Functional medicine views the body as a connected network or ecosystem, rather than a reductionist system, integrating all symptoms and connections.

“And when we go to medical school, we're taught to ask for the symptoms, look for the signs, do the lab testing, and come up with a singular diagnosis to explain everything. And if there's extraneous symptoms that don't fit the thing we're looking for, then we dismiss it. If you go to the doctors for migraines and you say, well, I got irritable bowel. Oh, go see the GI doctor. Or I have this rash, they go, oh, see the dermatologist. But the truth is the body is connected and everything is connected. And so functional medicine is really about understanding the body as a network, as a system.”