How Functional Medicine Is Empowering Women

Functional medicine offers women personalized, holistic healthcare by addressing root causes of health issues.

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The Rise of Personalized Healthcare: Functional Medicine for Women

Are you a woman and you’re looking for a comprehensive and holistic approach towards bettering your health? Then you should consider functional medicine; this is an approach that is patient-centered, and it goes beyond treating the symptoms and exploring the main causes of various health issues, thus offering a pathway to addressing different health concerns that are affecting women, such as reproductive health problems, hormonal imbalances, and chronic conditions while also enhancing your overall wellbeing.

When you consider how the genetics interplay is unique, and the environmental factors in every individual, functional medicine can help to empower every woman through personalized strategies that include stress management, nutrition, integrative therapies, and physical activity. Such a customized approach can ensure a woman’s health journey is unique and similar to her life story while promoting resilience, vitality, and optimal health. As you read through below, you’ll understand functional medicine better and how it can benefit women’s health.

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine is a systems approach that is biology-based. It aims to identify and address the root causes of an ailment. Unlike traditional medicine, which mainly focuses on symptoms, functional medicine normally aims to understand and treat the underlying causes of a patient’s health by considering the body as a whole. It emphasizes a patient-centered approach instead of a disease-centered approach.

Functional medicine practitioners normally spend more time with each patient, gathering details about their health history and also looking into the interactions among environmental, lifestyle, and genetic factors that usually influence their health in the long run. Such an approach makes functional medicine unique because it considers an individual’s vitality and health.

Major aspects of functional medicine include personalized care that has been tailored by a health practitioner based on the needs of an individual and the integrative and scientific approach to medicine, thus focusing on empowering a patient and being committed to discovering the root causes of an illness. Functional medicine can be used to treat different health issues such as diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and mental health issues.

Currently, functional medicine is considered an alternative medicine approach. Nonetheless, the potential of this approach has led to increased recognition since functional medicine has proven it can improve patients’ health outcomes by addressing complexities related to an individual’s health.

The Difference Between Functional and Conventional Medicine

There are numerous differences between traditional and functional medicine. The primary difference is in the approach to treatment, diagnosis, and understanding of health conditions and diseases. Some of the major differences include:

Approach to Health and Disease

Functional medicine doctors usually focus on identifying an ailment’s root cause and addressing it by examining the patient’s medical history and lifestyle. In functional medicine, the body is treated as an interconnected system, and there is a part that has become dysfunctional. Here, the main focus is restoring the support and balance of the body’s natural ability to heal itself.

Disease-Centered vs. Patient-Centered

Functional medicine has emphasized a patient-centered approach. The main focus is on considering each patient’s unique needs, medical history, and lifestyle factors. Treatments are normally personalized, and the aim is to optimize each patient’s well-being and overall health.

Traditional medicine, on the other hand, has focused on a disease-centered model. Instead of focusing on the patient, the main focus is on the disease. Treatment plans are also likely to adhere to protocols that have been applied broadly to people suffering from the same condition.

The Use of Diagnostic and Treatment Methods

A functional medicine provider uses different diagnostic tools, including advanced laboratory results, well-detailed health histories, and genetic information, to help uncover a patient’s condition. Treatment can include nutritional support, lifestyle interventions, stress management techniques, and detoxification programs alongside other conventional forms of treatment.

Traditional medicine relies on standard diagnostic criteria and treatments such as surgery and pharmaceuticals. While this approach is effective for emergency and acute care, the main issue arises when it comes to addressing the underlying cause of an ailment.

Collaborative Care

In functional medicine, a collaborative care model is used, and it entails a team of healthcare professionals working together, including health coaches, nutritionists, therapists, and doctors, addressing different aspects of a patient’s health together and perusing through the medical history. Traditional care is collaborative, too, and it tends to be compartmentalized such that there are specialists who will focus on a particular area of expertise, leading to fragmented care.

Working with a Health Coach or a Functional Medicine Doctor

If you’re torn between working with a functional medicine health coach or doctor, there are different aspects that you need to be aware of as a woman to ensure you’ll receive effective and comprehensive care. Some of the things that you need to keep in mind include:

Understanding the Roles of Each Professional

A functional medicine doctor has a license and additional training, which means they can perform a diagnosis and interpret tests while also prescribing treatment or medication based on your health status. On the other hand, a health coach will collaborate with the functional medicine doctor to offer patients the support they need to implement lifestyle changes while following through on treatment plans. While the health coach won’t perform a diagnosis or prescribe a treatment option, their role is important in educating, guiding, and motivating the patient.

Integration with Conventional Care

Functional medicine is not here to replace conventional medicine. On the contrary, it is here to complement conventional care. The functional medicine health coach or doctor will work with the primary care physician alongside other specialists to offer a more integrated healthcare approach.

Women Getting into the Functional Medicine Field

With time, some female medical practitioners have come to terms with the significant role that functional medicine plays in ensuring that a patient leads a healthy and disease-free life. Preventative medicine is supposed to start at a tender age. For instance, when it comes to the reproductive system, the ovaries and the eggs present in them are there throughout a woman’s life, even when they were a fetus in their mother’s body. In functional medicine, preconception care is put into consideration. Women need to feel empowered, which is why ovarian health needs to be considered since hormonal balance, oxidative stress, and antioxidant status are essential for ovarian health and function. Female health practitioners need to bring such information to light, especially to adolescents. Empowered women will have more knowledge about the anatomy of their reproductive system, which is the significance of functional medicine.