The widespread adverse health effects from 9/11 and recent hurricanes including Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma and Maria have greatly increased the public’s awareness that serious health consequences can result from exposures to molds, toxic chemicals, and other environmental substances. However, the health consequences from these events are merely the tip of a rapidly expanding iceberg.
A persuasive body of scientific evidence has documented that, in a growing segment of our population, a rapidly increasing and complex toxic body burden is contributing to a variety of multi-system, chronic, and debilitating conditions and diseases. The resultant adverse and expensive impacts on the quality of life in these patients are reaching an alarming proportion. It is therefore imperative that these insights be widely disseminated throughout the healthcare system and that focused attention be given to improving the accurate diagnosis and effective treatments of these types of diseases.
Diagnostic tools must effectively expose, quantify, and define the diversity of conditions that can result from these contributors. They must also assess the status of affected organ functions, individual body burdens and susceptibilities to specific exposures, while also providing for the monitoring of treatment success. Treatment must address the actual causes and effectively remove individual toxicants. It must also optimize the individual’s organ system functions, detoxification pathways, and nutritional state, while also accommodating individually specific detoxification genes of biotransformation where applicable. Prevention must focus on early recognition of the causes of various conditions, clean up the environment and diet, and optimize nutritional status.
The goal of this course is to address the significant gap in the knowledge base of many clinician’s, as well as in their competence and performance in the above areas, relative to the available science regarding detoxification. Clinical recognition and action by healthcare professionals is critical to timely diagnosis and management of patients with toxic body burden.
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss the effects of toxins on the body.
- Implement up-to-date concepts and modalities to help diagnose those patients with exposure to molds, toxic chemicals, and other environmental substances.
- Apply objective laboratory testing to develop patient-specific detoxification protocols.
- Utilize practical take home information to help treat those patients with environmental exposure in the outpatient setting.
- Apply the wealth of presented information to improve patient outcomes by integrating properly sequenced therapy and extended laboratory evaluations during appropriate follow‐up to restore and maintain patients’ health.