A short transcript excerpt from an October 2011 FMU Roundtable (YouTube) where the speaker contrasts lifestyle medicine with functional medicine. The speaker argues that functional medicine applies greater specificity and complexity tailored to individual patients, whereas lifestyle medicine/public health approaches can be more generic unless an explicit methodology is used. The excerpt emphasizes that complex problems require complex, individualized thinking.
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And one of the big issues in lifestyle medicine is how is this different in public health? Well, it's different than public health if you have an architecture, a thinking methodology for making it specific to their needs. If you don't, you're doing lifestyle, public health measures. So in my mind, lifestyle medicine, functional measurement, the same thing. But in the minds of people that I talk to that are experts in the area of lifestyle medicine, we do something different because I spend time doing things that they think are too specific, too complex. I make it too hard. Well, complex problems require complex thinking. You just can't do one size fits all. And so I think in terms of the actuality of lifestyle medicine versus functional medicine, our particular approach takes it to that next level. Yes, all of those measures that we're talking about in terms of standard lifestyle medicine teachings, those are part of the formula relationship. But what emerges in my clinic when you bring that specificity to that patient and then you let them choose because you understand the different doorways they can walk through, that's looking at their specific functional issues. So that's the way I see it. And I see, when I talk to practitioners that have a different kind of approach, what we're teaching is complex, that the human organism is complex.
