Functional Medicine
A Doctor’s Touch
Due to insurance and billing pressures, most family medicine doctors just don’t have time to sit down and discuss patients’ issues, hopes, and fears with them. Empathetic bedside manner with comprehensive care and attention to detail has become a lost art. It is also common to have tunnel vision in medicine, “missing the forest for the trees”.
“Functional medicine” harkens back to the way family medicine used to be (and still is, in our practice). It involves a holistic, system-based approach and acknowledgment that the mind and body are closely interrelated. Emotional issues can manifest physically and vice versa. We try to avoid focusing on the minutiae, preferring to take a step back and look at the entire picture.
Interestingly, we were practicing functional medicine before it was cool. Our approach has always been to get to the heart of the issue, to “pull the weed out by the roots”, and to look at each patient as a whole. The most important factor is time (doctor/patient time).
Please see our page about time for further discussion.