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Emerging Concepts

Emerging concepts are innovative ideas or interventions which are surfacing and hold potential for eventual adoption into clinical practice. IFM has a strong history of successfully identifying and accelerating the acceptance of emerging concepts. We are pleased to bring you this monthly update, to keep you in-the-know on exciting innovations in Functional Medicine.

The microbiome has been a burgeoning area of study within the medical research community for over a decade, with the initiation of the Human Microbiome Project by the National Institutes of Health in 2007.^[1] But the idea that there are a variety of microbes living on and in the human body is not itself a new concept: “I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” wrote Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), one of the first scientists to study the human microbiome.^[2]

Could the mother’s lifestyle affect her child’s microbiome? What factors influence a pediatric microbiome, and how might they lead to health or disease? These are just some of the myriad questions asked by scientists in the field, which will be explored in the sections below, along with several significant caveats.