Finding Balance for Your Body: Connecting the Dots

In recent years the concept of bioregulatory medicine has become increasingly popular throughout Europe. At its core is the notion that good health is a state of balance and optimal wellbeing, rather than the mere absence of disease and symptoms. To find that perfect state, bioregulatory medicine practitioners must remove whatever agents are blocking the healing process while also helping to restore the body’s innate ability to rehabilitate and regenerate. But to do that they must first correctly identify what the root cause of the imbalance is.

The following is an excerpt from Bioregulatory Medicine by Dr. Dickson Thom, Dr. James Paul Maffitt Odell, Dr. Jeoffrey Drobot,  Dr. Frank Pleus, and Jess Higgins Kelley. It has been adapted for the web.

Like a log that has fallen across a flowing river, at the root of most illnesses are psycho-emotional and environmental toxic blockades that overwhelm the body’s regulatory systems. Consider a barrel that is filling with water. Every stressful event, every bite of toxic food, every exposure to mercury fillings is akin to pouring more water in that barrel. With every drop, more symptoms appear. Once the barrel is full it overflows into a disease state. But while everyone has a barrel, the influencing factors that fill each barrel are unique to each person.

We all have different life stressors, dietary habits, thought processes, past traumas, and environments. Each person, depending on their emotional type or miasm (inherited predispositions toward physical and/or mental illnesses or weaknesses), also adapts in his or her own way to these barrel-filling factors. To one person, getting stuck in traffic is maddening, and it fills their disease barrel a little bit. To another, traffic allows more relaxation time to listen to a favorite book on tape, and therefore it doesn’t add water to their barrel. How a person reacts—regulates—in response to causal factors is in part due to genetic predisposition, emotional/ mental characteristics, bioenergetic factors, social circumstances, and more. How full the barrel gets over the years plays an important role in the development of chronic illness. This is a process that might appear suddenly or insidiously, slowly mounting over months or even years. At the end of the day, both health and disease result from a complex interaction and reaction to physical, mental, emotional, environmental, genetic, spiritual, and social factors. A harmonious functioning and the ability to properly respond to all these dysregulating aspects is the blueprint to health.

The term regulation capacity is a measurement of a person’s ability to react. It essentially refers to how many pushes one can take and still remain regulated or balanced. When the body is in balance, it is not as prone to chronic illness, and it remains in a state of health, or homeostasis. Regulation is about reaction. If you throw a ball at someone’s face, they should react by either trying to catch the ball or dodging it so they don’t get hit. If a light turns on, the iris constricts in the eye. If someone gets bitten by a Lyme-carrying tick, their body’s autoregulating systems—immune, digestive, and inflammatory— need to react against the bacteria. Reaction is regulation, regulation is adaptation, and the ability to regulate is the key to health. But if a person’s barrel is too full or there are too many logs blocking their flowing river, then regulation and reaction cannot happen. The body slows, cells degenerate, and we run out of energy. Too much energy has been expended trying to get back to homeostasis.

Chronic disease occurs when a person has a lowered regulation capacity to such an extent that inherent healing forces are no longer able to react against disease-causing conditions with their normal and usual corrective efforts. Disease—quite simply—is a reduced regulation capacity. Regulation capacity is how well a person can adapt and react, and regulation logjams are what trigger or worsen chronic diseases. Bioregulatory medicine looks to remove the logjams and drain the barrel, all of which allow the resources for self-healing mechanisms to grow stronger, permitting self-healing to happen.

The terms self-heal and regenerate both refer to the self-repair forces inherent to humans. We know the body has the ability to regenerate, as our tissues regenerate all the time (think of a cut on your finger turning into a scab, then healing over completely). Over a life span, our body grows, develops, matures, and declines. Within this cycle of life, every one of the body’s cells and organs has its own regeneration cycle. Some cells are programmed to die after forty or so divisions. Every organ in the body has a regeneration cycle where old cells die and new cells are generated. Intestinal bacteria regenerate within several days, the intestinal wall within two weeks, and immune cells within four weeks. The liver possesses an extraordinary capacity to regenerate. As little as 25 percent of an original liver mass can regenerate back to its full size within six months. In general, the organs that do the most work encountering the outside world have the fastest regeneration rate. For example, the digestive lining and immune system cells have a far shorter life span than our bone, heart, and brain cells. Healing, therefore, depends on a tissue’s regeneration time.

The default state of the body is one of ceaseless regeneration. In fact, every atom and molecule of the entire human body is replaced every seven to ten years without us even thinking about it. This is a natural process that requires no medical intervention. However, in chronic and degenerative disease this renewal process goes haywire. In the case of cancer, cells become immortal and are constantly dividing and growing. In degenerative nerve diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cells of the nervous system degenerate instead of regenerate; they rot and die without replacement. Those following an allopathic medical track for neurodegenerative diseases end up on drugs such as dopamine antagonists and antiseizure medications that reduce the symptoms but don’t stop the root of the problem: nerve degeneration. A bioregulatory medicine treatment approach is in stark contrast. We know that there are several natural and nontoxic compounds with proven nerve-regenerative effects, including Huperzine, Apigenin, and lion’s mane mushroom, for example.1 These phytochemicals stimulate the regenerative process, promote quality and quantity of life, and shoot to cure.

The BioMed Patient Assessment

Bioregulatory medical providers take a patients’ medical history on their first appointment, like any conventional general practitioner (GP) would do. But the similarities generally stop there. Bioregulatory medicine therapists focus also on a comprehensive multisystem psychological and bioenergetic assessment; structural evaluation, analysis of nutritional deficiencies, toxicities, childhood traumas, and beyond in order to identify the dysregulatory factors involved in the process of symptoms or pathology. Allopathic GPs ask about symptoms, specific complaints, and review basic serum lab tests in order to match them with a diagnosis code and a prescription. Bioregulatory doctors, by contrast, think in patterns and connections and consider the patient’s story. For bioregulatory doctors, it is not about the diagnosis but rather about the systems at play. In the art of the bioregulatory intake, there is an element of intuition, where practitioners have learned to recognize, for example, that adverse events in childhood can manifest into pathology later in life. For example, if during adolescence certain coping strategies for psycho-emotional issues are not learned, addictive behavior can manifest in adulthood. Multiple food intolerances in early childhood can present later in life in immune system deficiencies or digestive or pulmonary issues. Those with toxin exposure in their past might present with cancer in the future. It’s all about recognizing cause and effect, the factors filling the barrel. Disease doesn’t just show up on your doorstep one day, just as (most) marriages don’t end in divorce in one day. Disease is never bad luck.

While the primary diagnostic tools of a bioregulatory medicine practitioner include those of any other physician—lab tests, blood work, X-rays, scans, scopes, histories, and physicals—the bioregulatory medicine practitioner also employs additional tools so they can examine each patient on multiple levels. These tools include, but are not limited to:

•  Physical body examination and constitution analysis
• Dental examination and panoramic X-ray
• Organ biocommunication scans
• General blood work, including orthomolecular
• Genetic and SNP analysis testing
• Body composition analysis
• Dark field microscopy
• Hormone testing
• Heavy-metal testing (urine/blood/hair analysis)
• Intestinal flora and comprehensive stool analysis
• Food intolerances (IgA, IgG, IgG4)
• Heart rate variability (HRV)
• Contact regulation thermography (CRT)

Using the most technologically advanced diagnostic testing allows the bioregulatory medical provider to perform a core tenet: tolle causam, or identify and treat the cause. Bioregulatory medicine employs noninvasive diagnostic aids that view not only structural imbalances, but also functional, metabolic, genetic, regulatory, energetic, and psycho-emotional conditions. Hence, environmental toxins, lifestyle, social and professional influences, and ecological terrain and genetic information are all vital factors to evaluate. If a patient walks in with dermatitis, instead of simply prescribing a steroid cream, the bioregulatory medical practitioner will seek out the root cause of that inflammation—a food sensitivity, poor kidney or liver function, impaired oxygenation, weak lung activity, stress at work, or a combination thereof. The symptom is usually the end result of an imbalance in several systems. Lots of pushes off the beam, the barrel overflowing, the river clogged with logs.

Illness does not occur without a cause, and symptoms (nausea, vomiting, headache, rash, fever, etc.) are not the cause of illness. As we have discussed, symptoms are an expression of the body’s attempt to defend itself, to adapt and recover, and to heal. When symptoms are treated via palliation and suppression (allopathically), and the underlying causes are ignored, the patient might develop a more serious, chronic condition. Etiologies, or causes of disease, usually exist simultaneously. Disease develops in a causal chain, one begetting the other. Bioregulatory medical providers not only discover the primary cause of the illness, but also identify the weakest afflicted organ or system. This is called the causal chain—which is essentially a flow chart that represents the evolution of the pathological history of the patient, taking into account all the possible manifestations and the evolution of a disease.

1. S.Acosta et al.,“NT-020, a Natural Therapeutic Approach to Optimize Spatial Memory Performance and Increase Neural Progenitor Cell Proliferation and Decrease In ammation in the Aged Rat,” Rejuve- nation Research 13, no. 5 (2010): 581–88.

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