Always Congested? Then Do This!

Hey everybody, it's Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week we're going to talk about congestion, stuffy nose, headaches, and the difference between sugars. So let's take a look at our first question.

Hey, Dr. Mark Hyman. I'm always congested. I've gone through a gut healing protocol. I'm living a very organic and chemical free life. My intestine is great, digestion is great, but I'm always congested. My nose is always stuffy. I do have two Pomeranian dogs, and I think that might be a culprit, but I think that they're allergies, so let me know. Thanks.

So congestion, stuffiness, runny nose, post-nasal drips, sinus problems, they're all signs of inflammation. And the question is, what's causing the inflammation? What's the trigger? As we talk about in functional medicine, we get to the root of the problem. At the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, we see so many patients with these problems and we really work to solve the root cause. And it's not that hard actually. It's not about taking steroid nasal sprays and decongestants and allergy pills and, you know, those can be symptomatically helpful, but they're not dealing with the problems. It's like putting a Band-Aid on something or turning the mopping up the floor while the sink's overflowing. Figure out that the sink's overflowing, turn the sink off, then you don't have to mop up the floor. So what we look at as the causes of sinus problems are allergies. Now, it can be food, so it can be dairy is the biggest one, gluten, other foods depending on the person. And there's ways of testing for that. There's different kinds of allergies. There's the acute, like you eat a strawberry or peanut, your throat swells up, you can't breathe, you die. And then there's the low-grade allergies, which are more called sensitivities. And these aren't things that you're gonna die from, but that can make your life miserable. And they're a different type of part of your immune system that's working on this. And that can be from, you know, all sorts of different foods. It can be from environmental allergens, which are often the first kind. And it could be your dog, like you said. I think that's a big thing to think. It could be mold in your environment. It could be other issues, dust allergies that you're not aware of. So that's really important to dig in and figure that out. But most of the time it's food. and other times it's environmental stuff like cats, dogs, dust, mold, all those things are real. So you kind of got to dig in and there are blood tests so you can figure it out. There's blood tests for the delayed allergies, the mild ones, there's blood tests for the IgE and if you have a dog, I would certainly check that out. But what I do with allergy patients, what we do or people who have chronic sinus issues, we do elimination diet. So something like 10-day detox or Eat Fat, Get Thin really works well. and if you get better, then you know it's something you're eating, right? Or something you're not eating that you were now eating when you go on the new plan. And then there's supplements I use. I use things to help reset the gut. So you might need to treat yeast issues, you might need to treat bad bacteria in there, you can give people certain supplements that can help like probiotics, quercetin, which is a very powerful herbal medicine that can actually help to reduce the inflammation. And so there's a number of different things we can use to help people's gut heal probiotics, zinc, evening primrose oil, all kinds of things that we can use to help allergies. So it's really pretty straightforward for most people, but you kind of got to dig in a little bit. So that's how I would deal with this chronic congestion and stuffy nose stuff.