If anyone asked you ,“What is the most important thing in your life?” you might answer family, love, possibly money, but none of those can be fully enjoyed without your most precious assets, health and longevity. Yet, these assets are often overlooked in terms of time, effort, and planning. We may hire an asset manager for long-term financial/retirement planning, but just as important is a long-term “health asset manager. Traditional doctors are chiefly focused on managing or monitoring illness. Problems quickly resolved with medications or surgical corrections are surely important for short-term problems, easy to identify. But most of “optimal health” management lies OUTSIDE the realm of traditional medicine.  This is where functional medicine becomes so very important, and in fact, is THE answer.

Functional medicine is specifically termed “functional” because its focus is not one body part, one “disease”; it is instead the optimal function of the individual as a whole, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.  If ANY of these elements is out-of-whack, the whole cannot function at its best.  The functional physician’s work is to identify anything that is in excess or deficient in any of these areas and restore proper balance to ultimately achieve ideal function and longevity.

Let’s take a look at what is different in the way a functional doctor approaches a patient:

1 – Functional visits are considerably longer; the doctor listens carefully to an extended history, including al aspects of health and lifestyle of the patient.  Anything and everything in your life is of interest, and may provide clues to the things that need to be addressed.

2 – If you do not feel right, investigation continues until answers are found.  The “answer” is never: “The tests look fine, so there is nothing wrong.”  If you do not feel right, something is wrong, and must be pursued and identified.

3 – The goal is to RESOLVE problems, to promote self-healing, not to use medications for long-term control.

4 – To do this, investigations seek to uncover the true “root causes” of any symptoms, with treatment geared to “undoing” the cause or at least to support the identified underlying vulnerability.  This is especially important in treating chronic conditions.

5 – When relevant facts become evident from tests, or when the doctor is able to draw certain connections that may be useful, these are all shared with and explained fully to the patient, who, maybe for the first time, finally comes to completely understand his/her health and how it all fits together and makes sense.

6 – Treatment OPTIONS are discussed, and the plan for health is a collaborative creation of doctor and patient.

7 – Solutions are geared to the non-toxic, natural, non-pharmaceutical choices, to avoid some of the undesirable side effects often inherent to pharmaceutical treatments.

8 – A formal diagnosis is not critical to creating a health/treatment plan.  Treatment is based on history and lab results, and even symptoms without a diagnostic name attached can be very successfully addressed.

9 – The focus is not only on symptom/condition resolution, but beyond that, on discovering ANY imbalances and addressing them PROACTIVELY, leading to longer, healthier, happier lives.

10 –Treatment is very much individualized, so there is no “cookie-cutter” approach to wellness,.  Every patient is considered to be unique by the functional practitioner.

11 – Many pieces of one’s chemistry, and their related treatment, go unaddressed by traditional medicine.  It is unclear why, perhaps because the time it would take to go into such depth would be cost -prohibitive for insurance companies. These many key pieces of health wind up falling into the realm of functional medicine to be addressed. These include: food sensitivities, the gut microbiome, unexplained fatigue, immune system support, full spectrum natural hormone replacement therapy, the thyroid/adrenal axis communication, heavy (toxic) metals and environmental toxins (chemical and mold-related), the role that diet, vitamins and other supplements play in health, the importance of detoxification, and chelation therapy (natural elimination of plaque adherent to the body’s blood vessels) and more. Somehow, all of these quite physical areas of concern typically fall within the province of “functional medicine.”

So, WHEN do you absolutely need a functional medical doctor? When you want to be 100% listened to, when you want a deep new understanding of your health, when you want to resolve problems based on their root causes, when you want to establish a proactive program that will provide long-term health, wellness, and optimal longevity, when you want your doctor to view you as a whole and be your partner in health for life.

Robin Ellen Leder, M.D., has been practicing functional/holistic medicine since first training by the side of Dr. Robert Atkins (“The Atkins Diet”) after graduating from Brown University and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She has taken countless post-graduate courses in all areas of this field, and has a certificate from a psychoanalytic institute. At her Hackensack office, she has treated thousands of patients successfully, using the innovative tests and approaches that are integral parts of functional medicine (dietary change, supplement protocols, IV therapies, detox treatments, behavioral programs, counseling), addressing such issues as fatigue, the gut microbiome, thyroid/adrenal insufficiency, hormone imbalance, auto-immune disorders, psychological/behavioral issues, and autism spectrum disorders