AHS17

According to the World Health Organization a healthcare system involves “all the activities whose primary purpose is to promote, restore or maintain health.” This broad definition encompasses healthcare practitioners, students and patients. In recent years, the Functional Medicine (FM) and ancestral health movements have helped empower all three groups. The Institute for Functional Medicine defines FM as a system that addresses the underlying causes of disease, using a systems-oriented approach with conjunctive engagement of both patient and practitioner in a therapeutic partnership. An unfortunate obstacle for the FM and ancestral health movements currently is that the delivery of health information is widely dispersed over many different organizations, individuals and platforms, often making it difficult to begin, condense and grow one's FM education and understanding of ancestral health. This presentation highlights an electronic book resource that organizes  freely available FM and ancestral health resources by learning style (auditory, visual and kinesthetic) and further categorizes the resources by their level of expertise or targeted audience. This freely accessible educational resource is designed to streamline FM and ancestral health education for healthcare practitioners, students and patients so as to make living an ancestrally informed lifestyle and acquiring a FM education easy and accessible to all.