Functional medicine determines 'how' and 'why' illness occurs and restores health by addressing the root causes of disease.

FM is a framework for identifying and addressing the specific root causes of each patient’s health issues in order to improve outcomes. To do this, clinicians must understand each patient’s story, the factors which may have predisposed that individual to a chronic condition, and what may have triggered the onset of the condition.

So what's the difference between FM and the current conventional medicine system that we all know? Our regular medicine system treats each individual disease independently from everything else that happens in the body. Rather than study the root causes and underlying connecting mechanisms, it looks to pharma drugs to block abnormal processes and suppress symptoms. As the saying goes, "A pill for every ill."

Back in 2006, when my herd of horses collectively became very sick due to our then-unrecognised toxic environment, I didn't know what was happening to them, and neither did my vet, so we were given a buffet of very inappropriate pharma drugs which simply made them sicker. So, I had to figure it out myself, and over time, and a whole lot of studying with the Institute of Functional Medicine, I learned how - and why - my horses' health had become so compromised (see our About Us page).

It’s sadly too easy for us not to connect how our horse is feeling with how we feed and manage them, and how their environment can affect them. Once we understand these vital connections, it’s so easy for us to change our approach to these important factors - we just have to know what steps to take.

Unlike the conventional medicine system that we know, Functional Medicine recognises that the body is not organised by medical specialties, with a different 'ologist' doctor needed for each organ or system. These specialties are simply the branches on the tree of disease, but just like a diseased tree, the cause of the illness is a disturbance at the core, roots, and/or the soil.

What drives all disease are imbalances is the fundamental networks at the core of the body - networks that are all dynamically interacting every moment with lifestyle, disease triggers, and genes. In human health alone, nearly every one of 155,000 diseases listed in the Disease Classification System, known as ICD-10, is caused by imbalances in one or more of the seven interconnected systems. To treat disease, you simply cannot ignore the root cause.

1. Assimilation (digestion, absorption, microbiome, and respiration)

2. Defence and Repair (immune and inflammation)

3. Energy (energy regulation and mitochondrial function)

4. Biotransformation and Elimination (toxicity and detoxification)

5. Transport (cardiovascular and lymphatic system)

6. Communication (endocrine, neurotransmitters and immune messengers)

7. Structural integrity (from subcellular membranes to musculoskeletal structure)

What Functional Medicine allows us to do is connect the dots. To give you a human example, common links between many seemingly separate human diseases are now clear - what do Alzheimer’s, autism, cancer, diabetes, depression, autoimmune disease, heart disease, and obesity have in common? The answer is clear - inflammation, oxidative stress, imbalances in the microbiome, toxic overload, and imbalances in cell messengers.

Rather than treating all these diseases separately, as in that 'pill for every ill', we need to uncover the root causes for each individual. The brain, for example, only has so many ways it can say "Ouch!" but a multitude of things can hurt it, yet standard conventional treatment is a one-size-fits-all approach. Once you get a diagnosis, the thinking stops and the pills are then prescribed to mask those symptoms, without any approach to fix the root cause.

For most chronic diseases the results are dismal and often come with serious side effects, yet by focusing on restoring balance in the basic biological networks (the seven interconnected systems) of the body, diseases often improve or completely resolve.

A simple example - imagine you're standing on a drawing pin. Does covering it with a plaster or taking pain relief fix the issue? No. Now imagine you're standing on two drawing pins. Does removing one make you 50% better? No. You must identify and remove all the pins. No amount of pills, medications or one-size-fits-all treatment plans can fix a problem until the root cause is addressed: you've got a drawing pin stuck in your skin so it needs to come out.

Feed your horse healthy!

All of the triggers of disease noted above (toxins, allergens, microbes, poor diet and stress), and all the ingredients for health (nutrients, hormones, air, water, light, rest, rhythm, movement, sleep, personal bonds, connection, meaning, and purpose) impact these networks to create balance or imbalance, but by far the biggest regulator of all these networks is food. Food is the biggest lever to impact all these systems - the wrong foods can harm each system while the right foods can optimise each system - the right foods will regulate the health of the microbiome, immune system, inflammation levels, cellular integrity, and energy systems. Food balances hormones and brain chemistry, supports detoxification, and improves circulatory and lymphatic systems, and it even provides the raw materials for every cell, muscle, tissue, organ, and bone in the body.

While most doctors or vets have not seen the power of food (because they weren't trained in how to use food as medicine), I've personally seen miracles happen to our clients' horses. Except - they're not miracles. They're the result of understanding how the body actually works. Autoimmune diseases disappear; stress vanishes; lethargy evaporates; skin conditions clear up; metabolic issues rebalance. These aren't anomalies or spontaneous remissions, but reproducible results based on applying food, as medicine, with a Functional Medicine approach.

Whether horse or human, there's no other activity we do every day that has more power to change the body's biology than what we either feed our horses or what we ourselves eat. Food carries information molecules, instructions, and codes, that program the body's biology with every bite, for better or worse. Industrial, fake, made-in-a-factory, ultra-processed food drives inflammation, oxidative stress, and imbalances in hormone and brain chemistry, while damaging the microbiome and changing gene expression to turn on disease-causing genes. Proper species-appropriate food - whole, nutritious and phytonutrient-rich food - do the exact opposite. See our Feeding our Horses Healthy section for the full story.

The EquiNatural ethos

We always look at each case on an individual basis from a patient-focused, ‘functional’ viewpoint, focusing on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind your horse’s symptoms. Symptoms are there to warn us that something’s going on deeper down, so we need to look at how/why this is happening, as there may be one symptom causing several imbalances, or one imbalance causing several symptoms.

This way we can identify factors that may have contributed to pathological changes and dysfunctional processes in your horse’s physiology, which help us to see where the connections are that might otherwise go unnoticed. This will identify underlying imbalances and guide our approach as to what needs, alleviating, correcting, and/or fortifying.