The Importance of Therapy Individualization

Many of you have been in health clinics where you must “take a number” and be seated. Well, sometimes that’s what it feels like when you visit your MD. You go into the clinic room and wait for the doctor who spends all of ten minutes with you and that is supposed to constitute an individualized treatment visit. If a problem list extends past one or two symptoms you are asked to make another appointment or are referred to a specialist.

This is not the way of the functional health practitioners who pride themselves on treating each person as biochemically individual with individual therapy needs. Functional health doctors work alongside MDs to complement what they do and to embrace conventional medicine in their individualized approach.

Enter Clinical Decision Making in Individualization

While patients usually do not ponder the clinical decision making that goes into the individualization of therapy, to do it efficiently and accurately affects every interaction with our patients from the front desk information gathering to the private consultation in the doctor’s office. There is no place for “fuzzy logic” in the ever-growing complexity of clinical decision making in the complicated field of functional health.

4 Reasons to Consider Functional Health’s Individualization of Care

Obtain Cutting Edge Care– As functional health grows in popularity you will be on the cutting edge of new evidence-based models of care that address the entire body and its environment

Obtain Patient-Centered Disease Prevention-Functional health doctors help you prevent disease not just treat it!

A Wider Array of Health Choices- without dependence on medications only to manage a condition. Functional health practitioners individualize therapy to maximize risk intervention, to prevent future problems and to attempt to heal current ones.

The Root Cause of the Disease is Uncovered- Instead of focusing on symptom resolution the root cause of the condition can be unearthed and treated possibly eliminating the need for surgery or pharmaceuticals.

Functional Health’s Deep Dive Approach to Individualization

Functional health dives deep into the person’s very existence to get at the factors that may be impacting a problem or potential problem. Five people can come in with the same diagnosis, but each person took a different path to get to that illness all involving different organ systems. The job of the functional health practitioner is to tease out the variables impacting that one patient’s diagnosis and develop an individualized treatment plan that addresses those organ dysfunctions and systemic risk triggers for that illness.

To get at a person’s source of illness a basic questionnaire, or matrix, is used to help guide the practitioner in probing each area of the patient’s life to gain a better understanding of impacting variables. It operates on the premise that the diagnosis is not the conclusion of the journey, but only the beginning.

Foundations of the Matrix for Individualization of Therapy

The matrix consists of 3 primary areas:

• Retelling the Patient's Story
• Organizing the Patient’s Clinical Imbalances
• Personalizing and Lifestyle Factors

Within each category of the matrix there are several subcategories of assessment that finally lead the functional health practitioner to formulate the individualized therapy plan. And, individualization is key to the ultimate success of the therapy.