I don’t know what a “functional dentist” is, but the term “functional medicine” is used to describe alternative medicine doctors. They traditional misinterpret studies and exaggerate their impacts, focusing on small studies in mice or theoretical in vitro studies and then extrapolating those to treatment decisions.
So I can see "Functional Dentist" being more like a dentist that is willing to try more ways to save teeth & gums by using more traditional methods (eg. Balancing the oral microbiome, suggesting softer foods more often), rather than a "Real Dentist" suggesting extractions or root canals without ever mentioning the hardness of foods or oral microbiome.
This is the functional medicine fallacy: That “real doctors” are “shoving pills” that are secretly bad for the patient, while functional medicine doctors are also “shoving pills” but they’re a laundry list of supplements and traditional remedies.
In my experience, the functional medicine practitioners push far more pills and unnecessary tests than anyone else, but they’re given the benefit of the doubt because they’re operating under the alternative medicine fallacy that primary care doctors are the ones doing the bad things.
> (but may require more effort from the patient).
This is another concept used to justify the ineffective alternative medicine treatments; If they don’t work, it’s the patient’s fault for failing to do some effort. Another common explanation for when they don’t work is to “discover” yet another thing that needs to be treated. The additional demands of the patient are also designed to create buy-in which amplifies any placebo effect. The more rituals and supplements you can get a patient taking, the more they believe it’s going to work.
Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.
This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.
Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.
I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.
My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"
They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.
Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.
Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.
Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea
most chinese medicine is hokum, utter BS, but that doesn't mean they can't use plants whose utility have not been fully explored by modern science.
and even if it does work, that doesn't mean it didn't utterly ravage his liver -- but hey, at least his skin looks a lil better
I went to Swedish Hospital's Pain Services Clinic. https://www.swedish.org/services/pain-services Transformative.
Funny thing: the techniques and skills they teach work, even if you don't think they will.
I think most (all?) new age stuff -- naturopathy, chiropractics, reiki, whatever -- is BS. But I can't argue with my lived experience of using tai chi, mindfulness, education, and other new skills to proactively manage my disease.
This is my first time hearing (reading) the phrase "functional doctor". WebMD defines them as specialists in digging deeper, seeing the whole picture. Perfect.
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YMMV. Consult your doctor, etc. Most treatments don't help with treatment resistant conditions. Beware adverse effects. Yadda, yadda.
