Viewpoint: The ‘utter bullshit’ of functional medicine

[T]here must be something specific that Functional Medicine teaches, right? Well, no. I looked hard to find a single medical practice offered by Functional Medicine that isn’t offered by mainstream doctors. I couldn’t find a single one.

I did find a claim from the Institute of Functional Medicine that it “is uniquely capable of reversing the chronic disease trend and providing new opportunities for health and healing.” Well that sure sounds good! How do they do it? By focusing on the “whole patient.”

I have to be blunt here: this is utter b.s.

…

… I’m also really, really fed up with a tactic used by Functional Medicine, which is also used by naturopaths, acupuncturists, and homeopaths, where they criticize real doctors for practicing conventional, mainstream, “allopathic,” or “Western” medicine. They boast that they are better because they incorporate other types of practice, including alternative, holistic, “Eastern,” and other names. When I hear these labels, all of my b.s. detectors go off, and yours should too.

… I highly recommend this critique of Functional Medicine written by oncologist David Gorski nearly ten years ago, which includes some of what I’ve written here and much more. …

There’s only one kind of medicine: medicine that works. If a treatment works, then competent doctors will use it. If it doesn’t work–and here I include such dubious practices as acupuncture, homeopathy, Reiki, and Ayurveda–then it’s not medicine, it’s pseudoscience or quackery. So when I hear a Functional Medicine doctor criticize “Western medicine” and boast about incorporating Ayurvedic medicine, I want to run the other way.

Or to be more blunt: adding quack treatments to real treatments doesn’t make the real treatments more effective. It might even make you sicker.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here