Treating symptoms without addressing the underlying cause is like
putting a bandaid on a wound without cleaning and disinfecting.
It might temporarily provide relief, but the root cause of the
issue remains unresolved and it can potentially get worse over time.
Just like treating the symptoms of a disease may provide short-term relief.
But it often fails to address the underlying factors that contribute
to the disease's development.
By focusing solely on symptoms, we miss the opportunity to identify and
really address the causes that are leading to the cycle of reoccurring
symptoms and incomplete healing.
In contrast, if we address the root cause of a health issue, it allows
for a more comprehensive and effective treatment, and that leads to long lasting
improvements in our health and wellbeing.
It's like fixing the foundation of a building to ensure stability and
structural integrity rather than just repairing superficial damages.
That is in a lot of cases the difference between a holistic or functional
medicine practitioner versus, a, a lot of modern day approaches to medicine.
And, that's not to say that, all doctors or you know, pharmaceuticals
are bad, and don't fix issues like that just is not true.
however, a broader approach, certainly, can catch things and can fix things
systemically that, a lot of, just the way that the medical system is set
up, is just not prepared to catch.
And my next guest, Sarah Baker, is someone who
is focused on, holistic health practitioning.
She's an integrative nutritionist and coach that helps clients uncover the
root causes of their health challenges and guides them through an approachable
nutrition health and lifestyle blueprint that is unique and easy to sustain.
I have a really interesting conversation with Sarah and we dig into some
practical approaches to addressing
some very common health challenges, including stress and burnout.
Well, hi Sarah.
Thanks for being on the show today.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Jacob.
I'm really excited to chat with you.
Yeah, likewise.
so you're in Chicago and we've been sort of messaging on Instagram for a
bit about digging into this topic of holistic healthcare functional medicine.
For those who are, you know, not- not really like in the know about
this approach to health and wellness, can you share and, and explain what
functional healthcare is and how does it differ from traditional healthcare?
Yeah, so whenever you're working with a functional health practitioner or
even a functional medicine doctor, the approach is like literally the
opposite of conventional medicine.
So when you go to a conventional medicine doctor that's built through insurance,
which is awesome, that's why you have insurance, but your doctor can only
spend around 15 minutes with you and they typically run over symptoms and
then the result or not result, their suggestion for whatever symptom you
are presenting to them is typically a pharmaceutical drug or a referral to a
specialist or a referral to somebody else.
But in the end, a lot of people kind of hit a wall because their solutions
is typically drugs or pharmaceuticals, which in a lot of cases is very
necessary and even lifesaving.
It's if you have like cancer or diabetes or any sort of serious illness or disease.
Right.
So for any listeners that are dealing with something serious, I would 100%
recommend blending conventional and functional medicine together, where you
work with a conventional doctor and you work with a functional practitioner.
How functional health and functional medicine is different
of many different ways.
So, we work from a root cause approach.
So let's say somebody comes to me with like late onset type one diabetes or
just, you know, type two diabetes and they are working with a conventional doctor.
Functional health practitioners typically will meet with you for about an hour to
go over like lengthy health history, and a lot of questions that a conventional
doctor wouldn't ask, such as, you know, "what are you doing for work?"
"How long are you working?"
"What's your stress like, what's your sleep like?"
"Have you ever lived in a water damaged building?"
Like a lot of strange questions that.
The client or the patient would think is like, "why are you asking me this?"
But we ask all these strange questions because we're looking for a lot of
what is called like hidden stressors to current symptoms, current health
conditions, and even a lot of illnesses, especially autoimmunity.
I see so many clients that have autoimmune issues.
And so Functional medicine recognizes that there's typically root cause
or a hidden stressor or conglomerate of different hidden stressors that
kind of work together and create the perfect storm for an illness or
a health challenge or an imbalance.
And so what we target then, are those hidden stressors and not the symptoms.
If we were to target just the symptoms, maybe you would feel
some relief, but it's essentially a bandaid and it's not addressing what
is causing your health challenge.
And so then once we kind of uncover what the hidden stressors are to the
whatever health challenge you approach us with, then we create a completely
systematic type of protocol that does encompass strategic supplementation
as needed, but really, really prioritizes strategic personalized
nutrition, at home detox therapies...
'cause typically if you've got a health issue, you've got a detox.
And it's not the type of detox that you think where it's like a juice
cleanse or, you know, a, you're starving yourself for a few days.
It's not like that.
And then we address a lot of like nervous system regulation because
one thing that leads people to conventional doctor is chronic stress.
Chronic stress is typically the number one cause of.
Any type of health imbalance because you wanna look all the way upstream
to what causes, you know, metabolic issues that can manifest into.
Illnesses, disease, health challenges, whatever.
And it typically stems from stress.
So long story short, we spend a lot of time with every client.
We do a lot of sleuthing.
We're like detectives to figure out what is actually causing your symptoms,
and then we spend hours creating protocols and plans for every single
client where conventional medicine, they're with you for those 15 minutes.
And then that's it.
Bye-bye.
See you in, you know, like two months.
Yeah.
And that, that's really, interesting as far as the, the approaches
and the differences in, how, how you're approaching these.
I want to dig into some of that a little more cuz there's a, there's a lot of
information there and, for those that are like not quite, how do I wanna say this?
I wanna make sure that we're really understanding the difference between the
upstream and the downstream approach.
So, when we're talking about a, a situation where someone comes in and
they have symptoms, they are, are facing specific challenges, the traditional
approach is to, to go to a doctor and to have those, those challenges treated.
And what I hear you saying though is we may not necessarily be
addressing the underlying issues.
And so understanding holistically how all of the factors that
someone is experiencing in their lives, are affecting.
How they're feeling.
Mm-hmm.
So the question that comes to my mind is, How do you, because, when I, when I
think about my life and I think about, you know, all of the possible things
that could be contributing, could be affecting, the way that I feel at any
given moment, it's like, oh my gosh.
That's like, that's, that's overwhelming, right?
when I think about like, physical health, mental health, relational
health, my environment mm-hmm.
You know, that I'm in, I mean there, there's just, there's
what I'm eating, right?
There's, there's so many factors that, that go into that.
So how do you start to understand how those interplay?
Cuz I mean I, I would imagine it gets complex very quickly when
you're trying to understand the intersectionality of all of those factors.
Yeah, it does get very overwhelming and that's why anybody that's
on a healing journey gets.
Very overwhelmed very quickly cuz if they go on Instagram, they see
people saying, oh my gosh, you need to get osmosis tap water cuz
there's parasites in your tap water.
Or oh, you know, you're, the air you're breathing is infiltrated with mold spores
from outside or in your house or whatnot.
and oh my gosh, if you're working at a computer all day, you're getting emf.
So there's like always a bombardment.
And yes, we live in a toxic world, but.
Instead of getting overwhelmed about everything that we're
coming into contact with,
the two priorities that you want to kind of focus on and prioritize
initially in your plan is nervous system regulation and sleep.
Because if you have a dysregulated nervous system, meaning...
let's say you are like a CEO of a company and you're in back
to back meetings every day.
You could barely take a break.
You have a very high demand job, and then let's say you have to come
home and manage your family time.
Your nervous system is always on high alert.
It's always scanning for the future and trying to anticipate what's
going to happen because your nervous system also wants to protect you.
It wants to prepare you for what could happen in the future, and so we call
that like sympathetic dominance, where you're just always kind of on, on, on!
Or scanning your environment or anticipating what's gonna happen in
the future where you can't turn that off and turn on your calming part of
the nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system where you can feel safe.
And so a lot of people will say like, okay, I'm working on my root cause.
All right.
I.
Like, okay, let's use an example.
Somebody has Hashimotos, which is autoimmunity of the thyroid.
They go to a conventional doctor, they prescribe them thyroid medication
like Synthroid, and then they come to a functional health practitioner.
The functional health practitioner runs a bunch of functional labs, does different
assessments, and they find out, oh, you have, you know, like gut dysbiosis, which
is a gut imbalance of the bacterial flora.
Or you have leaky gut or something's going on in the gut and.
One root cause for Hashimotos is leaky gut or a gut dysbiosis, but there's
many other causes like mold could cause it, parasites could cause it, chronic
stress because of the HPA access.
There's, you know, again, there's a lot of different causes,
but let's say they uncover.
A lot of the contributing causes, and this person is taking all the
supplements and going on like a gut cleanse and doing detox protocols at
home, like castor oil packs and whatnot.
But then she's not managing her sleep, she's not managing her stress.
She's in a very high stress job.
She's juggling work and kids and family and her own life,
and her nervous system is.
On high alert or let's say she has trauma in her past that she hasn't addressed,
cuz that's also a big roadblock.
Sure.
To healing yourself as trauma.
or you just don't feel safe in your body.
Let's say you have like a chronic, you know, health issue that
you think about all the time.
The first.
Step to any healing plan is feeling safe in your body and learning how
to regulate your nervous system.
And sometimes that requires people to make uncomfortable changes, right?
Maybe sometimes.
And of course, not everybody has the privilege to like, you know, change
hours on their job or find a new job or change those aspects of their life.
Others do have the benefit of being, well, you know what?
I'm gonna.
Go, I'm gonna go on like a sabbatical for six months to
focus on my healing or whatever.
You know, everybody's circumstances are different.
But what we can all work on is regulating our nervous system.
And typically that requires, like somatic practices.
There's so much, there's only so much like talk therapy that somebody can do
if they don't feel safe in their body.
Yeah.
Because those deep emotions of not feeling safe or dealing with
trauma, that's very somatic.
Meaning that it's, it's physically within the body.
Yeah.
You know?
so.
That's what I think is the priority is working on nervous
system regulation and sleep.
Because if you are not sleeping well, you're not giving your body
what it needs in order to turn on all of its healing mechanisms.
Yeah.
So I would say those are the two first things you wanna master and then your body
will create this resilience where it can.
Eradicate, you know, parasites that you come in contact with.
It can build a robust immune system so that if you do have like acute
mold exposure somewhere, your body can detox it, you can methylate, you
can detox, you can eliminate, and you can withstand all of our environmental
toxins that we come in contact all the time, especially ems, because we have
a really strong terrain that can be resilient against life's ups and downs.