Dr. Mark's Minute - Why Treating Symptoms Makes You Sicker

There's a whole new field of medicine out there called functional medicine. It helps us understand the root cause of disease and helps us treat the system, not just the symptoms. In functional medicine, we want to answer the question why, not just what disease you have or what's the right drug for this disease. The question isn't what disease you have, but which system or systems in your body are out of balance. The goal then is to understand what disturbs those systems. How do we get off of the normal function of these systems and then how can we best create optimal function? I'm not so much interested in helping patients get perfect lab tests because as we have seen they don't tell the whole story. I'm interested in helping identify how the particular systems in their body are working or not working and then how we get them into balance. And this has to be done by treating the whole system, not the symptom. It's like treating the soil, not the plant. Just as there's no need for fertilizer or pesticides if the soil is healthy, there's no need for medication if your body is healthy.