In order to understand Functional Medicine, you must understand what it is not. Functional Medicine is not the Conventional Medicine you are familiar with. Conventional Medicine focuses primarily on finding disease or tumors that form in the organs and tissues of your body. In contrast, Functional Medicine endeavors to detect and recognize imbalances before they become disease or tumors. The standard medical education has badly neglected functional medicine. A significant segment of our population is afflicted with ailments for which the diagnostic testing and medicine of conventional medicine are of little or no use. There are disorders where no specific tissue or organ damage can yet be discovered that would explain why a person feels the way they do. Such imbalances often become recognized later on when tissue changes begin manifesting as disease processes. This makes Functional Medicine of great interest to those whose suffer without knowing why. The usual diagnostic search by elimination and exclusion is futile, as well as prohibitively expensive. Conventional Medicine lacks the proper attitude, suitable instrumentation and pertinent instructional background, which are necessary for diagnosing functional imbalances. 

Functional Medicine involves understanding a complex series of vicious cycles occurring in our body that feed each other. 

Then identify and provide support and counseling to unlock these vicious cycles to prevent their reoccurrence.

Functional imbalances can be detected early, from the beginning of the disease process. We now have the technology that in the past was not available. Wellness Alternatives uses a number of diagnostic methods for the diagnosis and evaluation of functional imbalances. Functional Medicine recognizes the body as being self-regulating through feedback loops and that disease occurs when this self-regulation has become disrupted. When these feedback loops get stuck or disrupted, imbalances and dysfunction occur. People often recognize this as being “sick”. The goal of Functional Medicine is to assist your body in returning to dynamic balance. Functional Medicine focuses not on the endpoint or pathological state, but on the dynamic processes which underlie and precede it. While acknowledging the existence of disease as well as trying to understand it, Functional Medicine focuses on the underlying processes and seeks a treatment which removes, replaces, repairs and restores the underlying events causing the problem. 

What is Functional Medicine?  

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