ISABEL, A CUTE 10-YEAR-OLD GIRL FROM TEXAS who loved riding horses, walked into my office a year and a half ago with one of the most severe cases of autoimmune disease I had ever seen. Her face was swollen, her skin was inflamed, her joints were swollen, her Institute for Functional Medicine’s basic training course for physicians. Even though the course is expensive—because unlike most other continuing medical education pharmaceutical companies do not support it—this conference was sold out. There were practitioners from 27 countries, and 24 faculty members from medical schools. Functional medicine is a hidden movement sweeping across the globe, and it is based on a different method of diagnosing and treating disease—one that focuses on causes not symptoms, one that is based on an understanding of the dynamic way our genes interact with environment, one that goes beyond simply treating diseases based on their label. The training I lectured at teaches practitioner to understand the body as a system; to seek the causes of illness; to understand the body’s basic functional systems, where they go awry, and how to restore balance; to understand the interconnections between symptoms and organs rather segregate diseases into specialties.

If there is a shimmer of a possibility that this approach works, that it can help patients recover from some of the most debilitating, devastating human diseases out there, are we not obligated to investigate further?

This approach is a fundamentally different way of solving medical problems, one that allows us to decipher the origins of illness and identify the disturbances in biology that lead to symptoms. Let’s see how this approach worked for Isabel. From Conventional Illness to Functional Health For Isabel, the only response physicians had to her life-threatening illness was to shut down her immune system, leaving her at risk for cancer, infection, osteoporosis, muscle wasting, and psychiatric illness. But there was another way. I simply asked the question WHY. I didn’t focus on WHAT the name of her disease was (mixed connective tissue disease, otherwise known as an autoimmune disease that affects the whole body), but WHY she was inflamed, WHERE this inflammation originated from, and HOW we could locate the causes and restore balance to her overactive immune system that was attacking her own body? The immune system usually responds to some insult such as an allergen, a microbe, or a toxin, and then runs out of control. Finding and removing that trigger is essential. In a review in the New England Journal of Medicine, it was acknowledged that “even in a genetically predisposed person, some trigger, an environmental exposure, or change in the internal environment -- is usually required for [autoimmunity].” (i) When I talked to Isabel the first time, I found many potential triggers for her inflammation. She was being exposed to a toxic mold, Stachybotrys, in her house. Her mother worked in limestone pits exposing her to excessive amounts of fluoride while pregnant. Isabel had all her immunizations before 1999 when thimerosol was removed from vaccines. She also had a thimerosol-containing flu shot every year. Thimersol contains mercury and mercury is a known immune toxin. This problems was compounded by her diet which included large amounts of tuna and sushi which she loved and ate regularly (and which exposed her to even more mercury), and loads of dairy, gluten, and sugar. In the year before she got sick, she also had many courses of antibiotics. Mold, mercury, antibiotics, sugar, dairy, gluten—all potential immune irritants. Isabel’s lab tests at her first visit with me were frightening. Her muscle enzymes and liver function tests showed severe damage. She had many autoimmune antibodies (anti-nuclear antibodies, rheumatoid factor, anti-SSA, anti-DNA, anti-RNP, lupus anticoagulant), a sign that the levels at which the body was attacking itself were extremely elevated. Other markers of inflammation were extremely high as well. Her white blood count and red blood cell count were low. Her vitamin D was also low. She had elevated levels of antibodies to gluten, which is a common cause of autoimmune disease and triggers significant intestinal inflammation. And her mercury level was extremely high in her urine after a provocation test (the only way to assess total body burden of metals). Normal is less than three. Hers was 33. At the first visit, I simply put Isabel on an anti-inflammatory elimination diet to remove possible triggers of inflammation from food allergens. She stopped eating sugar, dairy and gluten (from wheat). I gave her a multivitamin; Back to Content Library