Functional Medicine and Primary Care

What is Primary Care?

Primary Care medicine functions as a patient’s main source for medical care. Ideally, a Primary Care physician gets to know a patient over time and provides the patient with continuity and integration of health care services. It is the physician that the patient normally sees before they may be referred to a specialist. As the American Academy of Family Physicians says, the care the Primary Care physician provides “is person-centered, team-based, community-aligned, and designed to achieve better health, better care, and lower costs… Primary care is performed and managed by a personal physician who often collaborates with other health professionals, and utilizes consultation or referral as appropriate.”

What is Functional Medicine?

Functional Medicine and Nutrition are holistic disciplines that employ functional laboratory assessments to identify malfunctions and underlying conditions at the root of most common health complaints. It is a very individualized and personalized science-based approach which considers lifestyle factors, genetics, and assessment of body systems.

Functional lab evaluation utilizes the most innovative labs and more specific “optimal” ranges than what is offered through primary care doctors. These labs may include functional blood chemistry analysis, functional stool/microbiome test, detailed hormone evaluation, detoxification markers, food sensitivity testing, intestinal mucosal barrier assessment, mineral assessments and ratios, and others, depending on the person’s specific health history.

Often by the time someone comes to a doctor they are seeing the downstream effects of years of dysfunction that builds to cause disease. By working with a Functional Medicine and Nutrition practitioner, they can look upstream and identify the healing opportunities to get the body back to a state of healing. Through very personalized supplementation and lifestyle recommendations (that is indicated by lab results) it is amazing what can brought back into balance and how the body can find its natural state of homeostasis again, as well as move towards a state of vigor.

Complimentary by Nature

SLO Health, as a provider of Primary Care medicine, believes that Functional Medicine can play an important complimentary role to Primary Care, especially in a couple different ways. One case would be someone with chronic conditions, such as digestive issues, that might be the result of years of dysfunction which causes disease symptoms that are not straight forward and are best dealt with by looking upstream, such as doing gastrointestinal testing on the microbiome and the state of the GI lining and immune system. Other people may be very proactive with their health and desire to have a functional analysis done to move them from a state of “normal”, such as a state of no symptoms, to a state of “optimum health”, or vigor. Through following personalized protocols in lifestyle, diet, rest, exercise, stress relief and supplementation, people can increase their state of wellness, as illustrated by the wellness Scale (see Figure: Wellness Scale). At SLO Health, we offer truly integrated service where Primary Care works with other practitioners in the health team, such as Functional Medicine or Nutrition practitioners.