What is functional medicine, really?

Medicalish certification programs gone wild

A number of functional medicine practitioners claim they take a comprehensive, holistic approach to health that searches for the root cause of disease, whereas Western medicine only treats symptoms.

Yet searching for root causes is at the foundation of most non-emergency services medicine. Preventive care is not the domain of alt-med practitioners alone. They just like to claim that it is, for it paints a picture of a more reliable, more communicative, more trusted form of medicine.

Of course, there are good doctors and bad doctors and everything in between across the fields of medicine. This is as true for medical doctors as it is for chiropractors and naturopaths. While people’s anecdotes shouldn’t be discounted, they also cannot be taken for a system-wide problem.

The real problem is America’s for-profit healthcare system, which incentivizes dangerous behavior in terms of overcrowding and under-funding certain research. The answer, however, isn’t less training and invented terms like “functional medicine.” And while there are functional medicine advocates that take a holistic approach, the field’s two leading proponents constantly broker in perverse incentives.

Dysfunctional

The field of functional medicine was invented by chemist Jeffrey Bland in 1991 as a part of one of his companies. To date, none of the 24 official medical boards that certify specialists have offered functional medicine training, which tells you something about the validity of the paradigm.

Functional medicine certifiers advertise it as a new paradigm of healing that considers genetics, the microbiome, and quantum physics, among other disparate fields. The galaxy brain “theory of everything” approach to health can be seen in posts like this from family physician turned functional medicine don, Mark Hyman.

Conventional medicine doesn’t have arbitrary divisions as much as it has increasing fields of specialization. Not that those fields are always well-defined, or even understandable: in America, we have to carry separate insurance for vision and dental, which is simply absurd. The notion that our eyes and mouths are partitioned off from the rest of our body and, by extension, somehow don’t affect the rest of our body, is indicative of the predatory practices of insurance companies more than any nefarious medical agenda. In this, I agree with the premise of functional medicine: our body is one whole, organic system and should be treated as such.

To decry the entire system as creating arbitrary divisions is another story. Experts working together to gain a holistic understanding of physiology, biology, and disease etiology makes sense. A family physician waxing poetic about epigenetics, nutrition, and quantum physics, however, should give us pause.

Curiosity about other fields is healthy. Understanding connection points between disciplines. Yet Hyman is not a serious man when it comes to expertise, and he, along with other FM practitioners, leverage in vitro and animal studies to speculate about human biology, quickly selling unregulated and unproven products.

And then there’s the quantum realm, which alt-med practitioner just love. Instead of talking to an actual physicist, Hyman turns to…Deepak Chopra.

Hyman’s track record is not stellar. He wrote the forward for Robert F Kennedy Jr’s 2014 anti-vax book about thimerasol, which was removed from most vaccines in the nineties. The vaccine-autism connection has been disproven so many times it gets boring repeating the facts.

While it was nice seeing Hyman champion the potential new cancer vaccines (even if he was speaking in vague terms; not sure why he was chosen for the segment), he’s hosted RFK Jr on his numerous times, including late last year. You can tell a lot about a medical professional by those they choose to boost, and time and again, Hyman gives us reason to wonder what his real intentions are.