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experiencelifemag.com
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Functional Medicine 101
Functional medicine is changing the way we think about our health. So to help you get a better grasp on what it is and how it’s affecting our current healthcare system, we talked with Dan Lukaczer, ND, the assistant director of medical education for the Institute of Functional Medicine in Gig Harbor, Wash.
Experience Life (EL): What is functional medicine and how is different from conventional medicine?
Dan Lukaczer: I describe functional medicine as an integrative, science-based medicine that treats illness and promotes wellness by focusing assessment on the biochemically unique aspects of each patient, and them employing individually tailored interventions to restore physiological, psychological and structural balance. In essence, functional medicine looks at the underlying imbalances, and then tries to find what can be done to rebalance the individual’s system.
What we’ve done in conventional medicine all too often is look at symptoms and suppress them. As physicians, clinicians and consumers, we need to step back and look at the underlying issues and what we can do to resolve them. Functional medicine is really a way of thinking about medicine that is more integrative and more encompassing.
EL: Why is now the time for functional medicine?
Lukaczer: There are three things that are moving us toward functional medicine. First, there’s an economic crisis in healthcare — the way our system is run is bankrupting us. Though we are not all feeling the effects intensely right now, we will feel them in the next 20 to 30 years. Functional medicine will help us make the move from treating disease by suppressing the symptoms — with all those inherent costs — to being proactive on the front end so that we can prevent it in the first place, which will help change the economic situation.
Second, there’s a demographic change in society today. Baby boomers are getting older, and they want to spend their retirement years in a healthy, vital way. They’re looking for different answers to medical questions — they’re not going to take the same answers their parents took. They want better answers.
Third, there was not significant research on the efficacy of various complimentary and alternative therapies that are used in functional medicine — nutraceuticals, botanicals, acupuncture, mind-body-spirit therapies — 20 to 30 years ago. Now there is a lot of peer-reviewed, science-supported evidence that helps us understand these modalities and their effects on chronic diseases.
So these factors are coalescing to make this an important shift for conventional medicine. We’re close to a tipping point in looking at different ways to handle the looming healthcare crisis.
EL: What do you see in the future of medicine?
Lukaczer: I see functional medicine as an expansion of conventional medicine — a more integrated model. I see it as bridge to a more comprehensive way to handle complex, chronic disease. Conventional medicine plays an important role in helping us understand illnesses and disease and, clearly, in handling acute care, but the model needs to expand. Functional medicine can help it do that.
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Functional Medicine 101
Functional medicine is changing the way we think about our health. So to help you get a better grasp on what it is and how it’s affecting our current healthcare system, we talked with Dan Lukaczer, ND, the assistant director of medical education for the Institute of Functional Medicine in Gig Harbor, Wash.
Experience Life (EL): What is functional medicine and how is different from conventional medicine?
Dan Lukaczer: I describe functional medicine as an integrative, science-based medicine that treats illness and promotes wellness by focusing assessment on the biochemically unique aspects of each patient, and them employing individually tailored interventions to restore physiological, psychological and structural balance. In essence, functional medicine looks at the underlying imbalances, and then tries to find what can be done to rebalance the individual’s system.
What we’ve done in conventional medicine all too often is look at symptoms and suppress them. As physicians, clinicians and consumers, we need to step back and look at the underlying issues and what we can do to resolve them. Functional medicine is really a way of thinking about medicine that is more integrative and more encompassing.
EL: Why is now the time for functional medicine?
Lukaczer: There are three things that are moving us toward functional medicine. First, there’s an economic crisis in healthcare — the way our system is run is bankrupting us. Though we are not all feeling the effects intensely right now, we will feel them in the next 20 to 30 years. Functional medicine will help us make the move from treating disease by suppressing the symptoms — with all those inherent costs — to being proactive on the front end so that we can prevent it in the first place, which will help change the economic situation.
Second, there’s a demographic change in society today. Baby boomers are getting older, and they want to spend their retirement years in a healthy, vital way. They’re looking for different answers to medical questions — they’re not going to take the same answers their parents took. They want better answers.
Third, there was not significant research on the efficacy of various complimentary and alternative therapies that are used in functional medicine — nutraceuticals, botanicals, acupuncture, mind-body-spirit therapies — 20 to 30 years ago. Now there is a lot of peer-reviewed, science-supported evidence that helps us understand these modalities and their effects on chronic diseases.
So these factors are coalescing to make this an important shift for conventional medicine. We’re close to a tipping point in looking at different ways to handle the looming healthcare crisis.
EL: What do you see in the future of medicine?
Lukaczer: I see functional medicine as an expansion of conventional medicine — a more integrated model. I see it as bridge to a more comprehensive way to handle complex, chronic disease. Conventional medicine plays an important role in helping us understand illnesses and disease and, clearly, in handling acute care, but the model needs to expand. Functional medicine can help it do that.
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