The management of chronic illness constitutes nearly 80 percent of our health-care expenditures but occupies close to zero time in the training of physicians.

But here’s the headline. In addition to the many well-known examples of biomarkers—cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides, or glucose in the blood—there are also literally hundreds of new biomarker candidates that can help to pinpoint changes in a person’s health well before disease develops.

A SYSTEMS APPROACH To do this, functional medicine takes a systems approach to the body. We’ve already spoken of the network of organ systems in the body—immune, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, etc.—but here the important word is “network”; in other words, all these systems are linked. Therefore, as we know, an event in one system can affect

think of a disease as caused by an overly active step in one of the metabolic processes going on in the body—a single step that has gone out of sync or out of control. If you can find or create a substance that will interfere with that overly active step—block it, inhibit it, alter it in some way—you more or less transform the effect of the disease

doctors who practice functional medicine are not so much trying to figure out a diagnosis as they are seeking to understand the complex web of interactions in the patient’s history, physiology, and lifestyle.

One of the new biomarkers in the blood that we’ll meet again later is high-sensitivity C-reactive protein: hs-CRP. This biomarker is an indicator of chronic inflammation and, especially when combined with a companion biomarker in the blood, homocysteine, can alert us to a person’s early risk of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, or dementia, four

These processes, occurring primarily in the liver, where most of the detox machinery resides, convert toxic substances into nontoxic by-products, and eliminate them via the kidney and intestines, which have some additional detoxification abilities as well.

the most compelling reason for a new operating model is the science we’ve been reviewing in the previous chapters. It is the genomic revolution that is making the functional medicine revolution necessary. Our understanding of why and how the interactions among our environment, lifestyle, and genetic predispositions can alter our physiology and

You tell your doctor you feel tired and you sort of ache all over. Pressed for specific details, you report that you haven’t been sleeping well, can’t concentrate, have no energy, and just feel wiped out. Trained in a pharmaceutical strategy that seeks one cause to explain one disease that can be treated with one drug, the doctor is stymied at best