Dr. Deborah Wood-Schade, D.C, C.C.S.P.

03/28/2023

Amazing

"Waiting hours under tropical rain, I got this Golden-tailed Sapphire singing on a perch!" 🌈
Location: Wildsumaco, Ecuador

Credit: Emin Yogurtcuoglu (https://www.instagram.com/birddetective/)

03/28/2023

Hmmm its got
Me thinking!

🤧

03/28/2023

Too pretty to eat!

Very nice Focaccia bread art 🙂 See the recipe & more: http://creativedesignjoy.com/yummy-focaccia-bread-recipe/ 🙂

08/12/2020

The awareness of the importance of the gut to overall health has skyrocketed in the past decade. One recent example of the surge in knowledge about the connection between gut health and systemic health is rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Inflammatory biomarkers are known to emerge years before a definitive diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis is possible. One theory dating back to the beginning of the 20th century suggested that RA emerges from mucosal tissues and dysbiosis, and only later do problems occur in the synovial fluid and joints. More recent research supports this chain of events!

07/09/2020

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06/25/2020

Self-care isn’t selfish, it is necessary to stay strong, healthy, and grounded. Having a healthy relationship with yourself can improve your confidence, mental state, productivity, sleeping habits; and overall health. Some ways to put this into practice are journaling, alone time, personal days, eating healthy, and treating yourself to something that you enjoy once in a while!

06/25/2020

If you have the wrong bacteria in your gut, this may be the reason that you are struggling to lose weight. Restoring gut microbial balance can reset the body’s metabolism. If you’re struggling to lose weight, consider visiting your Functional Medicine doctor to have your gut bacteria checked out.

06/19/2020

Anxiety is a symptom—a symptom that has a root cause.
In functional medicine we seek to unearth the root cause and address the system at that level. It’s like having a splinter in your foot…do you remove the splinter or just take the painkillers to shut the body up?
Now if you are living with anxiety then you might be thinking you’d take a thousand splinters in the foot than one more debilitating episode. We understand that.
But supporting the root cause doesn’t mean ignoring symptoms or leaving you to deal with them.
Supporting anxiety with functional medicine means figuring out why you have the symptoms in the first place, while also offering you some relief and tools to manage the anxiety in the day to day. Please reach out and ask us how we can support you.

06/17/2020

In order to keep up with a busy life, maintaining optimal health and an optimal brain is a top priority. When your brain is functioning well, you have more energy and a better quality of life. Here are 6 things you can do to improve your brain function:
1. Eat plenty of healthy fats
2. Eat colorful plant foods
3. Exercise improves memory, learning, concentration and boosts your energy.
4. Actively relax
5. Avoid sugar, trans fats, high-fructose corn syrup, food additives, and preservatives.
6. Eat protein at every meal

06/14/2020

A functional approach recognizes that the immune system is in charge of both inflammation and anti-inflammation. Inflammation is needed in the body to allow the immune system to do its job and clean up the ‘bad guys’. The problem of auto-immunity and metabolic syndrome is not that there is inflammation, it is that there is something confusing the body to attack itself and cause chronic inflammation. Functional medicine exposes the root cause of the confused immune system and when we support this, the body can realign the natural immune response!

06/10/2020

The key to optimal health is what you are putting into your body. Nutrient deficiencies and toxicity from a poor diet are linked to nearly all modern health conditions.
Some of the ways food prevents disease include:

- Decreasing inflammation – Inflammation is the body’s attempt to heal itself after an injury, defend itself against foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria, and repair damaged tissue. Inflammation’s job is to heal, but in many cases, it also contributes to chronic diseases.
- Balancing hormones – Abnormal changes to your hormones can lead to accelerated aging, diabetes, obesity, fatigue, depression, low mental capacity, reproductive problems, and an array of autoimmune diseases.
- Balancing blood glucose levels – Poorly managed blood sugar levels can cause cravings, fatigue, neurological damage, mood disorders, hormonal imbalances, and more. It’s important to balance your blood sugar levels to avoid these symptoms and possible illnesses.
- Alkalizing the body – Low-quality processed foods make the body more acidic, which allows diseases to thrive more easily. An alkaline diet helps to prevent that from happening.
- Eliminating toxins – In modern society, we are bombarded by chemicals from our diet and environment. Toxicity contributes to inflammation, autoimmune diseases, infertility, hypothyroidism, fibromyalgia, etc!

05/28/2020

How can Functional Medicine help patients experiencing allergies?

By looking upstream to identify root causes, you can create a downstream impact that can dramatically improve patient outcomes! As the result of an underlying immunological issue, allergic and atopic diseases increase inflammatory burden and put patients at risk for developing other conditions. With health resilience playing a crucial role in the outcome of disease, supporting the underlying causes of atopic diseases may strengthen the immune system response. As seasonal irritants like pollen begin to emerge, patients may be experiencing allergy symptoms that could be confused for more serious illness and might prevent the immune system from mounting a robust response to novel infections. Support can include appropriate laboratory testing, targeted supplementation, and steps to reduce gut inflammation.