Having helped the reader identify key functional imbalances, Dr Bland offers in-depth guidance in the development of a truly personalized health promotion program—“with the help of your chosen health care practitioner.” Diet, lifestyle/exercise, environment, pharmaceuticals, supplements, and imbalances in each of the core systems are addressed. Specific, practical, do-able recommendations are offered.
Just think how much more effectively you could use your time counseling and developing a treatment plan if your patient had read The Disease Delusion and filled out the self-assessment questionnaires before his or her appointment. And this is a book for clinicians as well; new insights into not only the development and practice of 21st-century functional medicine, but your own optimal health are certain to be found. Following are just a few neuron-invigorating insights; virtually every page contains at least one.
- “Conventional wisdom has long held that our health is 70 percent heredity and 30 percent everything else. The breakthrough discovery at the heart of the functional medicine revolution—our genes are not our fate—flips that ratio on its head.”
- “Before 1940, the incidence of breast cancer developing in women with the BRCA mutation was 24 percent. By 2013, the incidence was greater than 85 percent. What changed? Not the gene, but the environment influencing the gene’s expression: diet, exercise and other lifestyle behaviors.”
- “The vast majority of drugs—more than 90 percent—only work in 30 to 50 percent of the people.” − Allen Roses, md, onetime global vice president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline, 2003.
- “… the specific biological target a drug blocks because it is related to a disease in one part of the body may be important for normal functioning elsewhere (e.g., the Cox-2 inhibitors. Inhibition of COX-2 in blood vessels leads to a decrease in their production prostacyclin, which helps prevent platelet aggregation and vasoconstriction, so its inhibition promotes excess clot formation and increased blood pressure. Even long-term or overuse of NSAIDS, such as ibuprofen, can result in gastric bleeding, heart attack and stroke.)”
- “… grapefruit juice … can profoundly affect the metabolism of some widely prescribed drugs. It increases the blood levels in women taking certain birth control pills and alters the effect of those pills …”
- “The total number of genes in the human genome is approximately 25,000—fewer than are found in a number of plants. The genome of the pinot grape, for example, has nearly 30,000 genes—making us seem perhaps less complex than the wines we drink.”
What the human genome project and following scientific detective work has made clear is that although the human genome has fewer genes than expected, it has the largest amount of what was originally called “junk DNA” of any organism, plant, or animal on the planet. Junk DNA takes up more than half the real estate in the human genome. What we used to think of as junk actually contains the information that controls the expression of our genes. These are the “promoter regions” of the human genome. They control the translation of our genotype into our phenotype, and they are influenced by factors such as environment, lifestyle, and diet.
Although it may seem comforting to receive a diagnosis from a specialist—you have arthritis, or you have depression—that is only a starting point for understanding the shared mechanisms that underlie that manifestation of illness. In functional medicine, such a diagnosis is but the first step toward finding out how to manage the condition effectively. Solving a health problem comes not from naming it but from understanding the physiological disturbances that have resulted in the changed function we refer to as disease.
Functional medicine takes a systems approach to the body—why, because the body contains a network of organ systems—immune, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, etc—but here the important word is network; all these systems are linked. An event in one system can affect something else in another system. An anti-inflammatory that diminishes pain in your musculoskeletal system may at the same time be causing serious harm in your gastrointestinal system, so although your arthritis may feel better, you’ve suddenly got a miserably painful ulcer. Or take the case of statins, which are known to lower the risk of heart attack and stroke but have also been shown to increase the risk of dementia and diabetes. Why? Because although they affect the cardiovascular system, they also affect the nervous and endocrine systems; the effect in one case is benign and in the other case adverse.
It stands to reason that we should look at the body’s systems in relation to one another.
- “… ill health in the bone is influenced by inflammatory signals from other parts of the body—just like angry fat and arthritis. Indeed, there is a strong connection between osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and heart disease. If you have one … you are likely to have the others—for the simple reason that they all share common disturbances of the core physiological processes.”
- “… the gut has its own nervous system. Dubbed ‘the second brain,’ a term first coined by Columbia University research gastroenterologist Michael Gerson, this enteric nervous system consists of billions of neurons and is filled with the same kinds of neurotransmitters found in the brain in our skulls. The second brain secretes messengers that communicate back and forth between the gut and the brain. … One of the best known of these messenger substances is the hormone serotonin. … It may calm the brain, but the majority of the serotonin produced in the body comes from the gut, so that meddling with serotonin may also mean meddling with the gut … that’s exactly what happens with the class of pharmaceutical antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs. … It has now been found that excessive serotonin activity is associated with increased risk of bone loss. Does this mean that SSRIs are interacting with gastrointestinal function? Yes …”
- “Surface receptors on specialized cells called L cells in the small intestine are identical to the bitter taste receptors on the tongue. Our digestive system also “tastes” our food when a specific taste sensation—e.g., bitter—alters the gene expression of the L cell and its function. When L cells are exposed to a bitter-tasting substance, they secrete glucagon-like peptide 1 into the bloodstream. An integrin hormone … GLP-1 signaling stimulates the action of insulin.”
- “BPA binds to receptors on cells that the body’s natural hormones use to regulate physiological function. In doing so, BPA displaces the natural hormones … and thereby sends different messages to the cells. Moreover, because many of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals are very active, it takes only a very small exposure to create significant changes in health. This is toxicology on a very basic molecular level, and it is changing the way we think about what is toxic and at what level.”
- “… increasing the dietary intake of soy, kale, cranberry, and green tea as well as of the spices turmeric and rosemary can help eliminate BPA from our bodies. All these foods are known to contain specific substances that increase a particular component of the detoxification process called glucuronidation …”
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4684103/
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