When you visit a physician’s office with a health concern, the appointment usually follows a familiar pattern of history taking, physical exam, and potentially plans for further testing or a trial of medication.

The focus in this conventional approach is on symptoms and their relationship to specific organs: cognitive issues and your brain, palpitations and your heart, shortness of breath and your lungs.

In a functional medicine approach, however, we expand our view from isolated, individual organs to whole, interconnected systems.

In this post, let’s talk about why that is and what advantages functional medicine offers to both patients and physicians.

What Is the Functional Medicine Approach?

In functional medicine, we deal more with systems than with single organs. Why? Because the body is an interconnected whole, and symptoms that appear via one organ usually stem from multiple elements working in a dysfunctional way.

If I apply a conventional “pill for an ill” strategy, I only address the most obvious symptom without digging into the underlying cause.

Instead, the functional medicine approach goes deeper, exploring multiple aspects of health that could be contributing to the symptom. How is your nutrition? How do you feel after eating certain foods? What does your exercise routine look like? How’s your energy throughout the day? How well are you sleeping?

This systems-based perspective allows me to gather more comprehensive information about a patient’s health and potential contributing factors. It also helps patients see that treatment isn’t just about addressing one niche area. Real healing goes further, and it includes addressing what I call the Four Pillars of Health: sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress elimination.

The advantage of the conventional, organ-based approach is its simplicity; it’s easy to understand. Cardiac issues go to the cardiologist, lung problems to the pulmonologist, abdominal pain to the gastroenterologist. But this compartmentalized view misses the bigger picture of how your body actually functions, which means it often misses the opportunity to truly make you healthy.

The 7 Systems of Functional Medicine

When I say that the functional medicine approach looks at systems, what do I mean? Organ systems, such as your GI tract? That’s still a bit too narrow.

Functional medicine considers seven key systems grouped by their broader roles or functions in the body. These systems provide a framework that helps us uncover the root causes lurking behind symptoms.

System 1: Assimilation

Consider a car that won’t move. That’s the symptom, and we might assume it stems from a problem with the motor, the starter, or any number of complicated and technical parts. But a simpler explanation could be that the gas tank is empty.

As a system in the functional medicine approach, Assimilation is all about the “gas tank.” It includes digestion, absorption, and respiration, the processes by which we take in the essential elements (nutrients, water, oxygen) our bodies require for full and healthy function.

System 2: Defense and Repair

The Defense and Repair system handles protecting the body when it’s healthy and fixing the body when parts break. This system includes immune response, inflammation management, and cellular repair mechanisms.

Sticking with our car analogy, we can liken Defense and Repair to taking a car in for preventive maintenance and/or getting it fixed after a fender bender.

System 3: Energy

Gasoline in a tank doesn’t produce energy if it just sits there. It’s the combustion of that gas in the car’s engine that creates power.

The Energy system focuses on producing the power our bodies need to get things done using the raw materials we gained in assimilation. For instance, our mitochondria function as tiny factories that convert food into ATP, the energy currency of our cells. Our cells then use that energy to carry out all kinds of crucial activities throughout our bodies.

System 4: Biotransformation and Elimination

Without efficient filters and exhaust systems, cars suffer from buildup and reduced efficiencies.

Similarly, human bodies generate byproducts from energy creation and other processes, and these need proper elimination. This takes place through our Biotransformation and Elimination system, which deals with waste and toxin removal.

System 5: Transport

Transport includes the biological avenues for moving materials around the body, such as blood vessels, lymphatics, and respiratory pathways. These deliver blood, nutrients, oxygen, and waste to the appropriate destinations, something like a car’s hoses and pipes delivering oil and other fluids where they’re needed.

System 6: Communication

Communication coordinates all the processes throughout the body. It’s the management system that covers how cells and organs talk amongst each other through hormones, neurotransmitters, and immune messengers. We can think of this system like the computer that controls and coordinates all your car’s functions.

System 7: Structural Integrity

Lastly, Structural Integrity encompasses the body’s infrastructure, the muscles, bones, and connective tissues that keep us upright, mobile, and strong. In a car, this is like the frame and tires, the foundation supporting everything else.

How Functional Systems Work Together

The seven systems of the functional medicine approach aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap tremendously.

Just consider the example of fighting off an infection, like pneumonia.

If bacteria enter your lungs and cause pneumonia, your Defense and Repair system recognizes the threat and sets off alarms. Those alarms travel through your Communication system to different parts of your body.

In response, your Energy system ramps up production through the Assimilation of nutrients, creating the power needed for your immune response. As it operates, your immune system generates byproducts that must be processed through Biotransformation and Elimination. So even as the Transport system moves immune cells to the infection site, it shuffles waste products through the body for elimination.

When all these systems work together effectively, you recover your Structural Integrity, fighting off muscle weakness and overall fatigue in favor of renewed strength and vitality.

As you can see, this interconnected reality makes it impossible to treat root causes while focusing on just one system, let alone one isolated organ.

The Benefits of a Root-Cause Approach

To maintain the quality of life we all seek, we need to address both current illnesses and future prevention. When your body is properly prepared through healthy lifestyle choices, you can fight off many illnesses more effectively and minimize the damage that occurs if you contract others.

When stress becomes overwhelming, every system becomes inefficient. When sleep suffers, your Defense and Repair system can’t do its job effectively. When nutrition falters, Energy fails. The commonality linking all seven functional systems comes back to those Four Pillars of Health I mentioned above.

The functional medicine approach examines each of these foundational pillars to identify where problems originate, rather than simply using medication to mask a symptom that’s alerting us to a deeper problem.

The Functional Medicine Approach: A Framework for Navigating Complexity

The study of medicine and how the body works is extremely complicated. I tell people that sending a rocket to space is complicated, but engineers can write out the entire process on paper (provided they have enough room).

The human body is different. It’s not just complicated, it’s complex. No one understands everything about how the body works yet. No one can write it all down.

The systems approach of functional medicine provides the clearest framework I’ve seen for understanding these complexities. Conventional medicine’s organ-based approach tends to be more sterile and limited, missing the overlap of how our body’s numerous components work in concert with one another.

So, though we may use medication in functional medicine, our approach is fundamentally different. Instead of asking, “What pill will fix this symptom,” we ask, “What’s causing this system to break down, and how can we support the body’s ability to heal?”

The functional medicine approach offers a path toward genuine, lasting health rather than temporary (or chronic) symptom relief. At Jupiter Concierge Family Practice, this systems-oriented thinking allows us to investigate beyond the symptom, getting to the root of a problem rather than covering up the signals that a problem exists.

Your body is an interconnected whole, and it deserves to be treated that way.