What does it mean to practice functionally?

You've probably heard of functional medicine by now. TikTok, Instagram and other social media outlets are full of functional providers giving snippets of health advice. There's a lot of great information out there, available for free.

While you can learn many tips and tricks to help alleviate myriad symptoms, how can you address your health as a whole?

Working with a functional practitioner can be the key to finally improving long-time, nagging symptoms, addressing troubling diagnoses, and even promoting longevity and improving quality of life.

What does functional practice look like and what does it really mean to practice functionally?

Here are what I believe to be the most powerful tenets of functional practice:

1) Individualized care

You are an individual, with unique genetics, history, exposures, tools, and outlook. No two bodies are the same, so all of those factors play into your care and healing.

2) Therapeutic partnerships

Your practitioner partners with you to educate, inform, and provide guidance for sound decision-making. Working with you and even with your other health providers, your functional practitioner will help assimilate what seems like disparate information, weigh options and navigate decisions in all cross-sections of your health care.

3) Focus on lifestyle tools

Your greatest tool for making powerful and lasting change in your health are optimizing lifestyle habits in the core basic areas of: nutrition, movement, sleep, stress-management, and relationships. This should underline how important these factors are in our overall health and wellness!

4) Root-cause analysis and innovative testing tools

Navigating nuances and potential pitfalls, sometimes using non-standard (but insightful) lab testing, and honing the process to see what functional nutritionist Andrea Nakayama calls, "what's really going on in there," in order to address true root causes is keystone to functional practice.

5) Whole-body focus

The beauty of this approach is that it fully respects the body's natural ability to heal, and actively encourages this by taking away the offending factors and putting in elements that help this process work better.

When you learn how to treat your symptoms functionally, you're adopting a framework that allows you to see the body as a whole, taking a systems approach to healing, and using lifestyle adjustments that are appropriate for you specifically, to bring balance to your body. This works even as your body changes and symptoms shift and change, and they will because life's not stable; factors change as circumstances change.

If you're at all curious about what functional nutrition support can do to help you, take advantage of a free consultation to discuss your symptoms and goals.

You can also learn about functional healing by taking my small group class, offered with functional medicine physician, Dr. Cameron Olderog, MD, of Horizon Functional Medicine. Check here to see if there's a class happening soon.

For me, understanding my health through a functional lens was life-changing. I know it can be for you, too.