Conventional medicine is used by doctors and other healthcare practitioners such as nurses and pharmacists to treat symptoms, diseases, and illnesses using medications, surgeries, and radiation. It is important to note that medical practitioners only treat symptoms rather than the root cause. 

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The issue with only treating symptoms? That's comparable to taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm instead of putting out the fire. You may not hear the smoke alarm going off anymore but, the fire remains. When only addressing symptoms, your body will continuously find new ways to tell you something is wrong - you may develop new symptoms such as headaches and rashes or, in extreme cases, autoimmune diseases and illnesses such as cancer may appear. Think of symptoms as your body's way of screaming at you. 

Functional medicine focuses on a whole-body approach. Rather than sending you off to a chiropractor for your joint pains, a gastroenterologist for your digestive issues, and a psychiatrist for your depression and be prescribed different medications for each of these health concerns, a naturopath doctor or nutritional health practitioner will do an extensive "background check" on your health to find the correlation / root cause between all symptoms. By treating the root cause, symptoms will naturally also disappear.