WRITTEN BY Nancy Palermo Lietz, MD
Medicine Designed
for the 21st Century
I
If you are standing on a tack, no
amount of aspirin or pain medication
will make the discomfort of the tack
completely disappear. The medicine
will only subdue the pain temporar-
ily. You must remove the tack to
allow the discomfort to abate. If you
are standing on two tacks, remov-
ing only one is not enough to make
you feel better. You must address
both triggers to be completely free of
the pain. Unfortunately, our current
medical system addresses disease
just this way. Instead of getting to the
root cause of a problem, symptoms
are simply treated with disregard
for what is causing the problem
in the first place. When a disease
process has multiple symptoms,
often patients end up on multiple
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medications—essentially “a pill for
every ill” as many who practice Func-
tional Medicine like to say.
Functional Medicine is different in that it
aims to get to the root cause of disease by
identifying specific details of a patient’s
physiology, history, lifestyle or genetic
makeup which might be contributing to
the problem. Functional Medicine prac-
titioners also consider an individual’s
internal (mind, body and spirit) and
external (physical and social) environ-
ment as factors that contribute to overall
functioning. Functional Medicin e treats
the whole individual, not just organ sys-
tems. Disease affects all organ systems,
so it only makes sense not to isolate sepa-
rate systems. Functional Medicine practi-
tioners apply strategies such as nutrition,