Integrative Medicine – What Is It?
Integrative medicine enables doctors to use a holistic approach to the body because it views the whole person and not just the symptoms of disease or one particular disease. If one part of the body becomes unhealthy or dysfunctional it will impact adversely on other systems and organs in the body.
For example, if you have a leaky gut you will have a leaky blood brain barrier, and this can lead to increased brain inflammation – if you heal your gut your brain function will improve. I guess it’s nothing new – as Hippocrates said “All diseases begin in the gut”.
In women, if the thyroid gland is over or underactive, their ovaries will not function properly, and their menstrual cycle will become dysfunctional. If we balance the thyroid gland, the ovaries will produce the correct amount of the hormone progesterone to balance the menstrual cycle.
Unexplained recurrent urinary tract infections are usually associated with the wrong balance of bacteria in the gut. Giving frequent courses of antibiotics to kill the bacteria in the urine may never resolve the problem. The cause is in the gut not in the urinary tract, and once again Hippocrates was correct!