The BNFM team have put this document together to clarify why we’ve set up BNFM and what we’re hoping to achieve.

Ultimately BNFM is set up as a community organisation, so we will need the help and support of our membership if we’re to achieve our goals.

We hope you think we’re on the right track.

Context and mission statement

We believe that functional medicine is hugely important to the future of healthcare. With rising rates of chronic disease, persistent symptoms unexplained by conventional diagnoses, and increased usage of pharmaceuticals with serious side effects, there is a clear need for a different approach to healthcare. Functional medicine offers this alternative by addressing the root causes of illness, using a highly personalised, systems biology-based approach that involves understanding the interconnected web of factors influencing health.

As functional medicine practitioners, we know and see every day that this approach works. There is an urgent need to bring this approach to more people. The current healthcare system is struggling to cope with overwhelming demand from the millions of people in the UK with chronic health conditions – people that could benefit hugely from functional medicine support.

However, there are many barriers to widespread adoption of functional medicine, including a lack of trained practitioners, low public awareness, inconsistent reputation, inconsistent training standards and a lack of widely accepted certification, and a general lack of awareness by the mainstream healthcare community. Compounding this, most practitioners work alone without support, which can be challenging and limits our ability to learn from and collaborate with each other.

We want to do our bit to try to overcome these barriers and help functional medicine reach as many people as possible.

Our vision is of an integrated, well-supported community of practitioners who are well-trained, well-respected and confident in their practice, and are able to have a broad impact on the standard of care received by patients in the UK.

As such, the mission of the BNFM is to advance, support and spread the practice of high-quality functional medicine in the UK.

Objectives and activities

There are many ways we could work towards our mission. Here are some which seem within reach at present. We can always re-prioritise if the team and membership have ideas and energy for other activities.

• To provide opportunities / spaces to share clinical experience and best practice
  • Zoom events
  • In-person events
  • Facebook group
    
    
• To support current practitioners, and help new practitioners set up their practices
  • Networking
  • Written resources
  • Directory of practitioners (for referrals and mentoring; not public facing)
    
    
• To support initiatives which further our mission
  • Scientific research and publication
  • Outreach, education and advocacy (to the public, doctors and the NHS, and the government)

Most of the above (except the outreach) is practitioner-facing, i.e. not visible to the general public. However there is a strong need to improve the public perception of functional medicine, so in the longer term we may wish to consider some additional activities:

• To provide public-facing content
  • Explanations of functional medicine
  • A public-facing directory of practitioners with full membership
  • Perhaps offer full membership only to those meeting certain criteria for qualifications, and allow use of our name and logo to full members. Great care is required here as we want to support our members, not add challenges or exclude them. We won’t do this without extensive consultation.
    
    

Membership

The intended membership of BNFM is appropriately qualified functional medicine practitioners (although precise clarification is still needed and may prove challenging).

Allied professions such as health coaches are also welcome to be involved, as they are likely to have an important role to play if functional medicine is to thrive.

Context with other organisations

There are already quite a number of organisations supporting functional medicine in various ways in the UK – notably BANT and CNHC (supporting and regulating nutritional therapists), BCFM (aimed at meeting the specific needs of medical doctors), NMI (conferences and scientific publications), ION and other academic organisations, and more.

BNFM is unique in its specific focus on functional medicine, and in bringing together functional medicine practitioners from various backgrounds, e.g. medical doctors and NTs, which we believe adds a lot of value.

While we think there’s a valuable role for BNFM to fill, we share many of our goals with the other organisations listed, so we plan to work closely together.

Structure

BNFM is a not-for-profit, and the team are unpaid volunteers.

Currently we are incorporated as a limited company to facilitate handling money for conference bookings etc; in future we intend to transition to being a CIC (Community Interest Company).

Additional policies

• We intend to take a strong stance on accepting sponsorship only from organisations who share our goals.
  
  
• We do not intend to provide a space for discussion of topics outside the core discussion of how best to practice functional medicine. This is because some seemingly-adjacent topics (e.g. the efficacy of other healthcare modalities, the politics of the NHS, the politics of vaccination) are in fact very controversial, and their discussion is likely to unnecessarily divide practitioners and negatively affect the perception of the organisation. This is not to say that these topics should not be debated – just that BNFM is not intending to provide a forum for doing so.