Functional Medicine Specialist

What is functional medicine?

Functional medicine is a health care approach that seeks to discover why and how illness develops in a given individual, and restore them to health by treating the whole patient rather than focusing on an isolated set of symptoms.

In practice, that means that functional medicine practitioners create individualized care plans that revolve around your needs as the patient, taking into account every potential influence on your health.

Rather than treating a health problem by, for example, relieving symptoms or killing an infection, a functional medicine approach involves getting to the root cause of why you were vulnerable to the particular condition in the first place.

How does functional medicine work in practice?

You won’t experience a radical difference between a consultation with a functional medicine specialist and a regular medical professional. Dr. Perijoc looks at your medical history, asks you about your symptoms, and conducts a physical exam where appropriate, just as any other doctor would.

What you’ll probably notice is that Dr. Perijoc spends a lot more time talking to you and asking questions about your general health and lifestyle. She also carries out tests to gain as much information as possible about genetic and biochemical influences on your health.

Using the broad range of information she gathers, Dr. Perijoc works with you to address every factor affecting your health.

What are the benefits of a functional medicine approach?

Functional medicine gives both you and Dr. Perijoc a big picture of your wellness status, identifying every influence on your condition and taking steps to improve health, restore function, and boost well-being.

Many health conditions can have multiple possible causes, and by only treating one cause, you overlook the effects of other contributing factors. One single causal factor, such as stress, can create multiple symptoms, and a single condition can have many symptoms. Functional medicine brings all these elements together to make sense of them.

For example, a condition like fibromyalgia can have many contributing factors, and where a triggering illness might be the primary influence in one patient, in another person, the cause could be stress, poor diet, or a hormonal problem.

Whatever your concerns or symptoms, Dr. Perijoc designs an optimal care plan that gets to the heart of your health and ensures the best outcomes. Call North Texas Internal Medicine Specialists today or book an appointment online.