Functional Medicine and Cancer
As is the case when we use functional medicine to treat other diseases, such as dementia, arthritis, and more, our approach to cancer treatment centers around the whole body. Rather than compartmentalizing the disease based on individual body parts, we recognize that the whole body works as a system. Because of that, we must approach the disease with the same mindset.
This is true for cancer in particular as there are no two cancer treatments and developments that are the same. Even two patients with the “same” type of cancer — breast, colon, brain, etc. — may have vastly different underlying causes of why the cancer appeared where it did. Just the same, two patients with different types of cancer could have developed it due to the same causes.
Because of this, it’s imperative to treat every case as an individual. Sure, chemotherapy and radiation may be successful in treating the cancer at the surface level, but it does nothing to identify why it got there in the first place. More importantly, it is not sufficient in our attempts to find the root causes of the disease in the first place.