Please don’t destroy functional medicine.

Because we need it now more than ever.

This is my plea to all of the practitioners and coaches and other wellness professionals out there who identify as supporting functional medicine. There seems to be a disconnect, a diverging set of opinions about what functional medicine is — and what its role should be — when it comes to public health during a pandemic. This is for those I see on social media who are claiming that the Institute for Functional Medicine (IFM) — the developers of the concept of functional medicine and founders of the functional medicine movement — has somehow aligned with the “dark side,” taken a political stand or joined with “evil forces” simply because they support vaccines as a way to save lives and address the public health crisis of this global pandemic.

Here are nine reasons I still believe functional medicine is our best way forward, and they’re why I stand with IFM. And if you consider yourself a functional medicine practitioner or coach, I hope you will consider these points too.

1. This is a global pandemic and a public health issue that has, to the great detriment of humanity, been politicized.
2. The Institute for Functional Medicine’s positions are not “left” or “right” they are based on well-informed, educated interpretations of science and data coming in from countries all over the world (not just the US, where the pandemic is especially used as a political football).
3. From early-on in the pandemic, IFM has shared, and continues to share, numerous, excellent resources, tools, webinars and protocols to support both prevention and treatment of Covid-19 AND they provide links to research to back up everything they say. They even provide their take on how strong/weak they believe the data is. Check it out, please. https://info.ifm.org/covid-19
4. Functional medicine has always focused on addressing the upstream, root causes of disease. Before the pandemic, it was largely focused on addressing root causes of complex, chronic disease. Now we have an acute problem, with potential long-term, chronic consequences, affecting billions of people on the planet.
5. I’ve been following and supporting IFM for nearly two decades, and they have ALWAYS been about the integration of allopathic medicine and natural/lifestyle medicine in a way that best serves patients AND is based on scientific data and real-world outcomes.
6. A novel virus and its variants causing a global pandemic is an acute public health issue. Addressing the underlying causes, from a functional medicine perspective, means both strengthening the host’s immune response by addressing factors (like pre-existing, lifestyle-related conditions) that make it easier for the virus to kill people AND using the best tools available to modern, science-based medicine to STOP the virus from causing severe disease (and there is plenty of good data that vaccines do that). Are they perfect? No. No vaccine or treatment protocol is perfect for everyone. But strengthening the host and using allopathic medicines, when they’re the best tools available to address the acute issue at hand, ARE what functional medicine does. If you don’t feel this way, please re-assess what you call yourself as a practitioner.
7. To suggest that IFM has somehow gone away from that by agreeing with the vast majority of epidemiologists, scientists and other public health experts globally on the topic of vaccines during a pandemic is absurd. Like diet, lifestyle and certain supplements, vaccines ARE addressing an upstream cause of disease and death by boosting the immune system. You don’t have to believe the science, you don’t have to like it, but it’s the best science we have to work with.
8. LET’S THINK ABOUT THE LONG GAME HERE. We need our medical and healthcare “establishment” — that is allopathic practitioners, hospital systems, insurance systems and governments — to embrace functional medicine as the standard of care so that we CAN use lifestyle medicine and integrative therapies to help stem the tide of long-term, chronic illness globally. We also need to address poverty, racism, food deserts and access to preventive medical resources — all issues that people also brand as political, but shouldn’t be. Based on the experience of this pandemic — and the underlying conditions that are, quite literally killing people quickly now instead of slowly — we still have a LONG way to go there.
9. IFM’s role in the functional medicine movement is both as the founders of it and the providers of science-backed educational programs that bring allopathic-trained medical practitioners into the functional medicine fold, helping them understand how to incorporate alternative therapies, food-as-medicine and other lifestyle interventions into their practices. If IFM ignored the overwhelmingly positive science on the benefits of vaccines and took “sides” with a relatively small group of outliers who believe that functional medicine should embrace anti-vaccine rhetoric or conspiracy theories, they would be eternally preaching to a very small choir and they would LOSE ALL THEIR CREDIBILITY among the audience of people they most need to bring into the functional medicine world. I’m not suggesting this is why they support vaccines, I’m merely stating a fact.

If you truly care about functional, integrative, natural and lifestyle medicine for the prevention and treatment of illness, then we need the “establishment” to embrace functional medicine. Otherwise we can all sit here complaining about the situation, and nothing we say will be heard or taken seriously.

If we really want to “win” the long game here, we need to work together and stop supporting positions that make all of functional medicine look like a bunch of anti-science, paranoid witch doctors and supplement-hawkers who don’t understand or care about public health. That’s not us!

The scary part of posting this note is I know I will be attacked by a certain segment of my fellow health coaches and practitioners who claim they practice “functional medicine” yet have fully embraced the rhetoric of the anti-vaccine crowd. Based on my experience, they will call me a “sheep” (which says more about them than it does me), and they’ll swear I’ve gone with IFM to the “dark side.” There is no dark side here. There is a global pandemic, and we’re all just doing our best to help keep people from suffering and dying.

Let’s keep that in mind, please.