I haven't been to a functional doctor and I really don't know where you can find a real one, not just somebody who says they are. But here is an interesting story of a 10 year old girl who supposedly was helped by functional medicine:
www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/is-there-a-cure-for-autoi_b_756937.htmlone of the most severe cases of autoimmune disease I had ever seen. Her face was swollen, her skin was inflamed, her joints were swollen, her immune system was attacking her entire body—her muscles, her skin, her joints, her blood vessels, her liver, and her white and red blood cells. Isabel couldn’t squeeze her hand or make a fist.
The tips of her fingers and toes were always cold from Raynaud’s disease that inflammed her blood vessels. She was tired and miserable and was losing her hair. Isabel was on elephant doses of intravenous steroids every three weeks just to keep her alive, and she was taking prednisone, aspirin, acid blockers, and methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug used to shut down the immune system daily.
Her doctors wanted to add another powerful immune suppressing drug (a TNF alpha blocker) to the regimen of medication she was already taking. This drug increases the risk of cancer and death from overwhelming infection, because it prevents the immune system from fighting infections normally.
Two months after I first saw Isabel and discovered and treated the underlying causes of her inflammation—after, as she says she, “stopped eating gluten, dairy, and sugar and took some supplements” she was symptom free. In less than a year, she was completely healthy, her blood tests were normal, and she was off all her medication.