The Hormonal Orchestra
There are 11 systems in the human body:
- Muscular system
- Respiratory system
- Digestive system
- Integumentary system (Skin)
- Skeletal system
- Circulatory system (cardiovascular)
- Excretory system (urinary)
- Reproductive system
- Nervous system
- Lymphatic system
- Endocrine system (hormone)
Each system has a very special and important job. When one system is out of balance, our entire body feels the impact. This is especially true if there’s too much or too little of one of your hormones. Because each one is responsible for so much of the communication between one system and another, you feel awful when they’re out of tune.
Why is balance so important when we talk about hormones? Think of an orchestra. It doesn’t matter if each musician is a genius on their own. All the musicians must play in harmony to bring us an incredible performance. If one person is out of sync, the whole melody changes and the performance suffers. There are over 50 hormones in the human body, each coordinating different functions. The balance between them is paramount. Just like an orchestra, if your body produces too much or too little of a particular hormone, performance suffers.
The endocrine (hormone), nervous, and digestive systems can either positively or negatively influence your quest for weight loss. But issues are hard to pinpoint if you focus on each system separately. They don’t really work independently. So if you want to improve one, you need to look at how all three are cooperating (or not).
Naturopathic and functional medicine use this approach to assess patients. Instead of looking at one system, or even one symptom within that system, and prescribing a pill to fix it, a naturopathic doctor will investigate which other systems might be involved. Usually, symptoms are the result of many systems in the body being out of balance for a long time.
Imagine a supermarket chain receives complaints that there’s never any toothpaste on the shelves. Is the problem that the stocking clerk isn’t stocking the shelves properly? Has the manager forgotten to order more? Is there a hold-up with the delivery from the manufacturer? Spending time re-training your stocking clerks won’t solve a problem with your distributor. Likely all the systems could use a little tweaking. But if you don’t investigate, you waste resources fighting the wrong problem.
People often approach health as a one-step process. If you take this pill, or get this treatment, you’ll magically be healthy again. Unfortunately, poor health, chronic disease, weight gain, and pain are usually caused by multiple factors. Thus, they generally require a multifaceted treatment plan. Persistent acne, for example, is commonly caused by a hormone imbalance. A topical cream isn’t a real solution, because when we stop the cream, the acne simply returns.
To make an accurate assessment, I also need to look at diet, lifestyle, gut health, and food sensitivities. A long-term answer requires looking into all the systems in the body that could be responsible for acne.
In the case of weight loss and gain, your diet probably isn’t the whole story either. When patients come in complaining of persistent challenges with losing weight, I ask about their diet and activity levels, of course. But I also look at what might be going on with their hormones.
My main philosophy in medicine is that the systems in our bodies are all connected. We are one unit, one body. In fact, I have a hard time understanding how many physicians don’t look at the body this way. To me, a fundamental part of medicine is how deeply connected and intertwined each body system is. Without looking at the whole picture, we might be doing our patients a disservice.