Functional medicine is a comprehensive approach to health and wellness incorporating lifestyle, diet, and specific diagnostic testing to help uncover root causes of illness. Diagnostic testing primarily focuses on hormone balance, including adrenal function, as well as digestive pathogens and food sensitivities.

Integrative medicine, like functional medicine, also incorporates lifestyle, diet, and diagnostic testing as an approach to health and wellness. In addition, integrative medicine expands on treatment and diagnostic testing to include environmental, nutritional, infectious, immune, and neurochemical evaluations for a wide array of health problems.
Both approaches have similarities, but for some practitioners their desire may be to incorporate a few integrative medicine treatments into their practice such as targeted nutritional therapy or adrenal testing, and not pursue a total transformation of their practice which is often the goal of functional medicine.

Other terms often used to describe functional and integrative medicine are complementary or alternative medicine. There is a lot of crossover between these terms so for our purposes here, we will simply use ‘Integrative Medicine’ to be inclusive of functional, complementary, and alternative medicine.

Neurological disorders are often chronic in nature. For example, Alzheimer’s disease is linked to biochemical imbalances now known to be linked to various inflammatory and oxidative stress problems. The use of convention medicine only works to slow the deterioration of this disease, but integrative medical approaches such as targeted nutrition and antioxidant therapies are often beneficial too in preventing Alzheimer’s cognitive deterioration.

Other brain and nervous system problems, including mental health issues, as well as autism-spectrum disorders, can be significantly helped with integrative medicine approaches such as testing for chronic infections, food sensitivities, and utilizing various nutritional therapies to deal with the underlying imbalances that are often at the root of these disorders.