Functional medicine is a model of healthcare that is comprehensive, individualized, evidence-based, and looks for the root cause of health conditions. In Functional medicine we treat the body as an interconnected whole rather than as a collection of systems operating independently, therefore we understand its possible to have several conditions with one cause or one condition with many causes.

Humans have been on earth for roughly six million years and for the majority of that time we went to bed with the sun and woke up with the sun, we ate things we found or could kill, we moved our bodies daily, and we lived in beneficial and supportive communities. Only in the last 100 years has that changed. We have artificial light, artificial food, and artificial relationships. We have a cultural expectation to ‘hustle’ even though we don’t move our bodies at all. We sit at work, in the car and then in front of the TV to relax.

Evolution is slow. This change in lifestyle does not fit with how we are biologically designed to live, creating a mismatch. This results in chronic lifestyle related diseases like hypertension, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, skin conditions, fatigue, obesity, brain fog, depression and anxiety.

As a society we have accepted these conditions to be a normal part of life or a normal part of aging without questioning the cause or the degenerative nature of these modern conditions. I think this is because we have no idea how good we are designed to feel, we have no idea that optimal health is our birthright.