How Are We Different?

It isn’t a case of either or, at Goode Health you can choose to work solely with Functional Medicine, or collaboratively with Conventional medicine. We have many contacts in the conventional medicine world that we regularly work with, or we can work with your own team.

Standard Healthcare

When you experience disease conventional medicine jumps in to treat you. It is a system designed around urgent care and it works exceptionally well for this.
Focuses on treating your symptoms with medication or surgery, conventional medicine asks WHAT do you have.
Treats you once you reach disease state, based on the diagnosed you receive.
Protocols and treatments are designed around diagnoses. Treatments and ‘normal levels’ are often based on clinical studies that look at what would impact the general population.
You will to see a systems based specialist and may require multiple doctors in different specaities to complete your care, i.e a rheumatologist, neurologist, endocrinologist etc.
Treatment generally commences when you have become ill to the point that you have damage to tissue or organ.
Conventional medicine is exceptional at providing surgeries, or medications, for treatment of disease.
Offers conventional testing which can be limited in markers, especially for chronic conditions or optimising health and particularly on the NHS.

Functional Healthcare

Functional medicine promotes a proactive approach to supporting people as early in the journey as possible.
Focus is on finding the root cause of your symptoms, asking WHY do you as an individual have this illness or symptom.
Functional medicine looks at improving the physiological function within the systems in the body, by identifying imbalances. This can be from disease state or preventative. We are looking at how well your body is working, take digestion, we aren’t just looking for a disease, or a nutrient deficiency, we are asking can you actually break down fats and proteins, are you functioning well.
Functional medicine promotes a personalised approach to care, tailoring protocols to your history, genetics, environment and diagnosis. 5 people with the same diagnosis could be on different protocols based on their root causes.
We look to the interconnections of the whole body, to bring the body back to balance.
Finding your baseline and assessing your health over time, with regular support and ongoing care. Monitoring of conditions, retesting and evaluating change are central to the functional medicine model.
Functional medicine requires patient involvement. It requires you to be an active part of your healthcare and progress. You must be willing to give it your time, your resources and make change. This isn’t to say you don’t need support to do this, but you must be a willng participant. The positive to this is it gives you back power and control.
Uses standard conventional testing as well as advanced functional testing to dig deeper and assess physiology. With retesting to assess progress and see whether a patient can maintain new levels.