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“Autoimmune disease awareness could save children’s lives” – Fox 26 Houston Feature on PANS/PANDAS

Posted on by Team FMM

Dr. Kruppstadt was recently featured on Fox 26 Houston to discuss autoimmune disease and pediatric health. PANS/PANDAS can lead to behavioral and personality changes overnight. This can be frightening for parents, siblings, and caregivers – not to mention the child themselves. This condition is caused by an underlying infection (often strep throat) that attacks the brain.

But integrative pediatrics can help. Through dietary and lifestyle changes, we can help the child’s brain recover. Specifically, we often remove inflammatory agents like dairy and gluten to assist recovery. Dr. Kruppstadt advises parents not to wait if they notice significant and rapid changes in their child’s behavior. Discuss PANS/PANDAS with a healthcare professional.

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To learn more about our integrative pediatric services, click here.

What is Autophagy and Why is it Important?

Posted on by Andrew Newland

Autophagy is a Latin word that means “self-eating”. Since 2015, there have been some major leaps in understanding this extremely important process and how it is involved in chronic disease.

I want to explain it at a very simple level. If everybody in the neighborhood took their trash to the end of the street at the end of the day then went back into their house—they did this every day—all the neighbors in the neighborhood did that but the trash man never came. What would happen?

You’d have so much trash built up that the trash man couldn’t get down the street.

This happens in many disease states in all of the cells in our body. Now, from autism to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, ALS, multiple sclerosis, auto-immune illnesses, seizure disorders that tend to not respond to anticonvulsants. All these illnesses have an autophagy component.

Autophagy essentially helps the body clean up the cellular debris. And this is a little bit different than detoxification– a lot of times we think of peeing, pooping, also at the cellular level in the liver and the kidneys, those organs detoxify our blood in our urine. The liver and the kidneys help process the blood and basically all the blood in the body and that helps our body detoxify. But at the cellular level, if a person has broken off-switches for inflammation and they cannot dial the inflammation down, clean up their cells, and get rid of the cellular debris, we’ve got major problems.

In 2015, there were some special scans done of the brain. They’re called PET scans. We’ve been doing those for years but they were able to image cells in the brain called microglial cells. These cells have numerous receptors on them. Some of them are for turning on inflammation and some of them are for turning off inflammation. If you have broken off-switches for inflammation, the body is continuously kicking out these things called inflammatory cytokines. The body should be able to dial down that inflammation, but if it can’t, you make your body more vulnerable to inflammatory illnesses.

So we first need to get autophagy or self-eating to work. There are numerous ways to do this via medications and also supplementation. Autophagy is enhanced, for example, by curcumin, black pepper, green tea extract, Far infrared sauna, and short term fasting such as 12 to 15 or 18 hours.

That’s autophagy and it helps the body clean out the cellular debris and kick it out.

What is Functional Medicine, its Benefits and How to find a Holistic Doctor?

Posted on by Andrew Newland

Living with chronic disease can be a heavy burden not only for the patient but also for its loved ones. The expense and stress it takes to get through can feel unbearable at times, with no way of knowing if you’ll surely be well.

Eventually, patients look for other ways to treat their condition. One of the most popular methods is Functional Medicine.

What does this type of medical practice do, and why do they get it? Read on to find out.

What is functional medicine?

According to IFM, Functional Medicine is a systems biology-based approach towards diagnosing a patient. It is an individualized approach that focuses on identifying and addressing the causes of one disease.

Functional Medicine also looks into a person’s genes, environment, and current lifestyle to further dissect a medical condition and reverse its effects (if possible).

Why should I get Functional Medicine?

As opposed to other forms, Functional Medicine focuses on the patient for treatment management. A functional doctor will ask you questions to get a good grasp of your medical history, from your physical needs down to your mental and emotional needs. They will also consider other factors such as existing toxins, allergens, and your microbiome.

From there, functional medicine doctors will draft a customized living plan to help you live your healthiest life. Functional medicine treatment aims to improve a person’s well-being through good nutrition and healthy lifestyle changes.

Where can I find a holistic doctor?

Searching for a holistic doctor is easy. You can go to sites like IFM’s Find A Practitioner page to get a list of functional doctors around your area. You can also use long-tail keywords on your browser such as “functional medicine dr near me” and let the search engine source relevant medical professionals from various sites.

No treatment is ever useful without the right level of trust. Allow yourself to ask everything that you need to know from your doctor before proceeding.

4 Notable Differences Between the Practice of Conventional Medicine and Functional Medicine

Posted on by Andrew Newland

There has been a growing interest in alternative medicine lately in different parts of the world. Health-conscious people and other like-minded groups have been taking better steps to take responsibility for their health.

One of its most popular topics today is functional medicine. What is it, and how does it differ from conventional medicine?

Read our quick below to find out.

What is functional medicine?

Functional medicine is an alternative treatment that focuses on the root cause of disease through a systems-oriented approach. It examines the relationship between your mind, body, and spirit to treat your whole body and not just the symptoms.

1. Functional medicine treats you, not your symptoms.

As opposed to its more traditional counterpart, which focuses on treating symptoms, functional medicine doctors aim to look at the bigger picture. This unique form of medicine will aim to treat your whole self. It leaves no stone unturned by trying to determine the root cause of the illness through naturopathic means.

2. Functional medicine offers personalized care.

Functional doctors also take pride in providing a personalized treatment plan for each patient. Apart from your diet, these practitioners will also look into your current lifestyle and your emotional needs to ensure that the care you receive works with the life you lead.

3. Functional medicine offers healing in the long-term.

Medical professionals use conventional medicine for treating acute and urgent medical symptoms. On the other hand, functional medicine addresses recurring symptoms within the body. By guiding their healing process, we teach patients how to address these problems more naturally.

4. Functional medicine does not heavily focus on medication.

Conventional doctors tend to prescribe medications too often. Instead of making your body go through unnecessary drugs, functional medicine provides a more holistic alternative. This form of healing combines naturopathic practice & other wellness activities that will help your body’s innate healing ability.

What Are Nutritional Supplements?

Posted on by Andrew Newland

Let’s talk about nutritional supplements. To begin with as a very basic matter, keep in mind that Supplements “supplement”. The definition of Supplement is something that completes or enhances something else when added to it. So what does a nutritional supplement, supplement?

The two main things supplement, supplement are your daily food intake and the things that your body produces or is supposed to produce naturally. Here’s the point. Your primary source of nutrition is your food. That’s something you can and should do something about. You absolutely must continually work on improving your food consumption behavior, and you absolutely must not assume that forgoing major behavior modification and taking nutritional supplements alone will lead to long-term health, wellness, and immunity. Just remember, supplements supplement.

For example, if you’re consuming a handful of supplements at the same time you’re consuming McDonald’s cheeseburger with coke and fries, you shouldn’t waste your money on supplements if you aren’t going to change your diet. Secondly, as you begin and continue taking nutritional supplements while drastically changing your eating habits, your body chemistry changes and evolves. Therefore there may be some tweaking of our nutritional supplement recommendations for the first six months or so, and at a minimum we should review your health status and supplement recommendations at least annually thereafter. As your eating habits improve, you may be able to reduce or eliminate some supplements and we can help guide you to make the best choices in this regard using the best evidence.

Nutrigenomics: Analyzing your food intake

A major part of our functional medicine practice is nutrigenomics, which is the analysis of the effects of nutrient intake on gene function and health. Genetic variations affect how the body utilizes vitamins and minerals and removes toxins, and understanding of an individual’s genotype enables diets to be tailored to meet specific genetic needs. So in Hope for Healing, we often recommend a new treat genomic test by genomics nutrition. It’s a simple cheek swab to obtain cells from the inside of your mouth, and the lab specifically analyzes 55 genes, looking for snips that is single nucleotide polymorphisms or variances changes abnormalities.

Why these 55 genes? Because these are potential snips that we can do something about. I like to call this actionable genetic testing, not doom-and-gloom testing. What action? Well, I’m so glad you asked. Usually the action is nutritional supplementation with major dietary modifications. So my point here is that nutrigenomics is about the combination of nutrition and genetics and we’re primarily interested in ensuring that your body is properly nourished. Who needs nutritional supplements? Really, everyone to some degree or another. For one, our soils have been significantly depleted and yield crops deficient in many of the nutrients they should include. Second, even in the best circumstances most people do not eat enough variety and nutrient-dense foods to ensure proper nourishment and as we learn from nutrigenomics most of us have some genetic variances which affect our nutrient absorption or processes. In some, the top three reasons most people need nutritional supplements are nutrient deficient foods, imperfect diets, and genetic variances or abnormalities.

I hasten to add that all of these may apply to you but you may be unaware of underlying problems in your body, or problems that may be in your future that can be avoided by nutritional changes we can make now. Most of us, however, if we’re not feeling fantastic most of the time can make phenomenal progress with nutritional supplementation combined with dietary improvements.

So we’ve talked about how nutrigenomics can guide our decisions on supplements and that focuses on our genes which do not change. We’ve talked about how supplementation with diet changes can and should improve our health and change our body chemistry and how we need to evaluate how we’re doing as we go.

How do we do that? Well of course we want to carefully and continually observe how we feel and to systematically evaluate our body functions and document our progress. So it’s important that you subjectively evaluate how you feel and we encourage this. We also have more objective means of evaluating our nutrition.

In particular, we often recommend a micronutrient test by SpectraCell Labs which involves a blood draw. This test for specific micro nutrients, including B vitamins, amino acids, metabolites, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, and antioxidants is an outstanding test. So the SpectraCell micronutrient test gives a very objective snapshot of about 6 months of nutrition, showing our body’s intracellular nutrient levels and guides us on deficiencies that we can remedy with supplementation or areas where we can reduce or eliminate supplements because our body function has changed or improved.

We also have urine micronutrient tests for children and adults. We want to provide you sophisticated, individualized, and customized advice based on reliable evidence and testing which is a lot more beneficial than what you may obtain from the nineteen-year-old clerk at the vitamin store, or healthy living aisle at the grocery store, or from Dr. Google. They are not going to be able to talk to you about bioavailable B vitamins, or vitamin d3 and the need to add vitamin k2, or not based on your neutral genomic findings.

Supplement Sources

Lastly, let’s visit briefly on the subject of supplement sources. Beware of Amazon on issues of storage and temperature controlled practices. Some supplement companies don’t even allow their products to be sold on Amazon such as zymogen, because they want to enforce the strictest standards on temperature storage and delivery practices. Beware of large retail stores. Beware of contaminated or fake products, essentially Chinese knockoffs. Defer to your providers chosen suppliers. I have a few supplement companies that I have personally vetted. I use them. Quality control. For example, heavy metals contamination with lead arsenic cadmium and mercury to name a few. The testing that various companies use on the location of manufacturing.

So in review, we’ve talked about nutrigenomics, micronutrient testing, the who, what, why, where, when, and how of supplements, and our recommendation for at least an annual review of your health status, and supplement recommendations.

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