Functional medicine-

This is an alternative medical system invented out of thin air by a nutritionist (not a physician) Jeffrey Bland, who was cited by the Federal Trade Commission in 1991 for false claims his company's products altered metabolism and induce weight gain. Four years later the FTC found Bland violated that consent order by making more exaggerated claims that his diet provided relief from GI problems, inflammatory and immunologic problems, fatigue, food allergies, mercury exposure, kidney disorders, and rheumatoid arthritis.  He was forced to pay civil penalties to settle such false claims.  Functional medicine focuses on "interactions between the environment and the gastrointestinal, endocrine and immune systems".  Practitioners develop individual treatment plans for people they treat.  Functional medicine is vaguely defined, centering on expensive blood tests and urine testing as part of "holistic" healthcare.  Proponents eschew established medical knowledge, instead adopting a model of disease based on the notion of "antecedents", "trigger", and "mediators" that are meant to correspond to the underlying cause, the immediate cause, and the particular characteristics of a persons illness. A functional medicine practitioner develops a "matrix" from these things which acts as a basis for treatment.  Functional medicine embraces orthomolecular medicine (megavitamin therapy), detoxification of unspecified and unidentifiable toxins, biochemical individuality, diagnosis of chronic occult infections that modern medicine frequently dismisses based on the lack of evidence such as chronic Lyme disease, homeopathy, biopuncture- the injection of homeopathic remedies, scientifically unproven nutritional interventions especially the avoidance of gluten for everyone regardless of whether they have any demonstrable gluten intolerance, leaky gut syndrome treatments, and is an anti-vaccine extremist.  There is no more scientific evidence of functional medicine than any of the parts of functional medicine, which is virtually none.