Most recently, Dr. Linder has been focusing on functional medicine. Heather Linder, MD has been interested in integrative medicine since her first year of medical school over 18 years ago.  During medical school, she helped develop a curriculum for integrative medicine at Penn State.  She also served as the medical student representative for the American College for the Advancement of Medicine (ACAM) and as a national representative for the Humanistic Medicine Planning Team for AMSA. During residency, she did an Area of Concentration in Integrative Medicine where she completed the Mind-Body Medicine Professional Training Program with the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and several training modules with the University of Arizona Fellowship in Integrative Medicine.  She has recently completed all of the advanced practice modules with the Institute for Functional Medicine.

    Functional medicine focuses on the following:

• Root cause approach
• Personalized diet and treatment plans
• A comprehensive review of medical history and life events
• Cutting edge approach to chronic disease and prevention
• Focuses on evidence-based natural treatment options

The functional medicine approach

One of the more popular approaches to improving health involves functional medicine, which focuses on underlying causes of illness that are influenced by genetic predispositions and the environment in which one lives in. Functional medicine typically utilizes individualized therapies to identify what exactly is causing your problem and implements special testing to assess whether imbalances developed prior to the disease or were a result of treating chronic illness. This approach centers around the idea that one condition can have many causes or conversely more, that one cause can have many conditions. This strategy is essential in finding imbalances prior to the onset of disease and restore maximum function between all physiologic functions in the body.