Biochemical individuality
Genetics, environment, attitude, and lifestyle make each person distinct. That argues for a plan built for the individual rather than a protocol attached to a diagnosis.
Functional Medicine
Test - Don't Guess
The absence of disease is not the same as health. Functional medicine asks how the body is actually working, and answers with measurements rather than assumptions.
Functional medicine treats the body as an interconnected whole, on the view that a disturbance in one part affects the others. It combines a long clinical history with current laboratory testing, and its treatments generally run through diet, lifestyle, and targeted nutritional supplementation. Questionnaires, laboratory work, and health history together determine what is actually addressed.
The working principle is simple: test before you treat. It is a deliberate refusal to be led by whatever is fashionable this year, and it is why the first stretch of work usually goes into gathering data before much changes.
Dr. Sharpe taught this material at the graduate level for ten years, in a program built on the clinical framework established by the Institute for Functional Medicine.
Principles
What the model rests on
Patient-centered, not disease-centered
The older clinical wisdom holds that it is more useful to know which patient has the disease than which disease the patient has. Functional medicine takes that seriously as a method, not as a sentiment.
Dynamic balance
Health is a moving target, set by what the body is doing and what is being done to it. Chinese medicine arrives at much the same view by a different road.
Physiology as a network
Immune activity bears on cardiovascular disease. Dietary imbalance bears on hormonal function. Environmental exposure bears on neurological conditions. Treating any of these in isolation ignores most of the available information.
Where imbalances show up
Eight places a system fails
Environmental inputs, including diet, nutrients, air and water, exercise, and injury, are processed through a particular set of genetics, attitudes, and beliefs. The fundamental processes involved include communication inside and outside the cell, the conversion of food into energy, replication and repair, elimination of waste, defense, and transport and circulation. When something in that system malfunctions, it tends to appear in one of the following areas:
- Hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances
- Oxidative stress, including antioxidant imbalance and free radical damage
- Energy production, including mitochondrial function
- Detoxification
- Immune function
- Inflammatory regulation
- Digestion, absorption, and the gut microbiota
- Structural integrity, from cell membrane function to the musculoskeletal system
Imbalances of this kind generally precede the signs and symptoms by which organ system disease is eventually detected and named. Working on them means working earlier and at more than one level, which is a different task from treating the symptom that finally brought someone in.
None of this is a separate body of knowledge. It draws on research and information already widely available in medicine. Arguably all medicine should be functional medicine.
The framework described on this page, including the core physiological processes and the clinical imbalances that arise from them, follows the model developed by the Institute for Functional Medicine.