Serving Westchester County, Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan Connecticut and surrounding areas

What is functional medicine and how does it differ from conventional medical care?

Traditional Western (“conventional”) Medicine focuses on diagnosing disease and treating symptoms, generally with the use of prescribed medications or surgery. This approach is great when dealing with acute medical illness, like heart attacks, trauma, or pneumonia, but is much less successful when dealing with chronic medical problems, like diabetes, obesity, arthritis, and irritable bowel syndrome.

Functional medicine, on the other hand, emphasizes an understanding of the causes of physiologic imbalance in the individual patient. Functional medicine is holistic and considers the optimum functionality of all systems of the body. It incorporates a variety of methods and therapies for supporting those systems and keeping them healthy. These include nutrition and botanical therapies, lifestyle approaches and stress reduction programs. The idea behind functional medicine is that one can not only prevent disease and troubling health conditions but in many cases, reverse them.

Functional medical doctors attempt to understand the causes and reasons for the development of disease and practice preventive medicine in order to maintain optimal health and vitality. At Integrative Rheumatology of Westchester, we address your specific health risks and concerns. We take into account your hereditary background, your past medical history and current health conditions, any treatments you are receiving, your career and lifestyle, stress level, and eating and sleeping habits. If you struggle with a particular condition or illness, we work hard to identify the causes of the problem and prescribe an individual program to restore healthy function.

In many cases, adding a functional medical approach to an existing conventional medical program can be very helpful and can complement current therapy. Identification of nutrient deficiencies, hormone imbalances, immunologic dysfunctions, and allergens and toxins can be tremendously helpful in restoring health. We use a variety of diagnostic tests to help determine these potential functional problems.

At Integrative Rheumatology of Westchester, you will experience functional medicine at its finest. Dr. David Lans has been in practice for over 30 years and has a great deal of experience in conventional, integrative, and functional medicine.

In many instances, particularly in the case of chronic medical conditions, like diabetes, arthritis, autoimmune disease, and inflammatory bowel disease, a functional medical perspective can offer a fresh, alternative and safer approach than a conventional one. If you have been diagnosed with a medical condition and are considering proceeding with an invasive or surgical procedure or a potent drug therapy, you may wish to consider a second opinion from Dr. Lans. We encourage you to check with us before going through a potentially dangerous treatment.

Dr. Lans prides himself on his communication with and attention to his patients. He has the ideal backgrounds of integrative medicine, functional medicine, and anti-aging therapies.