When we encounter any illness, we usually rush to an allopathic doctor for swift handling of the situation. While most of your allopathic doctors cure your illnesses by offering you quick-fix solutions like tablets and syrups, doctors who practice functional medicine might as well sit down with you to take into consideration your lifestyle practices. They are usually MDs, doctors of chiropractic, or osteopaths who take a deep look into your life to detect the problem.
Table of Contents
Focusing on the Patient
Chiropractors and functional medicine practitioners emphasize examining the patient as a whole rather than just the illness. They look into the root causes of the diseases by recognizing the individuality of every patient. The primary factors taken into consideration during a patient assessment include foundational lifestyle factors: nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress level, interpersonal relationships, and genetics.
A Holistic Approach towards Treatment
Functional medicine practitioners consider the whole body of an individual while treating a particular disease. They examine the externalities of the illness and dig deeper into the mental and emotional health aspects of a person to detect the causes of the ailment.
For example, they might ask you questions about your food habits and sleep schedule and your relationship with your colleagues and partner, which significantly affects your emotional well-being.
FM practitioners may sometimes also recommend laboratory testing, including routine tests such as a complete blood count (CBC) and many other less conventional tests like stool, saliva, hormone levels, and genetic testing.
These tests significantly contribute to determining which biological processes may be affected and functioning at a less than optimal level. This information is then compiled altogether to develop a comprehensive customized plan of care for an individual to restore his good health.
Who is a Chiropractor?
Chiropractors usually adopt traditional treatment techniques like spinal manipulation and acupuncture with modern ideas of nutritional counseling and lifestyle interventions. They aim to improve your health rather than cure your disease to deliver long-term benefits.
Patient Involvement
Functional medicine chiropractors spend more time with the patients than their regular doctors. They ensure complete patient involvement in the process of analyzing the health situation of the patient.
They will communicate with the patients for hours to know their lifestyle and accordingly recommend changes. These changes cover many aspects of our daily activities, affecting our food habits, sleeping schedule, emotional and mental well-being, etc.
The patient has to actively participate with the chiropractor in improving their lifestyle than just simply resorting to taking medicines on the doctor’s prescription.
Integrated Method
Functional medicine often works with a combination of chiropractic and allopathic treatments, which is often said to be a combination of the art and science of healthcare. It is often done by mixing the knowledge of chiropractic and allopathic practitioners in treating the human body. Combining these practices, functional medicine aims at a patient-centric and science-based treatment.
In recent years, people have widely recognized the benefits of functional medicine practitioners’ treatments. As a result, many new and promising names have emerged in functional chiropractic medicine, out of which one of the most prominent is Active Edge Chiropractic & Functional Medicine.
