insights

The functional medicine timeline is a cornerstone of the patient-clinician relationship. This tool allows practitioners to capture the patient’s important life events, family history, and genetic information from in utero to present day. In particular, the tool helps pinpoint antecedents, triggers, and mediators (ATMs) to help identify any role they play—past or present—in the patient’s disease.

This foundational tool enables the patient to detail their life and health history and the clinician to plot it chronologically, often revealing previously unseen relationships between various factors. Through retelling their own health stories, patients often see connections between life events, health behaviors, and current states of disease, which may motivate them toward change. What makes the functional medicine timeline different from other tools is that it has the effect of giving the patient insight into previous life events and validates for them that their story has been heard.

The timeline is patient-centered because it places central importance on the patient’s experience, not the clinician’s interpretation of the patient’s symptoms. This encourages shared decision-making and patient-practitioner collaboration in developing a treatment plan. The functional medicine timeline and matrix, along with other comprehensive resources and patient education materials, are available in the IFM Toolkit as part of IFM membership.

Martha Calihan, MD, is an IFM certified practitioner (IFMCP). In the video below, she describes why the timeline is her favorite functional medicine tool.

TRANSCRIPT: 

I think my favorite tool in functional medicine is the timeline. It was something that took a new way of thinking for me to realize its importance.

If you can start to use a timeline to place things in a patient’s story and see how things developed over their timeline, over their life, not only do you have a better sense of how things were set up for what is now being manifested in a patient, but it is the best possible tool to share with a patient. Because then they can see how events and things in their life actually ended them up in the condition where they are now.

When I talk to patients about functional medicine, I always tell them that it’s like peeling back the layers of the onion until you get to the core imbalances. The beauty that then happens is that, all of a sudden, you can connect an awful lot of dots that you couldn’t connect before.

And using the timeline really helps me do that with patients.

Learn how to use the functional medicine timeline and other core techniques of the functional medicine approach at Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice!