How Toxins Affect Your Health – Diagnosing Toxicity

How do you even know if toxicity is affecting you? The symptoms are different from person to person, but when you are trained to see them, the clues are consistent. I always take a good look at my patients through my detox glasses.

Remember Tony’s tiredness and allergies? Kate’s depression and weight gain? Robert, in his sixties, suffers from unpredictable bowels, which only adds more stress to his high-pressure job. Told he has IBS, he assumes it’s something he has to live with and is not something he can fix on his own.

Tony’s, Kate’s, and Robert’s symptoms are common among my busy, hardworking patients. So are skin and sinus problems, fatigue and bloating after eating, constipation, headaches, muscle or joint pain, and arthritis-like tendencies as well as a general low-grade state of emotional malaise.

Their different responses show why, in general, doctors and patients today are detox-blind. How would we know that a single protocol of reversing the toxic state could relieve many of their problems, when the problems are all so different? The body’s response to toxicity is a complex web of possible reactions, not a single reaction that looks or feels the same in everyone.

On one level, toxicity goes hand in hand with the buildup of something that Eastern traditions call amma and that we simply call “mucus.” It is responsible for the puffed-up, bloated, heavy, or dulled feeling in body and mind that is so common today. At the next level, the toxic irritation goes deeper, causing allergic reactions to everyday things. And on yet another level, it stimulates the body’s immune sys­tem to get hyperactive and make mistakes in what it’s fighting; it starts attacking the body’s own cells and tissues, causing autoimmune disor­ders from gluten intolerance to arthritis and others.

What’s the consistent story behind the different cases? All these symptoms of dysfunction have as their root cause a state of irritation and mucus formation. And all of them begin to get cleared up when we remove the conditions that cause the irritation and facilitate the elimination of mucus.