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My background Since I was a child, growing up in northern Italy, I wanted to be a doctor, to help people heal and be happy. Whilst I was training for years in the science of the body, and becoming proficient in the treatment of its ailments, I realised I was always more interested in the people who were inhabiting that body. My instinctive belief was that everything in the body and mind is connected. Why does disease occur? Why does the body stop functioning normally? Although I was being trained to focus on symptoms and organ damage in isolation, I suspected that the key to healing was to look at the body’s systems as a connected whole. Why I chose General Practice This is why I chose General Practice as my speciality. How better to see a person in their entirety than to be a generalist? And yet, after 17 happy years working in NHS General Practice I have realised that even this type of generalism doesn’t go far enough for me. We are still following a conventional medical model, putting temporary patches on seemingly isolated and diverse conditions, but rarely actually getting to the bottom of them. Add the constraints of a system that doesn’t allow for more than a few minutes at a time with a patient, and you have a recipe for unsatisfactory management of chronic disease. And so patients carry on living with the daily drudgery of pain, fatigue, physical and emotional limitations, taking medication upon medication, with no sense of if and when they may improve. My introduction to Functional Medicine My “a-ha!” moment came when I was introduced to Functional Medicine. This evidence-based, tried-and-tested medical approach speaks to my need for a better model of care, one that delivers results. Functional Medicine moves away from a symptom-oriented approach and strives to find out the root cause of those symptoms, to identify and fix the underlying mechanisms of malfunction in the body. In doing so, symptoms frequently resolve and the body is restored