Foundational Health: What It Is And Why It Is Important – Part 2
Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN work on foundational health. Their expertise cover a wide birth of topics giving them the unique ability to recoginze unuasual patterns. This allows them to be able to pick out issues that others have missed or that previous treatments have uncovered.
Stress: everybody has it, so it is not the stress that you have, but how you handle it. Stress will mess with your hormones, your gut health, your thyroid, and ultimately, mitochondria. Making and executing a plan on what is causing you stress is the best way to deal with the stress. Other tools to use to help you manage the monkey mind are Atomic Habits by James Clear, Breathe by James Nestor, Getting Things Done by David Allen, Tinker Dabble Doodle Try by Dr. Srini Pillay, Stress Less, Accomplish More by Emily Fletcher, and lastly 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Stress is a very individual experience, but there are ways through it and we as well as other functional medicine doctors can help you plot a path. We can help in more ways than one.
Community: Let's face it, if your friends drag you down, it doesn't help you. This also applies to families. When someone is sick, hurting, or trying to heal, they need support and not to be the one who supports others. It is analogous to the airline speech of putting your mask on first so you can help others. You must be healthy to be able to help others.
Foundational health is having those pillars firmly planted and ingrained as your habits. They need to be your baseline habits, what you fall back to, and what you fall back on. This gives your body the resiliency it needs to come back from challenges. Instead of getting sick, you may just feel tired, have a bit of a cough, or just a runny nose. It lets the body's immune system work the way it is supposed to, without all the nagging aches and pains. In other words, if you were to get sick, the sickness is less severe. It won't keep you from getting sick or from bad things happening, because those challenges are inevitable. But it helps give you the latitude and emotional bank account to respond from a place of calmness and control rather than crisis and emotion.
Foundational health teaches you how to help your body recover from challenges. Let's say you get sick and need medication, such as antibiotics. You will know how and what to do, what to eat, and how to recover your baseline health. Foundational health is about independence, not dependence.
So why is Foundational Health Important? I must explain the concept or hypothesis of body burden. Body burden is best described in an analogy. The analogy I like to use is that of a backpack. When you are born, the backpack is essentially empty, or it should be. As one goes through life, we add bricks to the backpack. For every year of life you've lived, we place a brick in the backpack. The bricks of age cannot be removed, but if you get sick or are stressed, a temporary brick is placed in the backpack, which increases the load on the body. When you recover, the brick is removed. This is why the adage when it rains it pours seems to be true. There are opportunistic diseases and infections just waiting for your body to be compromised so that they can take advantage of it. When the backpack has the bricks of age accumulating, the bricks of dysbiosis, the bricks of a crappy diet, and possibly chronic disease bricks (these are rarely singular diseases), then the body slows notably.
The person suffers from what Dr Hyman calls FLC syndrome or Feels Like Crap syndrome. The good thing is that foundational health restores baseline resiliency and allows the bricks to be removed or at least lightened. This lightens the load or burden on the body. Now damage that has been done can be dealt with in a cleaner light or possibly reversed. Things like Hashimoto's thyroiditis, hypercholesterolemia, diabetes, or dysregulated hormones can now be dealt with on their own merit. But foundational health has to be established first. Otherwise, the patient will feel better, and something else will happen, and then they will get sick all over again. Remember the section in “Why Functional Medicine Fails” called whack-a-mole medicine? Well, this is when that happens. Somebody just keeps getting a pill for an ill or a supplement for a symptom.
The great thing about foundational health is that it's easy. One just must prioritize sleep, nutrition, movement, stress, and community. This is basically free and easy. Once the habits are established, then the “root cause” (in full disclosure, I really don't like this moniker) can be addressed, and optimization can happen.
After that going into a program like ours at Integrated Health of Indiana, will allow you to quickly deal with stress, cortisol, and hormones. We also get a great look into the microbiome, digestive function, and gut health dealing with what is presented on the labs. Lastly, looking at the mitochondrial function and body processes, we can address the deficiencies and optimize performance of the body systems.
That is why foundational health is so important; it is your resiliency and your battery. Right now in America of the developed countries, we rank last in health. I have heard it said that the unfortunate souls that lost their lives during the pandemic had multiple chronic diseases. (Think big bricks.). They weigh down the body and do not allow the body to heal. Think about this for a moment, there were 7,010,681 deaths worldwide from the virus. We were 1,219,487 of those deaths. If the US is roughly 4% of the world's population, by very simple logic, we would expect to have been about 4% of the deaths. However, that equates into 17% of the deaths from COVID for the United States. If we spend the most money of any nation in the world on health care, why shouldn't we have the best outcomes? I would offer that if we were a healthier nation, we would have done better, and I believe this is why we should all talk about foundational health.
Read more from Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN
Dr. Trevor Miller and Jessica Miller, RN, Integrated Health of Indiana
Dr Miller and Nurse Jessica have dedicated their professional lives to helping people live their best lives. Concentrating on healing from the inside out, they use a program to comprehensively address problems with hormones, foundational gut health, the micrbiome and mitochondrial health. Realizing that these are all tied together and addressing them as a whole leads to happier and healthier pateints.
