The Swedish Foundation for Functional Medicine is a not-for-profit organisation established in 2020.
Our mission is to help enhance the quality of healthcare for chronic conditions through the financing of research projects and educational initiatives in the field of functional medicine in the Nordic countries.
Key Pillars:
- Research focused on patient outcomes by comparing costs of functional medicine care with conventional care using standardized evaluation tools;
- Initiatives and activities focusing on the best way to obtain feedback on personalized multimodal lifestyle interventions at group and individual levels;
- Development of measurements indicating the effectiveness of personalized multimodal lifestyle interventions from a welfare perspective.
Today, almost half of the Swedish population suffers from chronic disease, and approximately 80 percent of the national healthcare spending is devoted to treating these patients.
In parallel with this development, interest in the functional medicine model is growing in the Nordic countries, and more data is needed to assess how this lifestyle-based, individualized type of healthcare could be adapted to Swedish and Nordic conditions.
In May 2016 we initiated the first clinical research trial on personalized lifestyle medicine in Sweden, financed by the three major Swedish insurance companies of EuroAccident, Länsförsäkringar, and Skandia, and led by professor Kerstin Brismar.
The study was a pilot designed to test the feasibility and acceptability of a personalized intervention program of lifestyle changes in patients with treatment-resistant debilitating primary hypothyroidism.
Our next research project is to test whether personalized lifestyle medicine based on the functional medicine model has a clinical effect on the treatment of refractory irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
Board of Directors