Lifestyle Medicine? Functional Medicine? What does it all mean?

If you’ve spent any time exploring health and wellness, you’ve probably encountered a growing list of medical “labels”: Lifestyle Medicine, Functional Medicine, Integrative Medicine. They sound similar, they sometimes overlap, and they can be confusing—especially if you’re simply trying to understand what kind of care best supports your health.

While these approaches differ in emphasis, they share an important common thread: they look beyond symptoms and ask deeper questions about why illness develops and how health can be restored.

Lifestyle Medicine: Addressing the Root Causes of Chronic Disease

Lifestyle Medicine focuses on one powerful truth: many of today’s most common chronic diseases are largely driven by lifestyle factors.

Conditions such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and even certain cancers are strongly linked to patterns of nutrition, physical inactivity, chronic stress, poor sleep, and social disconnection. Lifestyle Medicine emphasizes evidence-based interventions that target these factors directly.

Core areas include:

• Nutrition

• Physical activity

• Restorative sleep

• Stress management

• Social connection

• Avoidance of risky substances

Rather than treating disease as inevitable, Lifestyle Medicine reframes health as something we actively shape every day. For many people, changes in diet, movement, and daily habits can significantly reduce disease risk—and in some cases, even reverse illness.

Lifestyle Medicine provides a strong foundation. But for individuals with complex symptoms or long-standing health challenges, it may not always be enough on its own.

Functional Medicine: “Trust, but Verify”

Functional Medicine builds upon lifestyle principles, but adds a strong emphasis on data and individualized biology. Functional Medicine relies heavily on laboratory testing to guide decision-making. Rather than assuming what the body needs, practitioners measure it.

Functional Medicine often includes:

• Comprehensive blood panels

• Hormone testing

• Gut health analysis

• Nutrient and metabolic markers

• Inflammation and immune indicators

These test results help reveal imbalances that may not yet show up as disease but are already affecting how the body functions. Lifestyle recommendations—such as nutrition, supplements, or stress reduction—are then tailored based on what the data reveals.

For many people, this approach feels empowering. Instead of generalized advice, they receive insights specific to their own physiology. At the same time, interpreting complex data requires expertise, context, and an understanding of how systems interact.

Integrative Medicine: The Best of All Worlds

I describe my practice as Integrative Medicine. If Lifestyle Medicine focuses on behavior and Functional Medicine focuses on data, Integrative Medicine focuses on the whole person.

Integrative Medicine brings together:

• Conventional Western medicine

• Lifestyle-based prevention and behavior change

• Functional and empirical testing

• Evidence-informed complementary and alternative therapies

Rather than seeing these approaches as competing, Integrative Medicine views them as complementary tools in a larger healing framework.

This includes therapies often labeled as “alternative,” such as acupuncture and acupressure, which arise from Asian models of how energy and physiology move through the body. It also includes Indigenous healing traditions, which may incorporate visual journeying, shamanic practices, and other methods that work with consciousness, emotion, and the energetic body.

These practices are not meant to replace Western medicine, but to fill in gaps where conventional approaches may fall short—especially in chronic stress, trauma, pain, and conditions without clear structural causes.

Why Integrative Medicine Resonates

For me, Integrative Medicine offers a more complete and humane model of care. It acknowledges that humans are not just biochemical machines, but complex beings shaped by lifestyle, biology, environment, emotions, energy, and ancestry.

Instead of asking only, “What disease does this person have?” we ask:

• What is out of balance?

• What is this body asking for?

• What combination of tools best supports healing?

By integrating science, data, lifestyle change, and ancient wisdom, Integrative Medicine creates space for both precision and compassion.