Dr. Mark Hyman explains the difference between integrative and functional medicine. Integrative medicine combines alternative and conventional therapies as tools. Functional medicine is a systematic map for finding why patients are dysregulated, not just treating symptoms like depression.
Integrative medicine, functional medicine, they're parts of a whole. We're all in this hologram of life. But they are slightly different components of the hologram. Could you differentiate from your experience how integrative versus functional medicine are slightly different? Sure, yeah. I wrote an article a number of years ago, an editorial called the MAP Integrating Integrative Medicine. Because integrative medicine is about the tools. Functional medicine is about the map. It's about navigating, it's about thinking. So functional medicine isn't a specific tool or modality or treatment or test or a supplement. It's a way of analyzing information, sorting it, organizing it, processing it in such a way that tells a story about how people got sick and how they can get better. And it helps to choose which therapies to do, which may be alternative therapies or what we call integrative therapies, such as acupuncture, high biofeedback, or herbs or nutrients. But it's a fundamentally different way of thinking. So if someone comes to an integrative medicine case conference patient, which, let's say, take someone with depression, you'd have the homeopath recommending a certain remedy. You'd have the acupuncture saying they had spleen QI deficiency, for example, and may need certain acupuncture points. The psychologist might say they have early life trauma that's made them depressed. The nutritionist might say they have a folic acid deficiency, the internists might say they have a serotonin reuptake inhibitor deficiency, and so on. So you've got. And then the question is, well, what do you choose? You know, which. How do you figure out what's going on? And the unfortunate part about integrative medicine is it's saying we're going to integrate alternative therapies with conventional medicine. That's what integrative means for most people. I think some people conceptualize it a little differently and understand it's about the whole person. And on the mind, body level, on the relationship level, I think they've got it nailed. But where it falls down is you have all these smorgasbord of choices about modalities for diagnosis. The problem is the diagnosis is irrelevant. The question is, what's the cause? It's sort of the medicine of why functional medicine instead of the medicine of what? And so it's not what the diagnosis is and what should be the treatment, it's what's the underlying cause. Why is this person out of balance? How does the system is dysregulated and the disease becomes increasingly irrelevant in terms of understanding what to do.
