What is Enviromental and Functional Medicine?
Environmental Medicine is a specialty which began after World War II when Doctor Theron Randolph and others made ground-breaking discoveries linking allergy to various environmental factors, and pioneering new therapeutic techniques. In the years following, the field has widened well beyond the limits of traditional allergy. The American Board of Environmental Medicine was founded in 1988 to ensure quality training in this area. Dr Bernhoft recently passed his oral and written Board examinations in Environmental Medicine and is now a Fellow of the American Academy of Environmental Medicine.
Environmental medicine deals with the interaction between the environment and human health. Functional medicine overlaps, considerably, but places greater emphasis on restoration of biochemical integrity, and on the interactions between organ systems. Both deal, potentially, with practically every condition in the textbook of human medicine, for science over the past 60 years has found that most forms of illness have an environmental component which either causes, or aggravates, disease.
Parkinson’s disease, for example, is six times more common among farmers who use pesticides, and among those living within 1/4 mile of a pesticide-using farm than among the general population. Other neurological degenerative diseases have similar underlying risk factors, as do certain types of learning disability.
Similarly, heart and vascular disease have numerous environmental inputs, including dietary excesses or deficiencies, pesticides and heavy metals. Diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, chronic fatigue, immune problems have also been described as having environmental inputs.
Not every case of every disease has an environmental cause, however. Most diseases are multi-factorial, and result from an interplay between the genetics our parents gave us, and various environmental and lifestyle factors. We can influence this interplay towards health. For example, certain types of fatigue result from an inherited defect in an enzyme called MTHFR, which is involved in the production of chemical energy. This defect can often be overcome by giving high doses of folic acid or other related vitamins, allowing people with an MTHFR defect to live normally.
Many other diseases result from toxic overload in people with sub-normal ability to process natural or man-made chemicals. We can help them, too, by figuring out which detoxification enzymes are not working properly, upgrading their function with simple cofactors, thereby improving their body’s ability to detoxify, and by active measures to clear out the toxins.
It has been estimated that a majority of all chronic diseases, including cancer, are caused or aggravated by environmental factors. This new medical specialty, Environmental Medicine, now makes it possible for us to make headway against diseases that in the past have proven untreatable.