The Functional Medicine Matrix takes into account how the environment interacts with your genes and can result in health or disease. Helping to group and organize seemingly unlinked factors to paint a comprehensive picture of the patient and their life which can then be used to discuss chronic disease with said patient.

The factors that make up the matrix are as follows:

• Assimilation
• Biotransformation & Elimination
• Defense & Repair
• Structural Integrity
• Communication
• Energy
• Transport

Assimilation

This is how your body breaks down the foods you eat and the water you drink and then converts the break down products into energy and nutrition for your body, and how your GI system interacts with the rest of your body.

Biotransformation & Elimination

How your body interacts with your nutritional inputs and then converts the waste products of metabolism into non-threatening inert compounds that can then be excreted from your body. In some people, perhaps due to nutritional deficiencies, toxin or toxicant exposures, genetic mutations, chronic stressors or chronic inflammation the cellular the body systems don't function property resulting in a slow breakdown in function.

Defense & Repair

Your immune system and its interaction with your body’s general tissue repair systems. Your immune system has the task of identifying enemies from within and without and then facilitating cellular repair when the inflammatory assault on the invader is finished.

Structural Integrity

The structural integrity category is a little more complicated and diffuse but can best be thought of as cellular integrity. Things need to stick together in order to function. If the bricks in your house fall out of place one by one, eventually the whole house collapses. Cellular integrity includes that of your arteries and veins as well as that of your tissues.

Communication

How your whole body hormone system works. This includes your thyroid system, the sex hormone system, the hormone organs of origin (ie-adrenal and thyroid) and their connections with the nervous system.

Energy

This is mitochondrial science. The mitochondria are the power plants of every cell in your body.If the system works correctly, you can have a high performance athlete; if it doesn’t, you can have someone debilitated from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. 

Transport

The transport system involves the transport of nutrition, hormones, enzymatic factors within the context of the Functional Medicine Matrix. It is difficult to discuss this matrix node without the context of all others.