Functional medicine looks at the body as a system — root causes, not just symptoms. I'm learning to separate what's evidence-based from what's marketing-heavy.
I came to it as a patient, not a curious reader. Fifteen years of standard PCOS workups — HbA1c, glucose, liver, kidney, CBC — came back normal every single year, while my symptoms didn't budge. It took a functional medicine doctor, outside the insurance system, ordering an extended insulin panel — seven markers across a two-hour glucose tolerance test — to find the insulin resistance that had been driving my PCOS the whole time. The full story is in 15 Years, One Number.
What I'm working through now: which extended tests are actually evidence-based versus wellness marketing, why root-cause testing lives almost entirely outside insurance, and what it would take to make it standard for women already diagnosed with PCOS. This learning feeds directly into Folia's roadmap — root-cause biomarker benchmarking as the entry point to care.