Thank you for the question.
This is absolutely true. Sir William Osler, the famous Canadian physician, said to his medical students a century ago that if you listen carefully enough to your patient they will tell you what the problem is. For the case I presented, it took me one and a half hours to take that history and to do a careful physical examination.
When I teach residents in functional medicine, I'm surprised at their lack of physical exam skills. A large part of my teaching is on helping residents to sharpen up their history-taking skills and physical exams skills.
The power of the functional medicine matrix is that it forces you to think outside of your comfort zone and it forces you to be thorough in your critical thinking of these complex cases. It also helps us to hone in on what the patient has deemed most important. We teach our functional medicine residents to retell the patient's story back to them, and that's a very powerful therapeutic encounter.
The history and physical exam is still a cornerstone and should be the foundation on which you build other tests.