functional medicine or functional health in your search for a new perspective on your health care. If you’re thinking about adding functional health to your conventional or traditional health care, it’s great to know how integrative and functional health differ from conventional health.
First, Conventional Health
Conventional health is the traditional way to approach treating patients. Conventional medicine treats symptoms and disease. The lens used in a conventional practice tends to focus closely on a problem or symptoms and not encompass the whole picture. Conventional medicine tends to use medicine as a first-line treatment; and neglect discussing important lifestyle factors that are influencing a patient's condition. Functional health aims to discover the root cause of the issues being experienced by each unique patient. Functional medicine uses a systems biology approach, attempting to connect the dots between the interplay of hormones, the microbiome, genetics, lifestyle factors and emotional and psychological health. Functional medicine approaches aim to optimize an individual's health through lifestyle changes, supplements, and natural medicine — whereas traditional care often offers short-term solutions.
Integrative & Functional Health
Both integrative and functional medicine approaches are fundamentally holistic and focus on physical, emotional, spiritual and mental health, plus aspects of overall wellness. It’s all about the health of the mind, body, and soul. Functional medicine seeks to identify and treat the underlying cause of a condition. Functional medicine centers on the idea that one condition may have many causes or one cause can have many conditions. Integrative medicine uses a combination of allopathic approaches and alternative therapies to address a patient’s diagnoses.
Functional Health
Functional practices dig-in to the patient’s medical timeline or history organizing the information into areas that need support. Functional medicine clinicians utilize an assessment process, which often includes panels of specialized, functional tests. With the emphasis on the root cause, the patient can be treated rather than the disease. Functional treatment is structured to achieve an in-depth look at why clients may feel unwell. Treatment plans include herbal medicines, vitamins, detailed nutritional advice, detox, mental health support, acupuncture, and more.
The functional medicine model is an individualized, patient-centered, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the root causes of their symptoms. The provider will use their in-depth understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors to create personalized treatment plans to ultimately improve the health & well-being of their patient.
Integrative Health
Closely aligned with functional health, Integrative medicine focuses on the patient’s overall well-being instead of one condition. Integrative medicine takes a holistic approach, looks at the lifestyle of patients, and examines factors that contribute to their health concerns. Integrative health is more about the “how” than the “why.” Treatment plans may be similar to functional health and include dietary supplements, massage therapy, nutrition, and more.
Which one is best for you?
If you’re looking to transition from conventional health your functional medicine doctor or nurse practitioner will help you develop a plan that’s right for you. It may incorporate both integrative and functional health. Functional and integrative medicine are root-cause motivated, so there’s no incorrect path in adding these approaches to your unique health journey.
If you are searching for Colorado functional medicine, new york functional health, or telehealth, please don’t hesitate to reach out. To learn more about Tendwell membership, click here.
