Naperville Integrated Wellness
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Dr. Sexton’s Health Pyramid – Naperville Integrated Wellness
How to heal your body…
How do you build up your health and reverse chronic health conditions? Is there a road map from poor health to good health? I believe there is, and I call it a Health Pyramid. I created this pyramid as visual representation of how the various systems of your body work together, resulting in health and excellent quality of life.
I believe some systems to be more “rugged” than others. For example, your liver can handle much more dysfunction and is not nearly as delicate as your brain. Some organs have an incredible ability to regenerate and repair them themselves…your gut can generally heal itself when damaged, even severely damaged, but your kidneys, once damaged, are not be able to repair themselves very well.
We also have systems that play a much more vital role in overall body function and regulation than others.
3 ruling systems of your body
- Nervous System
- Immune System
- Endocrine System (all your different hormones)
These 3 regulating systems oversee the function of the other organs and systems of your body. They regulate your digestive system, heart, lungs, kidneys, reproduction, detoxification, movement, sleep, stress…etc. It is also very important to understand that these 3 systems influence each other greatly. They contribute to the health and function of each other, but also cause dysfunction and disease in each other. Let’s take autoimmune disease of the thyroid gland like Hashimoto’s disease. The immune system is destroying the thyroid gland which is an endocrine gland because it makes hormones. Your immune system may have made this “mistake” because you had been under a great deal of mental/emotional stress for a couple of years. To “feel” stressed, your nervous system would have been the starting point of the whole disease process. Your brain caused dysfunction of your immune system resulting in the attack and destruction of your endocrine gland (thyroid). If you are familiar with functional medicine concepts you might argue that I should have named the digestive system as a key regulating system. I do not consider it one of the 3 ruling systems, but it is the key to gaining access to the 3 ruling systems and it is the first system to address when restoring health. I created this pyramid to help explain how functional medicine works and how systems should be addressed. You will notice that the Digestion and Nutrition are at the base or foundation of the pyramid; this is because you must get the gut healthy if you hope to heal other systems in the body. Your digestive system is where your body obtains all of the nutrients that are required by every system in your body to work properly. Get your gut and nutrition in order and you can begin to have a powerful impact on the systems above this level of the pyramid. You will notice that Detoxification is the next level up. If your body can’t “clean” itself and remove toxins then it can’t work properly. Your liver is the main organ of detoxification, but if the digestive system is not working properly it will constantly put a huge burden on the liver, making effective detoxification impossible. Your liver needs to clean up and filter what has been absorbed from the digestive system. So you get the gut working and the liver also starts working better. Let’s jump up to Level 5 which is the Immune System. Level 4 is Inflammation and Level 6 is the Thyroid gland. For example, if you want to reduce Inflammation, you could cut out foods that trigger inflammation. These are foods that contribute to inflammation and burden your immune system. If you keep putting too much stress on your immune system then it might start to attack your Thyroid which is level 6. High inflammation will also interfere with the thyroid glands ability to make hormones and reduce the body’s ability to convert these hormones into their active biological form; etc. Let me be clear, your systems are not stacked like a pyramid, but there is a biological order to how the body functions. You could call the this pyramid a “Bio-Logical” pyramid, meaning we want to apply medical and scientific knowledge to our functional medicine approach. If you want to improve a particular level of the pyramid, you must first make sure the levels below it are working well. It would be more accurate to explain your body as a web of interrelated systems. A web however does not provide a sequence or hierarchy of systems. It does not provide a tool for application. If I created a “functional medicine web” I would simply say that “everything in your body affects everything else.” That would be more accurate, but not very helpful or useful as a tool to help people restore their health. This is why I structured my functional medicine approach as a pyramid. I could say a lot more about this, but then this would not be an article, it would end up being a book. Hopefully this pyramid helps you conceptualize how one system flows into the next and provides you with a better understanding of how your body works. If you would like more information about functional medicine and integrative medicine or Dr. Sexton go to napervilleintegratedwellness.com Do your own research, inform yourself and ask lots of questions. When collecting information, you MUST consider the source. There is no shortage of false, misleading, outdated, profit-driven and utterly biased information in healthcare today; even from the most respected sources and organizations. This approach to healthcare is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent any disease. This article is for information purposes and is not a substitute professional healthcare services. Contact our office for more information.How does the Functional Medicine Pyramid Work?
The systems of your body form a web
The purpose of functional medicine is:
Understanding how the body works, knowing how and where to investigate health issues, knowing what to look for, understanding the significance of what is found and creating a plan of action to reverse and correct the root cause the health problems.
My wish for you…health, happiness and a better quality of life!