Have you ever felt like your body was trying to tell you something, but you couldn’t quite understand what it was saying?

Maybe your blood tests look normal, yet you still feel exhausted, anxious, or inflamed. Or perhaps you’ve been chasing recurring symptoms for years — headaches, gut issues, brain fog — with no lasting answers.

Functional medicine begins with a simple but powerful idea:

Instead of asking “What disease do you have?” we ask “Why did this happen, and what’s keeping it going?”

This way of thinking opens the door to truly personalized care. One of the most useful tools we use to understand your story is called the ATM model — short for Antecedents, Triggers, and Mediators. These three words describe how health and illness unfold over time, and more importantly, how to turn that process around.

Antecedents are the background factors that shape your health long before symptoms appear.

They include your genes, early life experiences, and environmental influences that create your biological “starting point.”

For example:

• Family history of diabetes, heart disease, or autoimmune conditions
• Childhood stress or trauma
• Birth by caesarean section or early antibiotic use that altered gut flora
• Long-term nutrient deficiencies such as low vitamin D or iron
• Genetic variations that affect detoxification or hormone metabolism

These factors don’t cause illness by themselves, but they create the conditions that make the body more or less resilient when stress arrives.

Triggers are the specific events or exposures that push a vulnerable system out of balance.

They can be physical, emotional, or environmental.

Common examples include:

• Infections that overwhelm the immune system
• Food intolerances such as gluten or dairy
• Toxin exposure from mold, pesticides, or heavy metals
• Major emotional stress, loss, or trauma
• Medication reactions or overuse
• Accidents or surgery

In many cases, people can recall exactly when their health changed. Identifying the trigger is often the first step toward reversing the process.

Even after the initial trigger has passed, the body can remain “stuck” in dysfunction because of internal processes that sustain inflammation or hormonal imbalance.

These are called mediators — the ongoing factors that keep illness alive.

Examples include:

• Chronic inflammation and oxidative stress
• Insulin or cortisol imbalance
• Gut dysbiosis and increased intestinal permeability
• Sleep deprivation
• Persistent emotional stress or anxiety
• Ongoing nutrient depletion

Mediators determine whether the body continues to spiral into illness or begins to repair itself. Addressing them is where much of the healing takes place.

When viewed through this lens, symptoms are not random. They are signals that something in the web of your biology — your genes, environment, nutrition, and emotions — has drifted out of balance.

For instance, a woman with migraines might have antecedents such as a family history of hormonal issues and magnesium deficiency, triggers like chronic stress or poor sleep, and mediators such as ongoing inflammation and caffeine dependence. Once these layers are identified and corrected, the body often recalibrates naturally.

Modern life places enormous strain on our systems — processed foods, lack of sleep, chronic stress, pollutants, and digital overload. Yet our bodies still hold remarkable capacity to heal, if we remove the obstacles and support the right pathways.

Functional medicine is not about treating labels or chasing isolated symptoms. It’s about restoring balance to the underlying networks that keep you well — the digestive, immune, hormonal, and neurological systems that are constantly in conversation.

When we uncover what set the stage, what lit the fire, and what continues to fuel it, we can finally create a plan that allows the body to do what it was designed to do: heal.

Health is not simply the absence of disease; it is a dynamic state of balance and adaptability.

By looking deeper into your story — your antecedents, triggers, and mediators — we can move from suppressing symptoms to transforming health at its root.

At Healthrenew Clinic, this is how we approach every patient. We don’t just ask, “What’s wrong?” We ask, “What happened, and what’s possible?”

Because when we understand the story behind the symptoms, we can help the body find its way back to wellness.