Put Your DNA in the Right Environment

I'm always interested in integrated approaches, whether applied to medicine, relationships or the environment.

I was browsing the most September/October edition of Alternative Therapies this afternoon and the following quote from Dr. Bethany Hays of True North, a functional medicine and healing arts center in Maine caught my eye:

"I believe that if your DNA is not expressing the human being that you really wish you could be, you've got to put your DNA in a different environment."

Dr. Hays, an obstetrician originally, is now committed to functional medicine, which is variously known as complementary, integrative, or natural medicine. Dr. Hays believes that when a patient does not like the way their body is functioning, it's time to start exploring what part of the patient's environment needs to change:

• The physical environment of the air your breathe and water you drink
• The nutritional environment, which includes the bacteria in your system
• The inter-cellular environment where cells pass information and nutrients back and forth
• The psychosocial/spiritual environment.

In the article, Dr. Hays went on to say:

"What we learned from the human genome project is that your life isn't written in your genes. It's written in the interaction between your genes and the environment. I can't change your genes, but I can help you change the environment if you're willing to make the changes."

Dr. Hays is a pretty smart doc, as she knows that patients are coming to a doctor to get the biochemistry--the lab tests that describe what's going on in their bodies. I just did that and wrote about it (scroll down to see my journey with lab testing of late). Dr. Hays gets her patients engaged in the education process long enough to help teach them to change the environment that they're putting their DNA in.

If you live up in the Northeast, you may want to check out True North and Dr. Hays. If you want to read the rest of the article, take a look. She has some interesting things to say about hormone replacement therapy and how hot flashes in perimenopausal women are likely to be more related to adrenaline or noaradrenaline and the adrenals and only secondarily to estrogen and the ovaries.

Dr. Hays makes the case Dr. Rodier makes all the time about cellular communication, namely that, in the example of hot flashes, all the little hormones talk to each other and are in relationship with one another and if you don't get the relationships, you can mess up Mother Nature's system rather rapidly with unwanted side effects.