Integrative vs Functional vs Routine Medicine

If you’ve ever left a medical visit feeling like the bigger picture was missed, you’re not alone. That’s one of the many reasons people turn to functional and integrative medicine - two approaches that prioritize the root cause of illness over surface-level symptom relief.

What Is Functional Medicine?

Functional medicine looks at health through the lens of genetics, environment, and lifestyle. It’s investigative by nature, focusing on identifying and correcting the underlying dysfunctions that lead to symptoms or disease. It’s personalized, data focused, and emphasizes prevention.

What Is Integrative Medicine?

Integrative medicine shares many of the same goals but adds even more depth. It values herbal remedies, supplements, the mind-body connection, and traditional healing systems like Chinese medicine and acupuncture. Integrative care means not just asking what the disease is, but why the person became ill in the first place and what tools, conventional or complementary, can help restore health.

How We Practice

We operate in the space between functional/integrative medicine and routine medical care. While we don’t offer acupuncture or chiropractic care in-house, we refer out when needed. We are well versed in herbalism, nutraceuticals, and lifestyle medicine. What sets us apart from most "wellness" centers, naturopathic offices and "hormone clinics" is simple: we prioritize your health, not our bottom line.

We don’t sell unnecessary tests or push products. We don't profit from supplement recommendations we send you and take a "minimum effective intervention" approach to minimize side effects (including wallet damage). We don't mark up in-house labs or dispense medications from our office so that we can sell it to you at 2x our cost.

We don’t market to our patients. We do not promote solutions to problems, because the solution is treating the root cause and will vary person to person.

Examples of the kind of marketing we stay away from:

"Build muscle and have more energy, get on TRT!"

"Feeling tired? Come get your IV therapy!" "NAD is great for longevity!"

"Hair loss? Get tested for toxins!"

We answer questions honestly, do not over promise or minimize known and unknown side effects - we involve you in every decision.

Seeing the Whole Person

Mainstream medicine too often treats lab results instead of people. Integrative medicine insists that we do better. Before making clinical decisions, we look at your lifestyle, stress levels, nutrition, genetics, sleep, environment, and belief systems.

For example, when it comes to cancer screening, most doctors follow standard guidelines based on large-population studies. But what if a patient has several low-grade risk factors that add up? We believe care should adapt to the individual.

First, Do No Harm

We believe that when possible, lifestyle, nutrition, stress management, sleep and relationships should be first-line treatments. They carry fewer risks and are more likely to target the actual cause, not just the symptom. But we’re also realists. Sometimes these aren’t enough. When that’s the case, we use labs, supplements, prescriptions, and referrals - always with informed consent and shared decision-making.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Some patients want to dive into lab work and treatment plans. Others prefer a simpler approach. Some want to treat the problem; others just want symptom relief. There’s room for all of you here. The only philosophy we follow is meeting you where you are.