By, Joseph Eckstein, MSN, BSN, FNP
Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner
Functional medicine Maryland………..what is all this hubbub surrounding this trendy new-wave catchphrase? Is it witchcraft? Is it legit? Or is it something catchy that the public has gravitated to, like a new fad? Is there any validity to the words “functional medicine”? Our distant forefathers, like Hippocrates, looked at natural remedies, including the food we consumed, regarding their long-term health implications. “Let food be thy medicine…..” Does that sound familiar?
Fast forward to 2024, the digital age where technologies rapidly advance, especially in the tech world. Medicine has become somewhat stagnant in its approach to disease states. Medical providers continue to function in the illness model, a reactive approach to a subset of symptoms consistent with a disease process.
In other words, instead of taking a proactive stance in mitigating illness, the illness model kicks in once a person becomes sick. Diseases such as dementia, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity cleave years off people’s life expectancy and cost this country millions of dollars to care for these sick individuals.
Enter functional medicine, part Hippocrates, and part Eastern medicine. This modality focuses on disease prevention by getting to the root cause of illness. Functional medicine providers are the medical detectives who delve deep; they peel back the layers on the surface and dig for clues, often at the cellular level. Gut health and hormones are often implicated in imbalances in our health. If not correctly balanced, something as minute as a microbe can wreak havoc on many other systems.
Thus, functional medicine providers interrogate well beyond the surface and look at hormones and gut health. Although only visible with a microscope, the microbiome is cavernous and abundant throughout our bodies, yet often overlooked by traditional medicine approaches, which focus more on surface issues and general symptoms.
Traditional medicine bases treatment on symptoms; thus, people will often feel better when given a medication to treat a symptom; however, in the long run, this is all they are getting: symptom resolution or relief and not an actual cure for the underlying ailment.
Functional medicine ascribes to the philosophy that one size does not fit all; medicine has no cookie-cutter quick fixes. Instead, testing focused on cortisol, thyroid, gut health, and hormones, which are ordered and interpreted. Things such as the HPA axis are taken into account.
This feedback loop between the hypothalamus and the pituitary-adrenal gland is paramount for overall homeostasis, otherwise known as balance. Stress hormones can devastate our body’s natural balance; these abnormalities in the HPA axis can cause the upregulation or downregulation of specific hormones, causing disruption downstream.
A crucial concept to remember is balance, as any disruptions in the delicate hormone balance can lead to dysfunction in the body’s various systems.
