Biomarkers are indicators of our functional health status.

A SYSTEMS APPROACH To do this, functional medicine takes a systems approach to the body. We’ve already spoken of the network of organ systems in the body—immune, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, etc.—but here the important word is “network”; in other words, all these systems are linked. Therefore, as we know, an event in one system can affect

In the case of the bitter taste, for example, the surface receptors on specialized cells called L cells in the small intestine turn out to be identical to the bitter taste receptors on the tongue. In essence, our digestive system also “tastes” our food when the specific taste sensation—in this case, bitter—alters the gene expression of the L cell

The next seven chapters of this book will focus on the core physiological processes, explaining how each process works and the possible effects of clinical imbalances in each.

While serotonin affects mood, the hormone ghrelin, for example, affects appetite.

One of the new biomarkers in the blood that we’ll meet again later is high-sensitivity C-reactive protein: hs-CRP. This biomarker is an indicator of chronic inflammation and, especially when combined with a companion biomarker in the blood, homocysteine, can alert us to a person’s early risk of heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, or dementia, four

But functional medicine isn’t concerned solely with health problems; it isn’t looking at the connection between your outside world and your inside physiology just to rid your body of its health problem. Rather, its systems approach is a way of finding the proper match between your genetic uniqueness and your environment, lifestyle, and behavior so

Using the systems approach, functional medicine practitioners don’t stop looking if they can’t find a specific defective organ that can be “repaired” through acute care. They keep on going, exploring the entire physiological network to find the place or places where genetic expression has been altered by environmental factors. What they are looking

You tell your doctor you feel tired and you sort of ache all over. Pressed for specific details, you report that you haven’t been sleeping well, can’t concentrate, have no energy, and just feel wiped out. Trained in a pharmaceutical strategy that seeks one cause to explain one disease that can be treated with one drug, the doctor is stymied at best