When people ask me how I treat a particular condition, I often answer “it depends.” As a functional medicine doctor, I treat the cause of the symptoms instead of managing the symptoms. For example, in pharmaceutical medicine, seasonal allergies are treated with an antihistamine. Antihistamines block the signal that your immune cells send out when they encounter an allergen. The antihistamines stop the allergic response at one of the last steps of the process. Functional medicine treatments for allergies are directed at correcting the root cause so treatment for allergies may include treatments for immune changes that begin in the