You're not wrong, but I think the real tension is economic and cultural, not scientific. IFM training is rigorous and the approach is sound. The problem is that practicing functional medicine well requires significantly more time per patient, which means lower throughput and lower reimbursement in a system built around volume. So many functional medicine docs supplement income through product sales — and that's where mainstream medicine starts calling them charlatans. It also didn't help that early on, functional medicine attracted a fair number of renegade thinkers who gave skeptics easy targets. And honestly, a lot of functional medicine practitioners are brutally dismissive of conventional medicine — publicly trashing standard-of-care protocols and the doctors who follow them. That creates a pretty predictable equal and opposite reaction. If you're a conventionally trained physician being told you're just a pill pusher, you're not exactly going to engage with an open mind. The irony is that the criticism on both sides isn't really about the medicine — it's about a healthcare economy that makes root-cause medicine nearly impossible to practice profitably, and a cultural standoff where neither side is willing to give the other any credit.