photo by Brent FleuryDr. Andrea Girman does not appear 46 by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the petite brunette graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine seems to be a walking billboard for public health and a proponent of what she calls "intuitive eating." "Every time some new celebrity comes out and has lost 75,000 pounds, everyone wants to be on that diet," she says. "The cool thing about intuitive eating is that essentially, at its core, it’s about listening to your body and feeding it appropriately."

Appropriate words for a physician who moved to Asheville from Sun Valley, Idaho, last year to join the staff at Genova Diagnostics, located in the heart of Montford. Genova is a specialty diagnostics lab that’s considered one of the nation’s leaders in functional lab testing—analyzing things like a patient’s hormone levels, gastrointestinal tract bacteria or genetic markers for disease risk.

All of this helps point the way for a patient to achieve optimal health. "Functional medicine is an approach that focuses on prevention and addressing the underlying causes of symptoms, rather than solely treating the symptoms themselves," Girman says. Doctors who practice functional medicine, much like those who have a holistic or integrative approach, might look at constellations of symptoms and then go one step deeper to see what’s creating them.

For example, three patients with the same diagnosis might be treated very differently. Whereas a traditional practitioner might simply prescribe a certain medication to a patient with irritable bowel syndrome, a functional approach might mean treating everything that contributed to the condition, like food sensitivities, allergies or celiac disease. A doctor practicing functional medicine could use Genova’s detailed diagnostic tests to evaluate the physiologic imbalances that led to the illness.

But wait—isn’t this how all good physicians should care for their patients? "Functional medicine sounds like good medicine," Girman says, "because it is good medicine. It’s what any doctor would do if they had time." Unfortunately, most doctors don’t have the luxury of spending more time with patients. "Most conventionally trained doctors are doing the very best that they can within a system that keeps them extraordinarily busy doing all sorts of things that don’t necessarily make patient care a satisfying experience—for them or for their patients," she says. — Mackensy Lunsford