When you visit Complete Care, our providers will spend time with you to uncover the underlying causes of your health problems through careful history taking, physical examination, and laboratory testing. You can also expect to do a lot of talking, as a big part of functional medicine is exploring your detailed personal and family history, the circumstances around your first symptoms, and the experiences you may have had with other health care providers.
In addition to doing a lot of talking about your history, your provider will ask about your mental well-being and social factors. Considering these areas help our providers to see your health in the context of you as a whole person, not just in terms of your physical symptoms. We may also suggest that you submit samples for laboratory testing; some of these tests are the same ones used by conventional clinicians, but others are specialized tests that can help determine the causes of your illness.
The treatment plan you help design will usually include making some changes in your lifestyle: what you eat, your physical activity, how you deal with stress, your exposure to potentially toxic substances, and other factors.
In addition to lifestyle changes, functional medicine treatments may include combinations of medications, nutritional supplements, therapeutic diets, or detoxification programs. You will always play an integral role in choosing the treatments. As a patient of a functional medicine provider, you become an active partner in the design of your own treatment plan. This allows you to take control of improving your health and changing the outcome of your ailments.