When dealing with chronic illness, it’s important to investigate the “root cause” of what’s going on in the body. Often times treatments for autoimmune disease involve medications or interventions to manage or suppress symptoms, but they don’t always dig down to the root to see what’s going on at a deeper level. When we’re working in functional medicine and looking at things through a functional nutrition or functional medicine lens, it really is all about identifying the root cause of disease and understanding how your personal history influences disease expression. The most important tool in the functional medicine toolkit is the functional timeline. This tool allows us to put our presenting illness or symptoms in context with our entire life, and helps to identify the roots of illness to move towards resolution. In this post, we’ll look at the functional timeline and the ATMs, or the antecedents, triggers, and mediators of health!