Functional Nutrition
What is Functional Nutrition?
Functional Nutrition is patient-centered medical healing at its best. Instead of looking at and treating health problems as isolated diseases, it treats individuals who may have bodily symptoms, imbalances and dysfunctions. Almost always, the cause of the disease and its symptoms is an underlying dysfunction and/or an imbalance of bodily systems.
To battle chronic health conditions, Functional Medicine uses two scientifically grounded principles:
Remove anything that impedes the body from moving toward the optimal state of physiology
Your body naturally wants to be healthy. But things needed by the body to function at its best might be missing, or something might be standing in the way of its best functioning. Functional Nutrition first identifies the factors responsible for the malfunctioning. Then it deals with those factors in a way appropriate to the patient's particular situation.
Add what's lacking in the body to nudge its physiology back to a state of optimal functioning.
For treatment, Functional Nutrition practitioners use a combination of natural agents (supplements, herbs, nutraceuticals and homeopathic), nutritional and lifestyle changes, and spiritual/emotional counseling to prod a patient's physiology back to an optimal state. In addition, educating the patient about their condition empowers them to take charge of their own health, ultimately leading to greater success in treatment.
Hippocrates