Dr. Mark Hyman explains asthma through functional medicine, tracing it to environmental toxins, gut health, and food sensitivities rather than treating symptoms alone. He focuses on finding and fixing root causes instead of just managing the condition.
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. So the question this week is, what about asthma? What causes it? What can I do about it? How do I get rid of these terrible symptoms that I have? Well, asthma is a big problem. It affects millions and millions of people. It's increasing every day in America. and why is it increasing? It's increasing for a lot of reasons. One, increasing environmental toxins, increasing pollution, increases in food sensitivities and gut problems, increasing use of antibiotics and medication that disturb our normal gut, and foods that are funky foods, foods that are frankenfoods, that are altered proteins that are found in common foods we eat like wheat and dairy. All these things can trigger asthma. The question is, What do you do about it? Well, it's very systematic. In functional medicine, we focus on finding the root cause. Most conventional treatment focuses on suppressing the symptoms. I had a patient in their day, she was 42 years old, she'd actually died twice from respiratory symptoms due to her allergies. We call it anaphylaxis, which is a severe allergy reaction. She had to be coated with paddles to wake her up. She had 42 different sprays, pills, potions that she was taking every day prescribed by the top doctors at Harvard. She'd seen the lung doctor, the immunologist, the allergist, everybody was trying to fix her and no one could fix her because they weren't asking the right question. They were saying, Gee, how do we suppress inflammation? Not what's the cause of the inflammation? A very different perspective. And that's the perspective we take in functional medicine, getting to the root cause. So for her, She came to see me and I did some tests and said, Gee, what is it that's irritating your immune system? And we looked through the common causes. Is it food and allergens? Is it environmental allergens? Is it mold? We just asked a few simple questions. Is it something going on in her gut and the bacteria in her gut, which are altered, the microbes, bacteria? Is it a toxin? Sometimes it's environmental toxin or pollution, stress, poor diet, all these things are potential triggers for asthma and all chronic disease. In her case, we found she had very high antibodies to gluten. So she had celiac disease that was completely missed by the top medical school and university in the country because they don't think that, gee, food might have something to do with disease. What a concept. One professor there said, Gee, if food was medicine, I would have learned about it in medical school. Not a very good use of logic, in my opinion. What did I do for her? I simply removed the things that were a problem, got rid of the gluten, cleaned up her gut, got rid of the bad bugs, put in good bugs, fuel nutrients, fish oil, vitamin C, zinc, a few simple things helped her body restore and rebalance. And within six weeks, she was off every medication, no symptoms, no allergies, no hives, no asthma, which were occurring even on her medication regimen. So we have a very simple rule in functional medicine. If you're standing on attack, It takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. Get the TAC out and you don't need the aspirin. And that's really the focus of functional medicine, fixing the cause. So for asthma, it's a very big problem because we have done a lot of things to our bodies over the course of the last 50 years that have triggered this epidemic of asthma. We have increased our C-section rates, for example, where many, many children, almost half or more of children, are being born by C-section. And when that happens, they don't go through the birth canal, and they don't get the bacteria from the mother's vagina in their intestinal tract, and that prevents them from normally developing healthy gut flora, which is important to a healthy immune system. They might not be breastfed, which again, impedes their immune development. They might be fed foods early, like gluten and dairy, which can trigger an immune reaction in an immature immune system. They might have been taking lots of antibiotics for sore throats or ear infections, which also create disturbances in the gut floor. And all these things over time will trigger more allergies, more inflammation, more problems. So the goal here is to get rid of the things that are a problem and to help the body reset. And what we do is very simple. We get rid of the bad stuff. We take care of the foods that might be a problem. Gluten and dairy are the most common for asthma in particular. And then we put in things that the body needs to heal. We clean up the gut. There may be yeast issues. There may be bad bugs that are growing in there. We clean those out. And then we put in good things, healthy bacteria, probiotics. In fact, in one study they found that if pregnant women who had high risk of giving birth because they had a history or their family had a history of allergies, if they gave the pregnant women acidophilus during pregnancy, there was a 50% reduction in asthma and allergies and runny nose and eczema in the kids who were born to women who actually took probiotics. So very simple intervention. very low risk, very powerful. And these are the kinds of things that we do with functional medicine to help reset the body. So take out the bad stuff, put in the good stuff, your body knows what to do. Now I'd like to hear from you. Have you had asthma? What causes it for you? Do you know? What's worked to help it? And what hasn't? Why don't you share your experiences with us at drhyman.com so you can help others and we can help you. And if you like this house call, Sign up at our website to get it every single week. And share this with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. There are many people suffering with asthma. And please submit your questions so next week I can make a house call with you. Thanks for joining me.
