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

The gastrointestinal immune system is precisely where it is so it can catch these substances before they create havoc in the body and can then process them into harmlessness. It does this job by monitoring the metabolic substances produced by the enteric microflora. If the immune system senses that such a substance is harmful, it will react by

our skeleton is remodeled every five to seven years.

Dr. James Fries, a professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

5. Cellular Transport.

long-term outcome studies had ever been done on HRT until the Women’s Health Initiative study, the results of which were so alarming that the study directors felt morally bound to announce them early, before all the data were in. The study found that for many women, the particular combination of equine estrogens (Premarin, from pregnant mares) and

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.

Animal studies, like those by Dr. Michael Skinner of Washington State University, have shown that exposure to environmental toxins can result in epigenetic changes transmissible to the next generation and can create increased incidence of chronic disease.

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