Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice™ is a well-orchestrated, comprehensive, patient-centred educational program that helps you deepen your clinical understanding and practical application of the Functional Medicine Matrix Model.
Today’s Landscape
An epidemic of chronic disease threatens to compromise the health of our population and the effectiveness and economics of our healthcare system. Alarming projections suggest that future generations may have shorter, less healthy lives if current trends continue unchecked. Because of its focus on acute care, the current medical model fails to confront both the causes of and solutions for the chronic disease epidemic and must be replaced with a model of comprehensive care and prevention that is systems-based, integrative, patient-centred, and much more effective. AFMCP™-UK has been designed to meet that challenge.
What is Functional Medicine?
Functional Medicine asks how and why illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease for each individual.
The Functional Medicine model is an individualised, patient-centred, science-based approach that empowers patients and practitioners to work together to address the underlying causes of disease and promote optimal wellness. It relies on a detailed understanding of each patient’s genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors and leverages that data to direct personalised treatment plans that lead to improved patient outcomes.
By addressing the root cause, rather than symptoms, practitioners become oriented to identifying the complexity of the disease. They may find one condition has many different causes and, likewise, one cause may result in many different conditions. As a result, Functional Medicine treatment targets the specific manifestations of disease in each individual.
The Functional Medicine model evolved from the insights and perspectives of a small group of influential thought leaders who realised the importance of an individualised approach to disease causes based on the evolving research in nutritional science, genomics, and epigenetics. These thought leaders found ways to apply these new advances in the clinic to address root causes using low-risk interventions that modify molecular and cellular systems to reverse these drivers of disease. LEARN MORE
These Functional Medicine thought leaders were able to apply new research in a way that often brought dramatic results to patients who had previously received unsuccessful treatments. Part of this advance was a return to scientific principles of finding new ways to look for unifying factors at the cellular and systems levels that underlie organism-wide problems. LEARN MORE
As others became interested in learning Functional Medicine, it became necessary to systematise the approach so that it could be taught to a wider group of practitioners of differing backgrounds. The IFM approach to applying Functional Medicine is mainly practised through a set of tools that formalises both history-taking and mapping symptoms to the categories of root processes that underlie illness. Three of these tools are the Functional Medicine Matrix, Timeline, and the GOTOIT framework. More information about each may be found below.