Functional Medicine for Nurses: Rediscovering the True Art of Healing in the Nursing Profession
- Brigitte Sager
- Jul 20, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
This article was first published July 19, 2022 and updated November 8, 2025 by Dr. Brigitte Sager, DNP, IFMCP — Founder & CEO of the Institute for Functional Nursing (IFN).
The Call to Heal Again
In recent years, countless nurses have changed specialties, left the bedside, or questioned their calling altogether. The pace of modern healthcare, endless charting, and production metrics have left many of us wondering what happened to the art of nursing. I hear it constantly—from students, colleagues, and friends who miss the purpose that first brought them here.
My Journey to Becoming a Functional Medicine Nurse Practitioner and Identifying Functional Nursing
I started nursing school to become a midwife, because I wanted to empower women to believe in the power of their own bodies. I quickly realized that there was more to this calling than just pregnancy and childbirth, and I developed an interest in empowering people and healing them. The human body is so interesting!
In my eight plus years at the bedside, I worked primarily in critical care float nursing and cardiac care. Passing medications in rapid succession, discharge followed by admission, and little time for patient education all left me feeling like I wasn’t healing or empowering anyone.
What is Functional Medicine? Discovering the “Why” Behind Health
While searching for a better way, I studied nurse coaching and functional medicine and became board-certified in both. Functional medicine, often called root-cause medicine, taught me to ask why illness occurs—why inflammation, fatigue, or imbalance begins—and how lifestyle, nutrition, stress, and environment influence health at every level.
That perspective felt like coming home to nursing itself: seeing the whole person, listening deeply, and educating with compassion.
Speaking of Genes and Lifestyle
Today we know that genes are not destiny. Chronic diseases—heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, even many cancers—are rising not because our DNA changed, but because our environments and habits did. When nurses teach patients how nutrition, sleep, movement, and stress shape gene expression, we help them reclaim ownership of their health. Watching that empowerment happen never gets old.
Functional Medicine for Nurses: The How and the Why
As I dove deeper, I realized functional medicine isn’t new to us—it’s nursing knowledge rediscovered. We already understand the importance of lifestyle, nutrients, and stress physiology. Functional medicine simply gives us the framework and language to act on it.
During our very first live session with my first cohort of students, we explored this distinction together—what it truly means to practice functional nursing rather than functional medicine. Functional nursing isn’t about medical diagnosing or treating disease; it’s about applying the functional medicine framework through the lens of nursing—education, motivation, prevention, and partnership. We use the science of systems-based thinking to guide patient teaching, support behavior change, and empower individuals to take ownership of their health within the nursing scope of practice. This is the heart of functional nursing, and it’s what makes our work both unique and deeply needed in today’s healthcare landscape.
When nurses integrate this model, we see outcomes that reignite our belief in what’s possible: blood pressure stabilizes, fertility returns, anxiety lifts, inflammation quiets, and patients rediscover hope.
Returning to Our Purpose
Whenever I ask nurses why they entered the profession, the answers sound familiar: to help, to advocate, to educate, to heal. Functional nursing allows us to do exactly that. It restores the art and science of nursing by merging evidence-based care with the human connection that defines our work.
The Functional Nursing Program™
That conviction led us to create the Functional Nursing Program™ through the Institute for Functional Nursing (IFN)—currently the first and only IFM-aligned educational pathway built by nurses, for nurses. Our curriculum combines functional medicine, motivational science, and holistic nursing practice to prepare nurses and nurse practitioners to lead the next era of healthcare.
A Continuing Community of Growth
Within our Functional Nursing Membership™, we expand these skills through four live monthly meetups focused on communication, coaching principles, and case-based application. It’s where functional medicine comes to life—helping nurses translate theory into transformation, one patient at a time.
A Movement, Not Just a Method
Functional medicine for nurses isn’t a trend; it’s a professional awakening. It reconnects us to the values that drew us here—compassion, curiosity, and courage—and equips us to deliver care that heals from the inside out. For many of us, it’s not about leaving nursing; it’s about coming back to it.
