Functional medicine is a patient-centered, systems biology approach to the prevention, diagnosis, and management of complex chronic diseases. Unlike the standard healthcare paradigm as typified by “conventional” medicine that focuses upon therapies dictated by the diagnosis (i.e., “disease-centered medicine”), functional medicine seeks to explore and identify underlying imbalances and disturbances in physiologic pathways and the related antecedents, triggers, and mediators (ATM) that contribute to the development of various chronic diseases in a given particular patient (i.e., “patient-centered medicine”). Correction of these imbalances can help prevent the development of disease and can frequently reverse the clinical manifestations of the disorder once it has passed a diagnostic threshold. Rather than focus upon one or two organ systems, the functional medicine practitioner looks at many body systems and major pathways at structural, neural, hormonal, chemical, environmental and other interrelationships between organ systems and how changes in one system can affect other systems. Although Nutrition plays a key role in functional medicine, the field incorporates many other disciplines, including Physical Medicine, Pharmacology, and Mind-Body Medicine and well as Environmental Medicine and Toxicology. The diagram below—an updated version of the “Functional Medicine Matrix” (courtesy of and owned by IFM and used here with permission)—illustrates the interrelationship of core physiologic systems and functions; changes in any one of these aspects will cause alteration in the others.
