All posts tagged: toxicity

The Essence of Functional Medicine

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Because I am a nurse, I know a lot of people in the medical community and as they learn my story and I get healthier, I’ve often been asked what functional medicine is. This image below sums up completely what a patient’s experience with functional medicine is like: Patients have evolved since the 1950s and they’re much more informed and want to participate in their care compared to decades ago. They often want to know why they have whatever illness it is they have. Unfortunately  during those same decades, conventional medicine became more specialized, and, at least where primary care is concerned, it took a turn away from what was important: seeing the entire person and trying to figure out how the symptoms come together and solve a puzzle. Don’t misunderstand me — patients are being treated more efficiently and quicker than ever before, the problem is that chronic illness is exploding in a way that we’ve never seen in history.  So, despite having better drugs and more efficient technology, we are getting sicker faster …

10 Years Ago Today

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Ten years ago today I heard the words from my husband “It’s cancer”.  He stood in Recovery Room with tears in his eyes and had to tell me my biopsy was positive. I was in shock and scared out of my mind.  For about a day.  And then we went into fighting mode.  Not that I wasn’t still scared.  I was.  Every single day.  As a former nurse, this wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  This was the thing that happened to someone else. The Hardest moment came a week later when I sat in the “Cancer Center” waiting room at our local hospital.  Here I was with my husband, who is a cancer surgeon, and I really wanted to run out of the room.  I wasn’t scared of seeing the oncologist, or the treatments, but sitting in that room with others who were struggling, some who were clearly fighting a much larger fight than I was — that was the thing that I didn’t want to see.  Was that my future? It felt too …

Are you “on fire” and don’t know it?

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I can’t tell you how under-diagnosed inflammation is.  And it is one of the main keys to staying healthy.  If your body has chronic inflammation going on, you can not function at your peak and you’re at risk for cancer, heart disease and stroke.  And getting older doesn’t mean you have to deal with this or “put up with it”.  You can reverse it!  The common myth is that as we age, we are certain to ache and be stiff in the morning.  NO!   One of my favorite authors Kris Carr put it succinctly: …There’s a silent (yet violent) kind of inflammation that can take place without you even knowing it. What you eat, drink, and think (stress!), environmental toxins, smokin’, booz- in’, and even a couch-potato lifestyle can create a fiery cascade of inflammation in your body. When your body hits an inflammatory overload, your defense system gets so overwhelmed and confused that it literally doesn’t know the difference between the invader and you. As a result, your well-meaning immune system turns on …

Mercury, and how to avoid it… and why you should.

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Mercury and heavy metals exist in our bodies.  You don’t have to eat tuna or fish from Lake Superior 5 times/week to be at risk.  And there isn’t enough media attention on this yet.  So, read this and be aware of the risks of how mercury can truly change your balance and make you susceptible to disease.  There’s no way to avoid exposure to mercury.  It is a much larger problem today because of 20th century technological advances. If you think back to centuries ago, the pollution, power plants and industrial waste didn’t exist the way it does today.  The Industrial Revolution brought coal, which was thought of as a huge step forward in keeping people warm.  But…  guess what?  The downside is that when you burn coal, mercury is released into the environment. Coal-burning power plants are the largest human-caused source of mercury emissions to the air in the United States, accounting for over 50 percent of all domestic human-caused mercury emissions.  We need to move towards safer ways to provide power. Mercury in …