What is functional medicine? It's a question I get fairly frequently worth doing. A video on functional medicine to me is best described starting out by comparing it to conventional medicine or prescriptive medicine because that's what most people are familiar with. Anytime you do Teladoc or you get a sinus infection, you go to the doctor, whatever you're doing, conventional or prescriptive medicine in most cases. So it's all diagnosis based. It's about gathering up information on you. What are your symptoms? What are your signs like? Physical signs, symptoms would be like, I have a headache. A sign would be, look at this rash, right? They're a little bit different, but you get the subjective ones, which are the symptoms, the objective ones, which are the signs. You put that together, you add some lab work to it, and hopefully at some point you qualify to be labeled with a particular diagnosis.

(00:57)
So you have your complaints, you gather the information, you render a diagnosis. At that point, it becomes automatic. There's a medical textbook that says for that diagnosis in this gender, this age, this history, here's what you start with. Here's the first line medication. If it doesn't work, you do the second one. If it doesn't work, you do the third. If that doesn't work, pick a different diagnosis and start over at the top. That's essentially what you're going to get packaged differently potentially, but that's what you're going to get at a regular conventional medical visit. And then because of insurance constraints, what they will and won't pay for many times you're relegated to having a six to 10 minute visit. And so you feel like, gosh, did he even listen to me? Does he even know who I am? Is he going to remember me? How did he come to that conclusion so quickly?

(01:50)
And half the time, the doctor knows when they walk in the room, what's going to happen. They saw your complaints, they saw your labs. They walk in the room. They've already, I am not saying they're wrong, but they already know they do this all day long. They do it 50 times a day, but they've got to let you say your piece. They've got to answer a couple of questions, and then they're going to do what they already knew they were going to do, right? I'm not saying they're being dismissive, but it's no different than an auto mechanic. When you come in and you basically lay out the same thing they see five times a day, they know exactly what's going on in your car. I got in my car, I turned the key. All I heard was tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I don't know what's wrong with my car, new battery, whatever.

(02:26)
We'll go through the motions of checking it, but that's the problem they know already. The question is, when they prescribe a medication, are they making actual changes? Are they making you healthier? Are they resolving the problem or are they just controlling symptoms? And I think that's where a lot of people get frustrated. They're asking, why do I feel this way? And they're being told, if you take this medication, you won't notice that anymore. It's a mismatch. In functional medicine, we are much more concerned with how your problem developed. What are the root causes? Why is your body choosing to function this way instead of this way? Why do you have inflammation? Why are you making too much mucus? Why are your intestines inflamed and shooting everything out the back end? Yes, that's diarrhea, and yes, you can take Imodium, but why are you doing it?

(03:18)
Because if it's a food allergy, we can change the response to that, right? Quit eating the food. If you say, oh my God, my foot hurts terribly. You can get pain medication or they can take the thumbtack out of your shoe. One of them makes a meaningful change and fixes the problem. The other one treats a diagnosis or treats a symptom. So in functional medicine, we're constantly looking for the thumbtack in the shoe. Why is your body choosing to behave this way? Why can you not make enough cellular energy for your brain to work? That ends up being brain fog. But why? It's not genetic brain fog. Something is not allowing your mitochondria in your brain to make enough energy. Is it that you're not taking energy in? Is it that you lack the B vitamins to get it into the mitochondria? You lack the coq 10.

(04:11)
You're anemic and can't get oxygen there. Something is keeping your brain from doing the job. So you could just take a DD medication or you could figure out where the system went wrong and put some coq 10 in or fix the anemia or eat the right kinds of foods or get your insulin level under control, whatever, and start sleeping at night. Whatever it is. If you can get to the root cause, that change is going to be a more fundamental change and it will last longer. As a functional medicine doctor, I don't treat the diagnosis. If you come into me with unrelenting fatigue, I don't treat the fatigue. That's a symptom that starts to tell me where I should be looking for some underlying problems. But if you come in with unrelenting fatigue and we figure out through all of our questioning and poking around and talking, whatever, that you never sleep, well, then I need to find out why you're not sleeping right and you're not sleeping because I don't know, you can't breathe when you sleep or you get too hot when you sleep.

(05:17)
Or well, okay, why is that happening? Well, that's because of this. Well, why is that happening? And eventually we get to a point where we say, aha, you're eating this or not eating this, or you're taking this medication or not taking or whatever. And because of that, this whole cascade started that led to your symptom of fatigue. That's the functional medicine approach. How do we get to the root cause, the least common denominator, that underlying problem. Now, genetics play a role undoubtedly, but I can't change your genetics. I can change the environment those genetics live in, which determines how you express those genes. So we can make changes to what your genes do. But I can't make changes to your genetics. So the genetics, if we were to come up with an analogy here, the common one, and I think it works well, is the genetics load the gun, but your environment is what's playing with the trigger and fiddling it and spinning it around, and absent mindedly messing with it like a fidget spinner, sooner or later, that gun's going to go off.

(06:30)
Granted, if it was never loaded, you could mess with it a lot more. Nothing would ever happen. But if the genetics have loaded the gun, the environment is what you can change that's constantly fiddling with it and eventually makes it go off and somebody gets hurt. So in functional medicine, the antecedents are usually genetic issues. The triggers are those root causes, the environmental problems, too much of one thing, not enough of another. And that's too much sleep, not enough sleep, too much hormone, not enough hormone, too much food, not enough whatever. It's too much of something, not enough of another. And that's what leads to the dysfunction. That's what's playing with that gun that if it's loaded, we'll eventually go off. Those are basic, fundamental functional medicine principles. Another one I want to point out that's important for you to understand is that every single patient has what we call biochemical visuality.

(07:30)
You are individual. There is no other like you. There are people with the same diagnosis. They may be the same height and weight, they may be the same age and gender, but they didn't eat exactly what you ate for your whole life. They didn't have the traumatic experiences you had. They didn't live in the climate you lived in. They didn't take the medications you took. They didn't get the injuries or the surgeries that you've had. When you take all of that together, there is no other person identical to you. Identical twins live different enough lives. This one likes broccoli in that one doesn't, right? Or this one dated this girl and that one didn't. Or this one was good at math and that one wasn't. They are not identical.

(08:17)
The reason I point that out is that not everybody responds the same way to a medication. Not everybody responds the same way to having too much or too little of a particular food. Not everybody's going to do well on a carnivore diet. Not everybody's going to do well as a vegetarian. Not everybody can take these two medications together. Not everybody can take these two supplements together. Some people need more sleep than others in a medical doctor's office, generally speaking. Now, some of them get it, but generally speaking, they're treating the diagnosis not the patient. And so they see the diagnosis, they give the medication, it should work because it's the right medication for that diagnosis. In a functional medicine practice, we treat the patient that has the diagnosis because there are too many variables in that patient to assume that if we treat the diagnosis, everything's going to go fine.

(09:12)
We don't do that. We treat the patient, we treat the underlying symptoms. We go as deep down that rabbit hole as we can to get to the bottom line, because if we fix that or tell the patient how to fix that, now we have affected change that will cascade all the way up and start changing the symptoms. I'm not treating the symptoms. I'm treating the underlying problem, but every single patient is different. I can have 10 lupus patients come in and they all ended up there a different way. Could be food allergies, could be hormonal problems, could be a bad marriage, could be a surgery or a pregnancy or getting on or off the whatever. There are lots of different ways to get to that end point. It's a restaurant downtown. And if I walked into that restaurant and grabbed 10 people at random and said, how'd you get here? They all took different routes. They came from different parts of town, but we all ended up at the same restaurant.

(10:08)
Likewise, all the cars driving down the same freeway in my city. I'm in Houston, so all the cars driving down I 45 in Houston are not all going to the same place. We can all take I 45 south from the Woodlands into Houston, and we all end up going to different places downtown. But for the majority of the trip, we were all on the same road. That's a functional medicine mindset that you could all have blood sugar issues leading to a problem, but you could end up with 10 different problems. You could all have migraines, but you got there 10 different ways. That makes it confusing, no doubt, right? It's easier to practice when it's one diagnosis, one treatment, but that's not the reality of the world. And if you're watching this video, you've understood that that's not the reality that we live in. We live in a more complex, complicated reality.

(11:05)
So biochemical individuality means that we aren't all the same. We don't all have shared experiences. We don't all have the same GPS route to get somewhere, and we don't all end up in the same place for the same reason. We have to know your story. We have to look at your situation, how you got where you are, because that's how we determine how we can try to back you out of this. Now, if you have a ruptured spleen, you probably don't want to come to my office. That's one diagnosis, one treatment, it you fracture your femur in a motorcycle accident. I'm not the first guy you want to see. But when you have a chronic complex illness, when you have inflammatory problems that are difficult to define, nobody's been able to make a difference, hormones aren't able to be balanced, and you're frustrated with what you've gone through.

(12:02)
Maybe a functional medicine office that takes a real functional medicine approach to things is going to be a place where you finally get some answers that will affect some change. So that's, I mean, a long convoluted, probably poorly organized way to tell you what functional medicine is. But hopefully that gives you a sense of where a functional medicine doctor would be coming from. When they approach your case, what information do they want? What are they doing with it? What paradigm are they plugging that into in their head, and how do they come up with some game plan? It's based on all that complicated stuff that I just laid out for you. There are specific labs that support us and give us the information we need that prescriptive doctors generally don't have any use for because they don't need to look for the root cause. So we have special labs that have tests that help us get that information.

(12:54)
And then we use labs from regular doctors and regular labs as well. We do a physical exam. We do what we need to do to get the information to try to come up with your root causes. So hopefully that helps you understand functional medicine, both from a principal aspect and from a practice aspect. And if this sounds like something you're looking for, dig around a little further on my website and if you have questions, let us know. We're here to serve you and help you out. If I'm not the guy, if I'm not in your city, whatever, there are lots of good functional medicine doctors out there, find one for you, okay? But hopefully that helps you out. That tells you what functional medicine is. If you have more questions, let me know. I.