In residency you are part of a massive medical system. You interact with doctors and other health professionals, getting to know pretty much every area of medicine. From this experience, I can honestly say that almost all the health professionals I have interacted with are in this for the right reasons. They want to help people. The tool kit they are given to help is seriously lacking, but that is a blog post for a different day. The same can’t be said for the institutions. The medical institutions are all about their bottom line. They are businesses trying to make a profit so that their board members are happy. They are involved in a power struggle with insurance companies that decide how much they get paid and for what. This drives the systems to do whatever pays the best, not what is best for the patients.
At the end of my first year of residency I had an attending leave  our medical system for something called direct primary care. I went and observed his practice and others in the area and what I found was the form of medical care that I thought I was getting into when I started medical school. This form of primary care allows patients and doctors to develop deep relationships so that the doctor treats more than just the ailment in front of him or her. He treats the whole. This is why it is great for patients.
Since my junior year of college I have been very interested in human optimization. I stumbled upon functional medicine the year between college and medical school and knew this is what I was meant to do. Functional medicine is really just medicine that focuses on fixing the root cause of someones health issue so that their body can heal. It focuses on health and not treating disease. It made innate sense to me that the preferred state of the body is being healthy and vibrant. When the body isn’t in that state, there is a reason and its the job of the doctor and patient to work together to figure out what is holding the body back.  I spent as much time as I could manage with functional medicine practitioners and as good as some of them were I kept coming back to this stumbling block: they see the patient once or twice, try to educate them on their health, and change a couple of things, but then the patient is lost to the ether.
My last year of residency, it dawned on me that I could combine both direct primary care and functional medicine. This would allow patients to have continued access to high quality medicine that allows them to live the healthiest, longest life possible. Now that was something I could get on board with and hence the dream of Functional Health Solutions was born.
Now this dream has come to light and I couldn’t be more excited. If this form of medicine excites you as much as it does me, then please join us. I want to build a community of like minded individuals that want more from their lives and health.