Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Evan Brand. Thanks for joining me. I'm a board certified

holistic nutritionist, a functional nutritional therapy practitioner, and I run an online

functional medicine practice. What is functional medicine in case you're new to this stuff? Well,

let's say you go to a gastroenterologist for stomach pain, IBS.

They'll likely send you home with some sort of prescription, maybe an antipspasmatic medication or maybe an acid blocking medication and send you on your way.

Good luck. See you next year.

If there's a more severe issue, such as bleeding in the stool, maybe they'll

say, okay, we need a colonoscopy or possibly further invasive testing. Now, the functional

medicine approach is going to say, okay, well, why is there blood there? Let's use a stool test

to investigate what type of infections upstream may be causing that.

So we may find parasites, worms, h. pylori, other bacterial overgrowth problems.

We may find yeast and fungal issues, which would explain the client's brain fog and fatigue and sugar cravings and white-coated tongue, the thrush issue that we find.

In the case of depression and anxiety, you go to the therapist who maybe refers you to a psychiatrist.

You go home with a boatload, potentially, of pharmaceuticals, maybe an antipsychotic, maybe an antidepressant,

maybe it's just one thing, maybe it's just lexapro and that's it and you go home.

Functional medicine looks at it and says, well, why are they depressed and anxious?

Is it because of this trauma?

Is it the move?

Is it the relationship is failing?

Is it the home that has mold and is creating to

some some sort of neural inflammation problem and then that's driving the anxiety and depression

because that happens all the time is it the bacterial issues in the gut driving anxiety

...