What your microbiome is: Your body also hosts about 100 trillion bacterial, fungi, viral, and other microbes that make up our microbiome—the microbial community within your body. These microbes influence your physical and mental health and can even completely control it.
The big picture: When stressors overrun a well-balanced microbiome, your body becomes susceptible to physical, environmental, or emotional stressors. We take a functional approach to recovery, meaning that we look at the entire body when looking for answers. This involves balancing these microbial and other stressors so that your body’s immune response can be redirected to focus on the true problem.
For example, multiple situations can combine to cause depression. From the functional perspective, we look at where there is a breakdown not just in one or even multiple systems, but also in the way the systems are cooperating. Our goal is to help those systems work together well again.
Chronic illness: Forty percent of Americans suffer from some sort of long-term condition. While a small percentage of diseases (e.g., measles) come from a single, tiny disease-causing organism or pathogen, recent research shows that most chronic diseases involve multiple pathogens. These multiple systemic infectious disease syndromes (MSIDS) can cause your immune response to be misdirected, resulting in chronic inflammation.
Misdirected immune response: Traditional symptoms of an infection include responses such as a fever or a cough. This gets your body’s attention and helps you attack and get rid of the infection. However, when symptoms persist, the body works overtime to clear foreign invaders from your body. When it is not successful, the long-term battle can cause the body to choose other unrelated symptoms. Instead of a fever, the body could produce symptoms such as mood disturbances or psychiatric symptoms. These certainly get your attention, but rarely do you realize that these could actually be signs of an infection.
Healthcare professionals do not recognize such symptoms as signs of infection. Since insurance does not cover tests for organisms unless the symptoms exactly fit criteria specified in their field of practice, doctors do not order the tests that you might need to get a complete picture of your health.