Megan and fellow coach Danna revisit an early episode to unpack functional medicine—what it is, how it differs from conventional care, and how a functional approach can sharpen a health coach’s practice. Expect practical examples (BP meds, antibiotics + probiotics), how to vet providers, and what extra training changed in Danna’s client work.

Back in 2018, Megan introduced functional medicine as an option when conventional care feels stuck on symptom relief. In 2025, she and Danna (a Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach) compare notes: What does “root cause” really mean? How do labs, lifestyle, and nutrition fit together? And how can coaches collaborate with (or simply vet) doctors who think more holistically—without abandoning standard medicine when it’s needed?

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and Podcast Background

01:04 Understanding Functional Medicine

02:25 Functional Medicine in Practice

13:17 How Functional Medicine Informs Your Coaching Practice

Key takeaways

1. Root cause ≠ anti-medicine. Functional medicine uses meds when necessary, then investigates lifestyle, nutrition, hormones, gut health, and environment to address why symptoms persist.
2. Broader data, better decisions. Full labs (and sometimes stool/urine testing) + food/lifestyle mapping can reveal patterns a 7-minute visit can’t.
3. Clinician fit matters. You want curiosity, clear explanations, and collaboration. Titles help, but how they listen is the tell.
4. Coaching upgrades. FM knowledge helps coaches guide clients to targeted doctor questions, low-cost experiments (e.g., trial eliminations), and realistic next steps—especially when budgets/insurance are tight.

Resources & CTA

1. Share your questions or stories: leave us a voicemail
2. Explore more episodes of Becoming a Health Coach on the SwissCast Network.
3. Connect with Danna for functional-medicine-informed coaching.

Disclaimer: Educational content only; not medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Becoming a Health Coach. I'm Megan McCrory.

Hi everyone, I am Danna Levy Hoffman. I am a functional medicine certified health coach and Megan's co host on the Social Media Go Freaking Healthy podcast.

Together we are going to talk about what we learned and how our views and experiences have changed over the years. Or not.

The original episode is still available for you to listen to, but I hope that this updated version provides a deeper understanding between training to become a health coach and actually practicing as a health coach in the real world. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions about becoming a health coach.

Oftentimes people have a symptom. Maybe something that came on slowly over time. Maybe all of a sudden they don't want to go see a doctor.

Why?

So in my experience, I believe that doctors will wouldn't find anything wrong with me and I'd walk away feeling like a hypochondriac. Like it really was all in my head. So we wait. And we wait to see if it will just go away. We wait to see if it gets better. But we wait.

And often then with all this waiting.

We grow used to the symptoms and.

We just live with it. Or by the time we see the doctor, it's way more serious than if we had gone earlier. Now with the Internet and Dr. Google, we.

We sit in the comfort of our own home and try to diagnose ourselves. Like that ever really works. The simple fact is if you don't feel good, something is wrong with you. What that is will still need to be figured out.

However, you are the keeper of your body. If you haven't had the best luck with western doctors, search out a functional medicine practitioner.

These are healthcare professionals that have taken additional training in functional medicine. More and more people are finding success with functional medicine practitioners.

All right, Danna, you have recently and recently, like within the last two years got your certification as a functional medicine health coach. So you are extra super awesome.

Yes, I am, thank you.

And I think functional medicine is in certain circles very well Known because people have become disillusioned with Western medicine and disillusioned with the fact that they can't find a root cause for their problems.

But I really want to kind of set the scene because I want to know how functional medicine, first of all, what it is and how it works differently from what is called Western medicine, or more ironically called traditional medicine.

Because.

So, yeah, help us out here.

What's going on?

So, I mean, let's start with Western medicine, maybe, because basically, Western medicine, how should I say this, Mainly Western medicine, looks at what's your symptom and what medicine can I give you in order to take away that symptom, right? You come in saying you have headaches or migraines or, I don't know, whatever pain or whatever ailment.

And the doctor just kind of like scans through their brain, like, what medicine did I learn about? And they try to help you. They do try to help you, but they try to help you by giving you a medication.

With functional medicine, what we realized was that a lot of medications nowadays are actually doing more harm than good or are just basically putting a band aid over the symptom and not necessarily tackling the source of the issue. With functional medicine, what we try to do and what functional medicine doctors try to do is try to find the source of the problem.

Meaning, okay, you get headaches every day, or you get migraines every day. Let's talk about that a little bit. What other symptoms can you tell me you're getting?

Did you find any correlation with certain things that you're eating or, you know, running full blood tests and maybe sometimes stool test or urine test and understanding where your hormones are at, where your amino acids and vitamins are at, and just trying to get a wider picture of your whole situation and then connecting the dots from there and understanding what the source could be.

And oftentimes a good functional medicine, doctors will sometimes be like, I don't know what the source is, but I do know that if we start doing this right, it could be a C and Z. If we start doing it this way, it might help us to understand, is it A, is it C or is it Z? And so we need to go through a certain process.

Yes, sometimes it feels like it's a little bit slower. You need to go run the tests, you need to get the results.

You need to start taking certain, often supplements, actually, because we're trying to help you heal by filling up the reserves, right? Like filling up the buckets of the vitamins and the amino acids. And all the things. So I hope that answers the question.

It's basically, you know, trying to get to the core of the problem and trying to bring you into a more balanced state holistically so that you manage to see. Okay, oh great, that actually feels better. I'm feeling like the migraines are not as, as often.

And often we look at nutrition as well, of course because certain things could be because of certain foods that you're eating to certain groups of foods or certain things that you'd find in certain foods. So it's a whole, it's a whole very complicated world. But with working with a person who actually knows that world can really be helpful.

I remember hearing a story and maybe it was in my health coaching course.

Or maybe it was not.

I don't remember where I heard this, but the kind of the explanation for people who have never heard of anything with functional medicine, the scenario is this.

Somebody goes to the doctor, their normal GP Western medicine doctor, and they have high blood pressure, the doctor's gonna give them blood pressure medication and they're gonna take that for the rest of their lives because as you mentioned, they're treating the symptom of high blood pressure. Contrast that with a functional medicine doctor. So a functional medicine doctor should be noted.

This is most often a western medicine doctor who has undergone additional training in functional medicine to be called a functional medicine doctor. So don't. This is not like some hocus pocus, woo woo kind of whatever.

And let's say that same person goes to that doctor, they say hey, you have high blood pressure, this is not good. We will give you blood pressure medication now because we need to get your blood pressure down because you're restraining your heart.

But we're not going to leave it there.

We are going to look to see what lifestyle choices and lifestyle things that we can change, environmental, nutritional, physical activity wise, can we change to help lower your blood pressure from a natural point of view to get you off the blood pressure medication? Because you don't. Nobody wants to be on medication the rest of their life. And again, like you said, it's not fixing the underlying root cause.

Why did the person have high blood pressure to begin with? Would you say that that is a relatively good way to kind of the same scenario and how both of these doctors would handle that differently?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

I mean of course some, you know, depending on your severe, the severity of the situation, some functional medicine doctors might decide not to even go the medica medicine route if it's not so bad. Right. If you caught it on time.

No, but like, if, if it's, if it's. Your health is in risk now. They're not going to not use medicine. They're not going to just give you herbs and walk out the door.

My point is that they still have at their disposal to use modern medicine and pharmaceuticals to help solve a critical situation quickly, but they're not going to leave it there. They're not going to.

100%.

That's where it's going to stay for the rest of your life.

Yeah, 100%. And I can even go into a little bit more detail on that one.

Let's pretend that you have an inflammation of some sort and you go to a Western doctor and they'll basically probably give you antibiotics. Right.

And send you on your way where a functional medicine doctor will say, okay, let's give you some antibiotics, but let's also help your body by giving it probiotics. And they'll tell you not to take them at the same time because that would make no sense whatsoever.

And they will maybe give you something else or give you another food for thought about what could be causing or what could be helping the inflammation go get worse and what could help subside it.

So I feel like they just have the time and the knowledge to go a little bit more into detail on holistically, make sure that your body is getting a bit more balance rather than going like, here, take these antibiotics. I'll see you next time. And five minutes in and out. They didn't even look you in the eye.

I'm kind of generalizing, but fact is, western doctors don't have, don't have much time. They really don't. And it's not their choice. It's the health. What is it called?

Yeah, the health care system.

Health insurances and the care system and everything.

Like we talked about, where the doctors have been trained also in functional medicine. I believe nurses can also be trained.

And I'm wondering, are like any mental health healthcare professionals, like psychologists or psychiatrists also trained in functional medicine?

They definitely can be, yeah, of course. Yeah. I find that, you know, I find that the doctors that go into down that route are ones that are quite.

They're disappointed in how little they're actually making a difference. And that's when they kind of start going like, what, what, what is that? Like, what's the point and what's, how can I help better?

Yeah.

We recently talked about patient advocacy and people getting frustrated with the healthcare system or with their doctors non responses and I find that a lot of people then eventually end up going to a functional medicine doctor because they've exhausted the resources in western medicine. So would it be better to say just find a doctor who also does functional medicine and try to make them your gp?

Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of, there are a lot of doctors out there who just consider themselves a bit more open minded and would not necessarily say that they're functional medicine on their website and things like that, but they are. So I wouldn't say that anyone who doesn't have that, you know, badge on their, on their shoulder is not functional medicine.

I think you just have to suss it out and ask the right questions and see how you feel about the answers that you're getting. If you're being dismissed.

No, but if you're being listened to and the answers are a little bit more out of the box then you know, you're, you're talking to a human being who's listening to you as a human being. The doctor that I see is a doctor who on their website they say that they're holistic approach.

They don't say functional medicine anywhere on their website. But I have visited a couple of doctors in that practice.

I have found one woman who, who is super knowledgeable, who has a lot of functional medicine knowledge.

I mean she's very much functional medicine and that's who I go to because I feel that I'm being heard and I feel that I'm being asked the right questions. And at the same time I've also had bad experiences with functional medicine doctors, okay, who claim they're functional medicine.

But when I sit there I'm like, how do I know more than you? And how is this even a conversation? So I think it's just very individualized.

I think it's just finding a person that you're vibing with, finding a person that you feel like you're being heard that go into detail.

They ask you really questions that you don't even think they would ask or all of a sudden jump back on your test results and just kind of be like, maybe it's this, you know, I want to see curiosity from my doctor. I want to see that they're really trying to help me to figure out this puzzle that is my life and my health.

And if I don't get that vibe from them, I usually tend to just Go like, okay, I will probably quickly find someone new.

So as a health coach and talking to other people who are thinking about becoming a health coach or new health coaches, can you explain a little bit of the difference from when you had your kind of general health coaching certification and you were practicing as a health coach and then you have your functional medicine certification? And how has that changed your approach and the kinds of people that you are picking up as clients?

Like, how has that changed your practice as a health coach getting that extra certification?

Yeah. Yeah.

So I think what happens now is that I have a lot more, you know, let's just say that before I had this knowledge, I also felt uncomfortable giving not advice, but kind of like ideas of, oh, maybe it's this and maybe it's that because I didn't have more knowledge around it.

Now when I, you know, when someone comes up to me and says, oh, you know, I have this symptom and that symptom, I can already start thinking like, okay, why don't you go to your doctor and ask about histamine intolerance and ask maybe to check if you're gluten intolerant. So the way that it helps me is to just guide my clients a little bit more focused to be able to try to help them.

If they cannot afford going to see a doctor that is not covered by insurance, then we get, we get to start testing things out. That doesn't cost money. It does not cost you money to try to live a gluten free lifestyle for a month or two.

It's just kind of giving you a little bit more of an idea of how to help your clients. Well, cool, Danna.

That was a excellent discussion on functional medicine and I hope that our listeners have learned something. And as always, if you are interested in dropping us a line, we'd love to hear from you.

You can leave us a voicemail or drop us a message on our website and the link is in the show notes. Thanks, Danna.

Hey, thanks, Megan.