[notshift]

What's your standard of evidence? The functional medicine folks I follow and who I am a client of generally follow the latest research closely. In the content they produce and in the books they write, they refer to and cite hundreds of studies.

[ch4s3]

They do love to cite studies but there aren't any studies that back up their claims and not RCTs of their methods at all. Here's a good overview https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/aafp-functional-medicine-la....

[notshift]

I was hoping for critiques of specific functional medicine treatments that were administered, but didn't find many in the article. Their link about heavy metal poisoning being "rejected by medical science" is a broken link.

Besides that the article is mostly just attempted character assassination of various people and goes after some of the more fringe elements / treatments in the field.

A huge part of functional medicine is just helping the patient address lifestyle factors - diet, exercise, sleep, stress, and removing negative environmental influences, whether those are a person, a diet issue (particular foods can do a lot of damage), a physical environmental issue such as mold, etc.

The first step that every (decent) functional medicine doctor takes with a new patient is just looking for nutritional deficiencies and other lifestyle factors, and doing tests and asking questions to check for those things. Completely uncontroversial and backed up by science that everyone on earth agrees with. But regular doctors don't even take that basic step for their patients because it takes too long to actually learn about a person, their background, their personality, etc. and actually help them create lifestyle change.

Beyond that, I wish the critics would actually address the more common treatments in functional medicine instead of the fringe stuff. Things like alternative treatments for parasites (blastocystis, various worms, dientamoeba, etc.), candida overgrowth, SIBO, heavy metal poisoning, various autoimmune issues, nutritional deficiencies, hormonal issues, etc.

The modern healthcare system is broken in a hundred ways but instead of having any curiosity about alternative approaches folks like the author of this article just attack the field and the people in it rabidly.