This is what Functional Medicine is all about. Here's a report by leading FM expert, Mark Hyman:
Should You Fire Your Specialist?
Dr. Mark Hyman
March 1, 1012
The way most doctors practice medicine right now isn’t working. Medical students are trained to see the body as a collection of isolated parts instead of one whole system. The ensuing move toward medical specialization—organizing medicine by organs and diseases, by location and symptoms—is flawed and, as a result, modern medicine is at a breaking point. Not only does this hyper-focused approach to medicine dehumanize patients but is also ratchets up health care costs. We know, for instance, that medical specialists hospitalize more patients, write more prescriptions, and order more tests than primary care physicians. However, more spending rarely equates to better patient outcomes.
I know because that was how I was trained. In medical school, my classmates and I learned how to diagnose diseases and assign standardized treatments no matter who was suffering. I was taught to see the body as a set of symptoms, not one large system. Part of my training was learning how to refer patients to cardiologists for heart problems, gastroenterologists for stomach issues, and rheumatologists for joint pain. Given that most physicians were trained this way, it’s no wonder that the average Medicare patient has six doctors and is on five different medications.
What I now know is that the key to good medicine is seeing the whole patient instead of just a collection of broken parts. My approach is called functional medicine. Functional medicine is not a new modality, specialty or technique. Practicing functional medicine means thinking about how the body’s systems are interconnected. Functional medicine is about moving beyond a superficial diagnosis and discovering the root cause of illness. In functional medicine, we want to answer the question “Why?, not just “What is the right drug for this disease?”
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