Of oak trees, roots, terrain…and pandemics

My parents’ house, my home, is surrounded by majestic century-old oaks. I have always been deeply in awe of them and in love with all of them, they represent “home” to me.

A couple of days ago, we suddenly and very unexpectedly said goodbye to one of them.

We hadn’t noticed anything. No dried branches, no sign of disease, lots of beautiful leaves all summer long that had just started turning yellow.

I heard a thud, as I was just walking behind the front door. I opened…and was shocked to see it on the ground.

Fallen oak tree, Pandemic within the pandemic, signs and symptoms root cause resolution in functional medicine and functional nutrition

The tree looked so "healthy", we thought it did at least…

Listening to signs and symptoms and going to the roots, functional medicine root cause resolution

Most likely, it had been showing some signs for a very long time. And we were not paying attention. We were busy and taken by our lives and didn’t notice the signs. We didn’t “listen”. Something major was happening at the roots though, as it got so evident when they were uncovered.

What happened made me think again of what is going on in the world today, and about how the Covid epidemic is actually interacting with or maybe the tip of the iceberg of another very real and mostly invisible epidemic, the one of chronic inflammatory lifestyle disease. I am definitely not the first one to talk about this.

Jeffrey Bland, the godfather of functional medicine, already at the beginning of the current pandemic referred to it as the “pandemic within the pandemic" [1] and Richard Horton, in a comment on the medical journal The Lancet, defined the Covid 19 pandemic as actually a “syndemic”, in which the acute respiratory syndrome due to the virus is interacting with an array of non-communicable diseases in specific populations [2].

We hear this type of comments all the time: “He/she was healthy….and yet Covid/a heart attack/a stroke/…. fill in the blanks… hit hard”. But there are roots to these events too.

We got used not to tune into our bodies, not to listen, very often to ignore and suppress the signs and symptoms our bodies are sending. I did it too for many years, until my own rather lucky wake-up call. Sometimes I still do it. But those signs and symptoms are there to inform and guide us. And the roots below them need to be explored.

In functional nutrition we do just that: we listen, we go down to the roots and we work on those roots as well as on the terrain the roots are planted in. Most often the core of our work is actually on that terrain and enough to see big changes in the “branches”.

What is functional nutrition? You can learn more here.

What about you? Are you really listening to your body?

recurring symptoms root cause resolution, recurring headaches root cause, recurring sinus infections root cause, stubborn heartburn root cause

What is that recurring headache telling you?
Or your recurring (sinus) infections?
Or that stubborn heartburn?
Or your allergies?
Or your chronic pain?
What about your fatigue?
And your mood swings?
Those difficulties staying focused?
Or your insomnia?
Or…?

Are you just popping in a pill to suppress the symptom and go on with your life? Are you self-medicating with caffeine/alcohol/drugs/sugar / shopping/… to go through the day? Or are you hiding yourself so that others won’t notice?

These types of symptoms are often invisible from the outside; you might even be the only one to know about them. Very often there is nothing even noticeable on standard labs (until quite late), and you might even have been told they are all in your head, or to take a pill and deal with the rest.

What are you really dealing with? I’d love to hear from you.

And if you’re ready to go on your functional nutrition exploration journey to find your body’s messages, understand the roots and shift your terrain, I’d love to be your guide. Get in touch for a free 20-minute call to find out whether I am the right person for you!

Or if you need, in this especially challenging time, feel free to use those 20 minutes just to be heard.

PS Everyone is well and nobody (human and not) was hurt. We have been so extremely lucky. PPS Some months ago I wrote a series of blog posts on the lifestyle basics to support our immune system. You can find them at the following links:

#5: Relationships