Andrea uses a personalised approach to healing, based on the Functional Medicine / Integrative Medicine principals, a patient-centered rather than a disease-centered approach to treatment with a focus on your complete personal history, lifestyle and of course, nutrition.
Andrea combines Western herbal knowledge, the medical sciences and nutritional guidance within the framework of Functional Medicine to facilitate extremely effective patient protocols and support that ultimately become more than the total sum of their constituent parts.
That means being respectful of, and responsive to your individual patient preferences and needs, and ensuring your values guide all clinical decisions. This relationship between the patient and the practitioner must empower the patient to take ownership of their own healing with guided support. This active participation in the development of your therapeutic plan means you will feel more in control of your own well-being and are more likely to make those sustained lifestyle changes to improve your health long term when working with Andrea.
Functional medicine emphasises a definable and teachable process of integrating multiple knowledge bases within a pragmatic intellectual matrix that focuses on functionality at many levels, rather than a single treatment for a single diagnosis. Functional medicine uses the patient’s story as a key tool for integrating diagnosis, signs and symptoms, and evidence of clinical imbalances into a comprehensive approach to improve both the patient’s environmental inputs and his or her physiological function.
The Institute for Functional Medicine teaches health care professional’s how to apply these principles in practice through an intensive 5 day training course called Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice™.
I attended and completed the AFMCP™-UK training in London in 2015.
The IFM introduction to what Functional Medicine is
Functional Medicine Clinicians Define Functional Medicine and its Impact on Patient Outcomes
Mark Hyman explains more …
MARK HYMAN, MD, is a practising family physician, an internationally recognized speaker, educator, and advocate in his field. He is the Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is also the founder and medical director of The UltraWellness Center, chairman of the board of the Institute for Functional Medicine
