What is Functional Medicine?
About functional medicine
Functional Medicine determines how and why illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual.
The Functional Medicine model is an individualized, patient-centered, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It requires a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalized treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes.
By addressing root cause, rather than symptoms, practitioners become oriented to identifying the complexity of disease. They may find one condition has many different causes and, likewise, one cause may result in many different conditions. As a result, Functional Medicine treatment targets the specific manifestations of disease in each individual.
Nutritional therapy
Nutritional Therapists are uniquely trained to understand how nutrients, other foods and lifestyle factors influence the function of the body by considering biochemical individuality in a patient centred manner.
Nutritional therapy is the application of nutrition and lifestyle medicine sciences in the promotion of health, peak performance and individual care. Registered Nutritional Therapy Practitioners assess and identify potential nutritional imbalances and understand how these may contribute to an individual’s symptoms and health concerns. This approach allows them to work with individuals to address nutritional imbalance and help support the body towards maintaining health.
Nutritional therapy is recognised as a complementary medicine and is relevant for individuals with chronic conditions, as well as those looking for support to enhance their health and wellbeing. Practitioners consider each individual to be unique and recommend personalised nutrition and lifestyle programmes rather than a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
Practitioners never recommend nutritional therapy as a replacement for medical advice and always refer any client with ‘red flag’ signs or symptoms to their medical professional. They frequently work alongside medical professionals and will communicate with other healthcare professionals involved in the client’s care to explain any nutritional therapy programme that has been provided.
Autonomic Response Testing (A.R.T.™)
Developed by Dietrich Klinghardt, MD, Ph.D, A.R.T.™ is a comprehensive diagnostic system that has helped to transform many practices around the world into healing centres and helped many practitioners to become accomplished holistic physicians.
This highly accurate diagnostic method assesses the coherence of light emissions of organs and structures in the body. It focuses on identifying and addressing the 7 most common factors that block or stress the healthy functioning of the nervous system and offers solutions for their correction.
The success of his approach has earned Dr Klinghardt worldwide recognition for his ground-breaking work in chronic illness, Lyme, Autism and more.