The image above (adopted from the Institute of Functional Medicine), uses a tree to visually represent certain core aspects of the Functional Medicine Paradigm. It also further highlights the difference between a Functional Medicine approach compared to a Traditional Medical Approach. In order to keep a tree healthy and allow it to thrive, you need to focus on the roots and soil. Similarly, if you had a plant that was wilting away and its leaves were brown, you wouldn’t start by working on the leaves. You would look to the soil and roots for answers to some of these same foundational elements.

Like the plant, in Functional Medicine it is important to look at the root cause of why people feel the way that they do. Some of these important factors are listed as the roots of the tree in the image above. These factors may include: sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress levels, relationships, past trauma, microorganisms, environmental issue and genetics. These are the roots and the soil, which are influenced by specific predisposing factors (antecedents), triggering events, and ongoing physiological processes (mediators), and can result in functional imbalances at the trunk of the tree. Overtime, these can ultimately result in the signs and symptoms that are grouped into a diagnosable constellation of symptoms that we call disease (represented by the branches and leaves).

Usually traditional medicine tends to look at the symptoms first (the branches and leaves), which usually results in a disease diagnosis. Often times the diagnosis is associated with a drug that treats the constellation of symptoms. The problem with this approach is that it neglects the more fundamental reasons and root causes of why people are getting those symptoms in the first place (the roots and the trunk of the tree). In the traditional medical system , two people with the same disease get treated the same way, even though what is fundamentally driving the disease can be different in each person.