CONDITIONS WITH NO DIAGNOSIS

MANY INDIVIDUALS HAVE HAD YEARS OF INVESTIGATIONS BUT HAVE NOT ACHIEVED A DIAGNOSIS IN MAINSTREAM MEDICINE.

Their condition will have no name. They may have many different symptoms affecting many different parts of their body. Indeed their symptoms may keep changing and shifting around. For these people Dr Alex works out what ‘physiological components’ are involved and what the primary issue is, and what developed as a consequence or compensation, and treat accordingly.

Also, Dr Alex can work with individuals who have developed a plethora of medical problems but who don’t have a ‘resounding diagnosis’ that holds everything together. This is possible because Dr Alex works across  clinical specialities rather than within one speciality, and because she can spend as much time as is necessary (sometimes hours) with a patient to get the whole nine yards. When she has developed a view of a ‘Coherent / Cohesive Diagnosis‘, she will then relay it back to your GP / Hospital Consultant for their consideration and/or treat you accordingly.

We have developed a special type of medicine just for both these individuals which uses incoming data and clinical research data in a new way:

New Individual Medicine^TM

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ISSUES WITH A DIAGNOSIS BUT NO EFFECTIVE TREATMENT

OFTEN PEOPLE PRESENT TO DR ALEX’S CLINIC WITH A NAMED CONDITION BUT THE STANDARD TREATMENTS HAVE BEEN INEFFECTIVE.

This is because those treatments have been developed for the ‘what’ (the condition with the label), but the ‘why’ for you is different. So you need treatment directed at your own ‘why’ if your illness is ever going to recede.

Alternatively it is because you have been treated on a ‘lowest common denominator (LCD)’ basis with standard medicines, but the ‘LCD stuff’ that is common between you and other people with the same named condition, is only a fraction of your total profile.

Dr Alex will need to ask you many many questions to ‘work it out’. But gladly for these purposes she has on hand the powerful:

New Individual Medicine^TM

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DUSTBIN DIAGNOSES

A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE ‘CODED’ IN MAINSTREAM MEDICINE AS HAVING ‘CONDITION X’ BECAUSE THEY *DON’T HAVE CONDITION Y. They get thrown in a ‘diagnostic dustbin’.

An example is Chronic Fatigue and CFS. People who have ongoing fatigue without any of the barndoor mainstream medical causes of ‘tiredness’, get labelled as having ‘Chronic Fatigue Syndrome’. In reality, ‘CFS’ isn’t even the same as ‘Chronic Fatigue’.

No two people with a dustbin coding are the same, that’s why there are almost no satisfactory treatments for these individuals in mainstream medicine – it’s just where they are ‘put’ so that investigations and referrals can cease. With a label – but at a dead end.

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GUT / GASTROINTESTINAL CONDITIONS

THE GUT is the engine of the rest of the body – affecting everything from how your immune system is behaving, to disposition towards obesity, to how your brain is working. Dr Alex therefore often works with the gastrointestinal tract for ‘non-GIT’ issues.

Much of the influence of the gut on your wellbeing globally is due to the ‘Gut Microbiome’ – which is in turn affected by antibiotics, ‘dysbiosis’ & infections. And the integrity of the structure and function of the gut lining, disturbed in LEAKY GUT. In addition Dr Alex works with:

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CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE

CVS conditions are very tricky to treat, because the heart is complicated, the physician needs to be able to interface carefully and knowledgeably with mainstream treatments – and there is a lot at stake. The benefits of improving and safeguarding your heart/blood vessel function are immeasurable in terms of length of life, and quality of life.

Here are some heart and blood vessel conditions Dr Alex works with routinely:

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RESPIRATORY PROBLEMS

How your ‘respiratory system is’ tells a Specialist Physician a lot about your health and where the ‘glitches’ may be. A wheeze for example is utterly different from frequent infections.

Treating problems in the lungs, bronchi, ears, nose and throat may involve an overhaul of other systems (eg the immune system) and determining how and why these are not 100% for you. In the process of that, many other problems may fall away. In addition, these are some of the respiratory conditions Dr Alex works directly with:

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IMMUNE-SYSTEM HYPERACTIVITY, CONNECTIVE TISSUE DISEASE & INFLAMMATORY DISORDERS

Dr Alex is a world leader in Specialist Functional & Naturopathic Immunology. Immune system disorders underpin many of the issues that cause long term problems for people – and are very poorly treated in mainstream medicine (because the nuance required to treat immune-system-generated issues has defied pharmaceutics). This is why Dr Alex selected Immunology as one of her PhD subjects.

Here are some of the specifc areas she treats – each of which includes many different disease entities. In addition aberrant immunology is pivotal to many other types of medical disorder featured here.

Dr Alex is also probably the world leader in the Specialist Clinical Application of ‘Neuro-Immunology’, and ‘Psycho-neuroimmunology’ (PNI). Which means she has extra ways of addressing immune system disorders, based on massive research fields, that are totally unique.

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IMMUNE SYSTEM UNDER-PERFORMANCE & RECURRENT / CHRONIC INFECTIONS

It’s a lesser-known fact, in mainstream medicine, that ‘secondary immunodeficiencies’ are actually very common. This is where the immune system is not functioning optimally, not able to do its job properly. This may be for environmental, nutritional or ‘constitutional’ reasons, including because of chronic anxiety or chronic stress, concurrent disease, nutrient-poor first-world foods, and sleep issues. And may even include things like how you use your mobile phone.

Also it is often the case that where there is immune system hyperactivity affecting some branches of the your immunology, with, for example, allergies and inflammation, there are often counterparts which fail to function properly. And where there are any hormonal or chronic psychological issues, the same can apply.

Unbeknown to most people, this doesn’t just lead to chronic infections, or an increased risk of say cancer, but also affects how your brain works, your mood, how your gut and heart work, your eyesight, and how every cell in your body works, including in relation to fatigue.

To identify, investigate and diagnose all this, you need someone with a vast amount of knowledge and expertise, and a special type of professional who can see the joins in things that to you may not even imagine to be rleated. Dr Alex is a global specialist in this field and lectures other professionals.

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MUSCULOSKELETAL DISORDERS & FIBROMYALGIA

‘Musculoskeletal disease’ is a broad term for issues affecting the muscles, tendons, ligaments, fascia, or bones. These elements include ‘connective tissue’ and so the ‘Connective Tissue Disorders’. Muscle and connective tissue are vast components of the human body, so the extent to which someone is in pain or impaired by MS problems can be unimaginable.

People who don’t suffer with musculoskeletal issues generally think of these in terms of local injury. But in fact most of the musculoskeletal disorders Dr Alex treats have their origins in ‘systemic’ issues – i.e. complex disorders affecting body systems – and the muscles, bones, connective tissues are bystander casualties. Even spasm is most often driven by systemic issues.

What is very clear to Dr Alex, from many years of experience, is that using ‘just’ physical therapies to ease these issues is usually woefully inadequate.

While she offers some direct physical therapies (and liaises with other physical therapists where needs be), it is unlikely that she would only be using these to treat you if you suffer with musculoskeletal issues. She would start by searching for the root causes which often reside elsewhere.

Sometimes musculoskeletal issues have a component that is based in the psyche of the individual  – for example, traumatic codings that have led to the body being tensed up by the brain, on an intermittent or sustained basis. Dr Alex is probably world leader in dissipating these codings, where indicated. Thereafter, she ‘resets’ the body.

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DISORDERS AFFECTING THE FEMALE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM & / OR  SEX HORMONES

Very many women are affected by issues relating to their reproductive organs and the normal function of these during different periods of their life.

Many of these are not dealt with especially well in Mainstream Medicine, not least of all because they involve complex interactions among almost all hormones – including adrenal and thyroid, not even just the female sex hormones – AND with many other systems, including the metabolic, immune system and inflammatory pathways.

In addition, female systems are intimately linked with psychological systems and ‘neuro-psychology’, since the brain dynamically moderates and changes many aspects of female body function according to what it perceives (rightly or wrongly) to be ‘stresses’. Be that actual stress, relationships, work demands, nutritive stresses etc.

This is one of the key reasons why Dr Alex developed the advanced clinical applications of Psycho-neuroimmunology (PNI) and Psycho-neuroendocrinology (PNE) – in order to be able to recalibrate the way the brain is influencing the body in relation to female reproductive system function.

In other words, whatever pathways are involved in any female problems that you are having, Dr Alex is here to help.

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DISORDERS AFFECTING THE MALE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM & / OR  SEX HORMONES

One of the strangest things in life is how we assume that guys have totally constant bodies – because they don’t have reproductive cycles. This is simply not the case!

As with many body problems, there are times when men are more physically ‘on course’, with their body systems working really well, and times when they simply aren’t. And like women – albeit not as sharply and not as suddenly – they also have phases during their lives during which things (more gradually) change.

Men are typically poor at vocalising, or being precise in their articulation of, feeling off-colour (apart from man-flu!). And the end result is that they often present for help LATE – later than we would like, and with problems far more advanced or more entrenched than would be ideal.

Dr Alex is very used to picking through to help guys address issues that are causing them problems. And really hopes that if you are a guy with a problem, you book in to see her soon.

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ENDOCRINE / HORMONE SHIFTS & DISORDERS

In Mainstream Medicine, we look at levels of hormones that are at extremes – vastly too high or vastly too low – for normality. Usually this indicates that there is an ‘organic’ problem with the hormone-producing gland (so for example, Addison’s Disease is a medical emergency where the adrenal gland has failed to secrete enough cortisol for essential needs).

In Functional Medicine & Specialist Naturopathic Medicine, and of course New Individual Medicine, in terms of hormone levels, we are looking at hormones in a more nuanced way, and not looking at ‘catastrophic failure’ or ‘critical hyperactivity’ of an endocrine gland. For us there are two major things:

Bigger nuanced shifts that suggest that the shifted hormone is pivotol to how the person is feeling or (mal-)functioning, and possibly the key aberration in the overall mix, and

Smaller shifts that more likely indicate that the hormone levels have changed on account of other shifts that are more pivotal, where the key causative problems are in fact in different sorts of pathways (eg metabolic or immunological)…. which have to be fixed first in order to correct the hormones.

Although these more ‘nuanced’ changes are not life-threatening, they can direly threaten the quality of your life and lead to years of abject misery left untreated – for example, through overwhelming debilitation, loss of resilience to normal pressures of life, vastly aberrant moods, loss of capacity to function in one’s role as a parent, or to learn as a growing child etc.

These ‘non-organic’/’functional’ shifts are neither looked for nor detected via Mainstream Medicine. Dr Alex has on hand tests for these hormonal issues, as well as investigations that show when, for example, the problem is not the level of the hormone, but with the ‘lock and key mechanism’ that enables hormones to work.

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NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS & NEUROPATHIES

This seems like a small section – but the impact for anyone, of having problems of this sort, is beyond words. and most usually neuropathic and neurological problems are, at best, badly treated in Mainstream Medicine and, at worst, dismissed out of hand because they are poorly understood.

Sometimes this is the consequence of therapy – for example, radiation or chemotherapy for cancer – where the survivor is left crucified in some instances.

Other times it is because of longstanding issues such as diabetes that have been missed or not perfectly controlled.

Yet other times, it is because of neural infection – and for this whole group of people, the sometimes lifelong effects of neurological battering, and chronic or reactivate-able infection, can be treated with scorn by Mainstream Neurologists who have not kept up-to-date with scientific findings, leading to immense frustration, sidelining and despair. With the execption perhaps of HIV/AIDS neuropathy.

For other issues it is as a result of neural disease – like the devastating condition of Multiple Sclerosis. These are vast subject areas, with massive individual-to-individual variability, and often gross changes at different times within even a given individual’s life… At best support is offered, but little hope, and relief or steadfast improvement is generally rare due to very poor treatment.

It is important to note that neurological and neuropathic problems can affect the brain and central pathways as well. To add to the mix of problems faced by the person affected.

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MEDICAL ISSUES AFFECTING BRAIN FUNCTION & COGNITION

Illnesses that overtly affect the brain and brain function can be of the most devastating of diseases, leading to a whole loss of Self, the near-complete loss of an Individual – and also to a high burden of care, so other lives are also severely affected both by the care-giving, and by the frustration, and pain, of watching the decline.

In some brain issues there are ‘local’ compromises, and in others, these are more ‘global’.

Global compromises tend to be less obvious initially as they can affect many brain functions, but initially in a less radical way. Some are very innocuous – such as post-traumatic head injury.

Increasingly there are tests that can pick up some of the less obvious issues, sooner. But the tests have to be sought out.

For all brain compromise, Dr Alex beseeches you to present early. It is always the case that we can do more if there is more healthy tissue to work with – and this medicine, while advanced, is not magic. Our aim is always to try and stop progress of disease where possible, to regress established disease if possible, and to create functional and developmental workarounds wherever possible.

For all of these, we need healthy tissue. So please check in to see Dr Alex as soon as possible. The longer you leave it the less we can do, and the more it costs to do much less (which also means that at a tipping point, we will not accept you or your loved one as a client, because there will be very little we can ‘leverage’ to make it worth your effort, and hope).

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RECURRENT HEADACHES & MIGRAINES / DISORDERS AFFECTING PERFORMANCE OR FUNCTION

Any of the other categories of issue (eg gut issues, immune changes) can cause debilitation, weakness, or loss of optimal performance – which is why, when you come to see Dr Alex with any of these things, she will be asking a lot of questions.

Similarly, a presentation of ‘debilitation’ can involve a raft of laboratory tests – though only if the questions can’t pin it down. This is because the possibilities are endless – and often there are several factors working together. For example, sustained psychological strain, hormonal changes, and immune discrepancies frequently occur together.

People with difficult-to-specify ‘loss of optimality’ are often shoe’ed out of the door in Mainstream Medicine. However, in Specialist Naturopathic & Functional Medicine, we recognise that such a presentation may be a collage of many different issues all piled up on top of one another.

In amongst these mish-mash presentations, there is a subset of individuals who present with issues that have been dismissed as non-Central (ie not brain) and non-Neurological… but yet they affect them as if the brain is affected, or the nervous system, or both. And sometimes they also present with recurrent headaches or migraines alongside, even though these issues are not themselves ‘enough’ to cause their wider spectrum of problems.

If you are one of these people, rest assured, you are in good hands ! Dr Alex understands how and why this happens and can set about getting to the cause of your own problems.

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SLEEPLESSNESS / INSOMNIA, NARCOLEPSY & EXCESSIVE SLEEPINESS, AVIATION SICKNESS, JET LAG ETC

It is impossible to overstate the importance of sleep. And the importance of sleep being in a proper ‘diurnal’ rhythm.

Apart from the critical function of sleep to restore and protect your cognitive wellbeing, and outlook on life, and moods, there are crucial hormone, immunological, metabolic and other shifts that occur during the course of a day/night cycle, switched on and off by sleep, that are pivotal to the ENTIRE WELLBEING of your body.

The negative impact of poor sleep on your body is unsustainable in the long term. Similarly the innocuous erosion of relationships and work performance, as well as risks to your personal safety, by disrupted sleep patterns, is criticaly undermining of your wider wellbeing.

During sleep many brain and body systems are also ‘reset’ and ‘worked on’. So one of the fastest ways to return a patient to health with ANY problem they present with, is to get their sleep ‘perfect’.

Indeed if a patient presents to Dr Alex, and as one of their problems they are struggling with sleep, either needing too much or getting too little, that will always be the most pivotal place to start. To not have decent sleep is the biggest possible insult to your brain and body – and many times a problem you have that seems totally unconnected to you, will be the result of your sleep issues.

The opposite is also true – sleep can be disrupted by many things that are affecting the body, and that disruption can be the sentinel sign that alerts an expert Physician to a sometimes-serious underlying issue.

So if you are struggling with INSOMNIA, or HYPERSOMNIA, feel like your sleep is NON-RESTORATIVE, or are a frequent traveller having to deal with JET LAG, please do not ignore it. Please check in to see Dr Alex.

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‘STRESS’, ALL CONDITIONS CAUSED BY STRESS, OR MADE WORSE BY STRESS

Stress is a very poorly understood concept generally – and yet affects every condition, can cause many conditions, and can make any established condition worse.

Because of this discrepancy between the general understanding of stress, and our need, as physicians, to better understand stress, Dr Alex spent 2 years working out what stress actually IS – and from that new understanding, worked out how to fix stress and ALL CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH STRESS.

This is why Dr Alex is the world leader in the highly-scientific fields of Psycho-neuroimmunology – PNI (Mind>Body>Immunity) and Psycho-neuroendocrinology – PNE (Mind>Body>Hormones). As far as we are aware, she alone has determined how to directly leverage these advanced sciences for clinical gain. She has lectured on this – in standing-room-only events – to Physicians at the Royal Society of Medicine in London.

The fact that stress can cause disease or make it much worse is not a small issue. If you have landed a disease that is made worse by stress, what makes you think that you will get rid of the disease, and get better, if you don’t change the way that your individual stress is affecting your individual body…?

Please know that it is a precise thing – YOUR stress will be affecting CERTAIN PATHWAYS in particular ways that are reflective of YOU as an individual. Those pathways need to be expertly identified and the driver – the specific stress and how it is ‘coded’ – that is skewing how they are operating needs to be removed.

This is not a small issue ! And it is certainly not the same as what you will be used to hearing – such as ‘you need to reduce your stress’, or ‘you should do mindfulness’. It is about a very advanced and specialist system for identifying the precise formula of what is making you ill – and also very precisely, getting rid of it, and fixing the problem.

Armed with this unique specialist know-how Dr Alex is also able to use the science to work out how to use the pathways to ADVANCE THE SPEED OR EXTENT OF RECOVERY, over and above any other Physician worldwide. This is important – where relevant and applicable – for people with illness that can no longer be treated by other means, or for people whose backs are really against the wall. For example for some sorts of cancers. It is a powerful, precise weapon in the New Medicine Armoury.

If you have a condition affected by stress, or which came on after a period of stress or trauma – please book in to see Dr Alex.

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EYES & EYESIGHT / AGEING & ANTI-AGEING

Nobody would disagree with the fact that your eyes and your eyesight are very important.

Dr Alex admits that she was late to the table in realising quite the extent to which it is possible to work with eye problems in Specialist Naturopathic Medicine. She was surprised to find out that there are many angles for working with Glaucoma, Cataracts and risk of Cataracts, and Macular Degeneration.

She has though for a very long time worked with people at risk of eye compromise in vascular and metabolic disease, granulomatous disorders (such as TB and sarcoid), collagen diseases such as SLE, in sicca syndromes (such as Sjogren’s) and AIDS. The extent to which the eye reflects systemic wellness cannot be understated and clearly in order to preserve eyesight, it is important to consult with someone who understands and can work with the whole systemic disease.

When talking about working with ageing, Dr Alex often receives a mixed response – because people assume that it is about preventing wrinkles and other visual cues to our advancing years. In fact it is about PRESERVATION OF HEALTH.

If you think about it, in the ideal world we would all be 100% healthy then finally drop dead without disease at a ripe old age. That may be unrealistic at this time – however we should do everything we can to get as close to that as science makes possible.

Anti-ageing medicine is about preventing the debilitation and diseases of old age. And interestingly it is not that different from eye health approached systemically – working to prevent or control metabolic or vascular disease, and collagen disease, or connective tissue disorders. The very approaches for preventing memory loss and for preserving optimal heart function and preventing cancer, are all in the same realm as anti-ageing medicine.

Anti-ageing medicine is also about energy and resilience. The ‘production’ of cellular energy is a process that can take many hits over time – from any negative changes in your hormonal or immune system, through environmental exposures and effects, and so on. Anti-ageing medicine is about correcting those hits and restoring the optimal capacity of cells.

All of this also ties in with genomics – there are companies that specialise in ‘anti-ageing medicine’ who *only do genomic medicine, and even that at a lesser level than Dr Alex. So when you bear in mind the sheer extent of Dr Alex’s expertise in all these different domains, you will know you are in the best hands for your anti-ageing / health preserving / life-enhancing and eyesight medicine.

If you are interested in Genomic Medicine / Epigenetics, please see below.

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DISORDERS OF THE KIDNEYS OR BLADDER

Most people don’t really think about their kidneys – until they are forced to do so.

Renal medicine in Mainstream Medicine is extremely complex and Dr Alex cannot emphasise highly enough how much respect she has for renal physicians. That said, in her experience they can be quite blinkered about even the possibility that a SPECIALIST Physician with expert and indeed unique knowledge in areas such as Functional Immunology & moderation of something called ‘Cytokines’ (which inflict damage on damaged kidneys) can add value.

Indeed it is often the case that people with chronic renal disease are monitored year on year, without any intervention, except, importantly, their blood pressure or diabetes being controlled. And the purpose of this is to detect any drifting or increased drifting of standard kidney function tests from the normal range. However by the time that drift starts to happen, much of the kidney has already been compromised !

Meanwhile there is *a *lot we can do to stem the tide of deterioration – not in all kidney disease, but a lot in some kidney disease, depending on the profile of the disease in question.

If you are someone who has a condition, please contact Dr Alex to see if she can help.

Please note that Dr Alex also provides a service advising other practitioners, doctors and patients on herbs and nutraceuticals that must be avoided in renal disease.

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ISSUES WITH SKIN, HAIR & NAILS

Dr Alex’s interest in skin, hair and nails is less focused on the aesthetic angle, as important as that is to people, and more centred on what an individual’s skin, nails of hair tells her about more general issues.

As with the eye, skin very much reflects the wellbeing of the individual – but unlike the eye, the changes can occur fast, and so can alert the Specialist Physician to other problems early in the process of some sort of imbalance or decline, at a point when that deterioration can be relatively easily reversed. Similarly by watching the skin, we can use it as a barometer for gains that are being made in respect of the ‘constitution’ of other organs. The nails and hair also.

As well as being reflective of a more general problem – like atopy (allergic responses) – furthermore the skin can be one of the organs involved in systemic disease with a significant condition, as in erythema nodosum, or pyoderma gangrenosum.

Again it helps to be working with a Medical Doctor with the highest levels of experience and knowledge in many clinical specialties and the whole of their training in Medicine to call upon, and not a Naturopathic Practitioner who has simply undertaken a diploma training, since the intricacies of diagnostics and pathophysiology are very specialised.

Indeed dermatology is one of the last specialties to be addressed in medical training for this reason – and learning what nails tell you is one of the first areas of training, to alert you to notice everything, also for good reason.

So for example, apart from your nutrutional status (and then across 20 different separate areas of consideration eg amino acids, collagen, minerals etc), skin is refelctive of your neurology, immunology, hormone status (across many facets of endocrinology), cellular function, ageing profile, genomics, microbiota, gut integrity and function cardiac and vascular function, lymphatics, respiratory function and psychology.

If you have noticed changes to your skin, hair or nails, please check in with Dr Alex.

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ISSUES AFFECTING BODY COMPOSITION & STRENGTH

Body composition is a very important issue for many people. Generally people assume that body composition is all about looking good – which is great. However Dr Alex’s key interest in body composition is about health – and the strength and fortitude of an individual.

Dr Alex does help individuals who have a sport or occupational imperative (eg for acting a role, modelling) for a particular composition. This might involve ‘body-sculpting’, or ‘body-building’, or ‘strength-remodelling’ as relevant. And there are ways to do this in a healthy way.

Her expertise in this area is though more focused on RECOVERY and generating as much PRACTICAL RESILIENCE as possible, especially:

> for people who have been debilitated (eg CFS, Fibromyalgia)

> after a period of generalised ill health (eg sepsis) including after being bedridden

> following treatment for serious disease (eg chemotherapy)

> subsequent to interventional oesophageal or laryngeal inflammation that has prevented swallowing, or loss of swallow reflex etc

> after a serious health event (eg myocardial infarction – heart attack).

For each of these, the assessment and ‘prescription’ is to make the best from a poor situation (and where possible, of course, make the poor situation better).

For people who have or have had serious debilitation for example, the focus, while tackling the debilitation, is on regenerating the body to work as best as possible OVERALL given the demands and intentions of the individual. This may not equate to totally being able to remove the debilitation – it will mean getting rid of as much debilitation as possible, and then working on the body to fulfil the best service it can to help *that individual maintain a decent life, able to work, able to keep up with the demands of daily living etc. The focus is on PURPOSE and FUNCTION.

That’s not the same as ‘getting to a body beautiful’. It’s more ‘getting the best body possible for my personal needs’. For people with limited capacity, we do this over a period of time, gradually generating ‘extra oomph’ and then using that ‘oomph’ to generate more wellness. Like bouncing a ball higher each time.

Dr Alex does know a lot about body-building as well (and prides herself on having adapted that knowledge for body work in ill-health). She herself had a serious illness which left her disabled, and so she has great experience of doing this for herself – in a way that best preserves the health that she has, and makes it possible to sustain a high level of output. And though definitely not now ‘body beautiful’, from before this body battering she had abundant experience of personal, significant body-building, running over decades. She has also worked with professional athletes, Olympians (including gold medallists) and many people for whom ‘body perfection’ has been crucial for their intentions or work.

Dr Alex does not work with people who have or have had significant eating disorders (she will work with them for everything other than the eating disorder eg recurrent infections). This is because she believes that this is an area which requires a very high level of specialist focus and is delighted to refer these important individuals on to other professionals.

The same applies to people with addictions that affect their body composition. For example she will work alongside addiction specialists to treat hepatic compromise or malnutirtion in alcoholics – but not the alcohol addiction as such (she does though provide a particular type of psychotherapeutic intervention that treats any relevant causes of the addiction – the drivers – as opposed to the pathways involved with the habit of addiction).

Please do enquire if you have any questions.

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METABOLIC DISORDERS / DISORDERS OF NON-OPTIMAL METABOLISM

Metabolic drifts and shifts crucially provide a massive ‘wobble factor’ within an individual’s platform for health – and therefore also underpin almost all of the ill health that we see.

Everything from allergies to cancer, from eye disease to cardiovascular disease, from physical conditions to learning challenges, have or can have a basis in an individual’s metabolic health, and their metabolic fine-tuning.

In Mainstream Medicine we focus on specific named metabolic conditions – like diabetes mellitus, or conditions with metabolic components, such as hypothyroidism. Increasingly, gladly, there is also ever-increasing focus on metabolic ‘pre-determinants’ of ill-health, like high cholesterol, and insulin resistance. Somewhat bizarrely, though, most of the advice GPs are giving regards the nutritional aspects of even these pivotal issues is scientifically defunct (often by over 30 years)!

In Individual Medicine the focus is on many many many bio-chemical and bio-physiological factors affecting a person’s health, and their energy levels, performance and function. Literally thousands.

And also on the metabolic pathways that are relevant to essential inter-conversions of substances (said ‘substances’ being the critical molecules that are required for absolutely every biological function of the human body! Like hormones, and neurotransmitters, and their precursors)… and the failure to adequately eliminate substances that can jeopardize our health.

Dr Alex has an armoury of tests available to scientifically detect and monitor each and every factor that is relevant to an individual’s metabolic health, or to conditions they have that are underscored by metabolic shifts and drifts.

In addition there are rafts of tests that highlight an individual’s ‘microbiota’ -the populations of micro-organisms that also underpin health and wellbeing.

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CHILDHOOD DISORDERS (selective)

Dr Alex feels very strongly that children could do so much better if they had the benefits of Naturopathic Medicine more often – as generally-speaking, they are not presented to clinic unless they are severely ill and have already had years of failed efforts to find useful avenues for treatment within the mainstream system. Which creates missed opportunities.

When a child has a relatively minor problem, it can be that it would a much bigger problem if they were adult. In other words the relative drift can be far more significant than you can tell, just because they are abound with health and energy, as they are children. So say, for a simple example, because a child has certain eating preferences, they have a deficit of omega-3, they may present with atopic issues which are relatively small. But the actual impact on all their systems of that one drift, can be huge…. it’s just that you can’t ‘see it’. So you might miss that there’s a 5 or 10% lowering of capacity for learning quickly, for example, which you are unlikely to tie in with, say, their eczema… and might not even notice, because you have never seen them, during this school year, at ‘peak’. The impact of which, totted up over a period of years, is massive.

Similarly children get something called ‘Echo Patterns’. This is where they have an illness and ostensibly they recover – but it appears to leave a weakness in their system. So say they have ‘whooping cough’, then for years later, every time they are ill with something else, or stressed, they start coughing. This is because during the initial episode, there was recovery but not the ‘recalibration’ (of whatever – the system, the immune system, relevant biochemical molecules etc). This can also happen after immunizations and antibiotics, both of which can affect many things, including their ‘microbiota’ and immunology.

Among the most useful approaches are herbal medicines, nutraceuticals, acupuncture and acupressure. Dr Alex also practices something else that ‘resets’ (recalibrates) the neurology and psychoneurology of an individual child (appertaining to many circumstances ranging from a physical illness to a psychological trauma, from infections to learning disabilities) – the impact of which is often immediate and appreciable. Acupuncture / acupressure are also painless ways to achieve recalibration.

Herbal medicines and nutraceuticals are of value in so many different situations – ‘constitutionally’, in terms of affected ‘systems’ (eg gut, respiratory system, eyes, nervous system), and more specifically. Specific examples include: constipation, diarrhoea, infantile colic, regurgitation and continued vomitting, poor appetite, food and other allergies, fevers, acute and chronic coughs, measles (and avoiding the complications of measles), mumps, whooping cough, immunizations, ear infections, sleep problems, eczema.

In addition, Dr Alex can work rapidly with a child’s psyche both developmentally and interventionally, to counter specific issues (eg learning problems) or ‘undo’ counter-productive ‘codings’ that are effectively creating top-down stresses on their body systems, thereby skewing, for example, immunity…. all of which adds specific gains and adds to the child’s overall resilience.

Dr Alex often gets emails and cards from grateful parents and young adults who were in a dreadful situation 10 or 20 years ago, but have now just graduated happy and healthy from university… recognising how simple timely interventions have been pivotal to changing the likely trajectory of their lives.

Please enquire if you have any questions. We’re here to help.

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GENETIC / GENOMIC DISORDERS & MITIGATING THE IMPACT OF GENES ON PREDISPOSITION TO DISEASE

For a long while it was believed that genetic disposition resulted in a hopeless situation whereby people with ‘adverse genetics’ (eg a higher predilection for a particular disease) would not ever shake that higher-risk-status off until such time as there is some sort of gene therapy available (ie until a ‘bad’ gene could be deliberately changed, by altering the ‘coding formula’ at the level of DNA to have it create something more favourable). In fact many people still don’t know that this is not, in fact, the state of play.

There is a massive area of genetic research focused at interfering with gene expression – called therapeutic gene modulation. This doesn’t change the gene as such, but does change the expression of the adverse gene. There is also an equivalent which induces the DNA to transmutate by hoodwinking the repair mechanisms into thinking there is an error. All of this is very advanced. And as yet the limitations to this highly-specialised work haven’t been overcome.

However as has often been the case in clinical science, while these extremely high-browed research activites are going on, the point was initially missed that there OF COURSE natural gene modulators – environmental and nutrtional.  This should not come as a surprise – because the body is designed for its biological activities (including gene expression) to reflect our internal and external environments. The brain is also set up to develop that way, thereby reflecting our ‘milieu’. It is not all some pre-determined thing! How your brain and how your body operate reflect YOU.

This is why Dr Alex created ‘New Medicine’ – which is also called ‘Individual and Biographical Medicine’. The point being that every aspect of how your body behaves reflects YOU as an INDIVIDUAL, and carries with it the highs and lows of your life, the knocks, thumps, dents and crashes. Your exposures. Your nutrition. Yes, you carry with you the imprint of your dining.

YES – your biography influences even your genes. How you THINK even alters the expression of your genes in your BODY. This is one of the reasons why Dr Alex spent a long time working out how to deliberately modulate the body from the brain downwards (hence her Specialism in Clinical PNI and PNE).

So while what genes encode IS invariant, whether a gene is EXPRESSED (turned on – or OFF) is modulate-able. By your thoughts, your nutrients and your environmental influences.

GENOMIC Medicine is therefore the high science of conducting tests that work out your Individual ‘SNPs’, and, where not ideal, working to change the encoded outcome. These tests reveal the snippets of information within your genes that determine whether those genes – unmodulated – would favorably or unfavourably influence cardiovascular disease risk, predilection to adverse ageing, your functional immunology, your neural disease predisposition and so on.

And as these are identified, we can also generate AN INDIVIDUAL REPORT explaining how exactly YOU can make certain targeted changes to your nutrition or environment, that either:

> COUNTER the risk of those adverse genes being expressed (ie the genes are still there, but silent) or

> OFFSET the adverse effects of those genes when they do express (so if SNP1 encodes ‘bad Substance A’, we can advise you to take Item B that will negate the adverse effects of Substance A and create the opposite outcome).

With a PhD in four subjects, two of which are Pathology and Molecular Genetics, Dr Alex is one of a select group of people who are permitted to run these tests in the UK. It is the future TODAY. And surprisingly, it isn’t even hugely expensive.

Contact us to find out more ! Related terms for your research are: epigenetics and nutrigenomics.

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CANCER DIAGNOSES – INITIAL & STRATEGIC

Any diagnosis of cancer can have catastrophic effects on the patient – an Individual who often feels that, at the very moment of that diagnosis, they cease to be a PERSON and do indeed become a PATIENT forever.

There are phenomenal professionals in many amazing organisations who can help you with many of the practical and indeed emotional issues that affect you, as an individual, at the time of the initial diagnosis of cancer. Dr Alex is not seeking to replace any of them, with anyone.

However. Over a period of time Dr Alex has recognised – speaking to people even many years after their diagnosis – that the impact of being assigned an emotionally-devastating label, hearing the word ‘cancer’, getting knocked completely off-course from their near-term life intentions, being filled with uncertainty, feeling dread, and of being ‘pushed suddenly into a medical system’ and medicalised, however sensitively, has been dire, and has had dire effects on that individual for years. Described as ‘being dramatically whiplashed’, or ‘having my legs cut off’, ‘going into a stupor’ or ‘trance’, ‘being whacked on the head with a sledgehammer’, ‘having the most hideous sudden trauma’, ‘becoming locked in a permanent state of intense anxiety’, ‘being pushed off a cliff’.

And many have said that retrospectively they wish they had been able to seek help for that feeling at the time. For many this was of course also the time when they also have to make clearminded decisions – about what treatments, when, finances, who to tell, and so on.

Indeed the extensive science of Clinical Psycho-neuroendoimmunology ( PNI / PNE / PNEI ) would tell you that that impact could be adverse to prognostic outcome. But also it can be adverse to many other things – for example, your relationship with your spouse, or children, who want to be supportive and may be aren’t phased by the cancer as such, but do feel ostracized because the ‘patient’ is behaving unlike themselves. Potentially devastated, sometimes weirdly euphoric (bio-chemical preservation response). Worse, you may be alone and wondering what is even the point of it all.

So Dr Alex has extended this supportive service which is actually about something that isn’t part of what these amazing organisations do. It’s about:

> CENTRING UP

> Getting you back firmly on your feet.

> Growing and retaining your KNOWLEDGE OF SELF

> Getting in touch with your SPIRITUAL self (whatever form that takes)

> Helping you identify everything that for you as an individual, you have going for you. And showing you how you can start using your ABUNDANT RESOURCES to get through and past this thing.

All obviously from a position of understanding what is involved, what is at stake, and what is going on. And adding knowledge of how, down the line, if you so wish, we can help with your treatment and recovery in additional ways. So you have it all sketched out in your mind.

YOU CAN DO THIS.

If Dr Alex can be of help to you, please contact us today.

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CANCER – ADJUNCTIVE TREATMENT OPTIONS TO MAXIMISE BENEFIT OF MAINSTREAM MEDICINE

This section is about the TREATMENT of the ACTUAL CANCER (as opposed to peripheral work, which is the next section).

Cancer is of course a gargantuan subject. No two cancers are the same, and in New Individual Medicine, the same named cancer, between two different individuals, is absolutely not the same.

Please be clear that Dr Alex is NOT a Specialist Naturopathic Physician who advocates for ditching mainstream treatments and ‘going natural’. She will not accept you as a patient unless you are actively working with mainstream professionals. Cancer of almost all types is extremely serious, and as much as it would be great if chemotherapy and radiotherapy etc were treatments of the past, currently they are not. And they are not for good reason – they are the best that there is for many cancers, pending the development of less horrendous treatment options, some of which are gladly already in play.

The exception is with cancers where the Physician in charge of your care has advocated for a ‘watch and wait’ or ‘active surveillance’ protocol – which gives us a clear run to address the cancer solely from a specialist naturopathic perspective (Dr Alex has lymphoma and prostate cancer patients in this category, all of whom have had significant cancer regression with her help alone, the extent of which has been sustained).

Similarly sometimes your key Physician / Surgeon will advocate for ‘just surgery’ for whatever reason (usually because your cancer is not too advanced, or is too advanced, or because there are only marginal differences in patient outcomes for combinations of ‘surgery plus medical-treatment’ vs ‘surgery but no medical-treatment’, which sways the balance of judgment against adding in the mainstream medicine options), and allow us to work alongside. If you are in such a category we will expect you to have regular tests so that we can be 100% certain that we are making the expected positive inroads.

For all cancer patients, Dr Alex requires that we specify the precise focus / targets of our work and validate intermittently that we have indeed achieved the change/s that we have set out to achieve. This is because cancer cells have a ‘doubling time’ so there is no room for treatments that are not proving as effective as they need to be. Dr Alex doesn’t ‘do’ any random treatments, but because it is so critical, she is obsessive about checking in cancer.

Dr Alex is a UK leader in the field of ‘Integrative Cancer Medicine’. She was also the only non-North American editor for the ‘DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO CANCER’ that is the gold standard text for this in the USA, where Naturopathic Doctors do Board exams to practice Integrative Oncology. Endorsed by Dr Mehmet Oz and the such. Beyond that, she has additionally developed more advanced avenues using scientific and clinical cancer research in a new way. And has to add her specialist application of the advanced sciences of Clinical Psycho-neuroimmunology (PNI) and Psycho-neuroendocrinology (PNE) which provide added leverage where relevant.

All that said, whether or not Dr Alex will accept you as a patient will depend entirely on how much she feels she can add value to you as an individual. Please do get in touch so that we can start the conversation.

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CANCER – SPECIALISED TREATMENT OF ISSUES ARISING FROM MAINSTREAM TREATMENT / MAXIMISING WELLBEING

This area of Dr Alex’s work is about cancer, and all the different cancers she works with, BUT from the perspective of the ‘BACKDROP’ of the person and their wellbeing, and physical welfare, during and after cancer treatment. There are several facets to this.

1. MITIGATION OF ACUTE TREATMENT-INDUCED PROBLEMS:

Dr Alex is often consulted about a problem that has been encountered during mainstream treatment for which there are no viable / inadequate routes forward medically, but which can be tackled by Specialist Naturopathic Medicine (for example, this month Dr Alex has been working with a patient in a hospital who was unable to swallow from inflammation and raw mucous membranes for 4 weeks after STEM cell transplantation; she couldn’t have steroids, and she bled with NSAIDs… This was easily addressed naturopathically using a single preparation costing £25 which took all of 2 days to work, 3 days later allowing for discharge, with potential savings of 3 weeks of NHS costs and more crucially the avoidance of loss of 20% of the patient’s body weight had Dr Alex been asked 4 weeks earlier)

2. MITIGATION OF CHRONIC TREATMENT-INDUCED PROBLEMS:

There are many problems that arise as a backlash of treatment, especially after medical and/or radiation treatments for cancer. These ill-effects can last for years. They range from very specific issues eg lymphoedoma, vaginal soreness, chronic cough, irritable bladder …. through to globalising issues eg recurrent miscellaneous infections, devastating debilitation, reactive depression secondary to overwhelming depletion (we treat both psych- and bio-generated depression, but here we are referring to the bio type which can be even more difficult to tackle), and so on.

There are Specialist Naturopathic and Functional Medicine options for almost all of these sorts of problems – yet comparatively very few options in mainstream medicine. Because of this, within the NHS, as a result, there is an ongoing accrual of many ‘cancer-treated’ patients who are symptomatic with other ‘fallout’ problems (many of whom feel guilty for complaining, having ‘had their life saved’). We urge anyone with such a problem to seek Dr Alex’s help.

Please note for the record that when looking to mitigate treatment-induced problems, it is essential that you consult a professional who is aware of the exact ‘patho-physiology’ involved and the exact ‘mechanism of action’ of the prescription – which will inevitably be a specialist physician. Dr Alex often hears of ‘naturopaths’ suggesting ‘immune boosters’ that risk aggravating the actual cancer, or ‘antioxidants’ too soon after chemotherapy or radiotherapy (thereby diluting the impact of therapy). With respect.

3. SUPPORTING YOUR BODY DURING CONVENTIONAL TREATMENT:

Clearly one imperative here is knowing how to counter the adverse impacts of chemotherapy or radiotherapy, or surgical and peri-surgical interventions, without getting in the way of the benefits of the treatment.

Another imperative involves a more generalistic – but also very specialised – field of Naturopathic Medicine. For example, the gut is very vulnerable during conventional treatment. The gut is also the engine of balanced and optimal immunology. A cancer patient has an increased risk of infections – which is due to many different factors. So one prerogative is to mitigate against the erosion of gut-enabled, individually-optimised immunity. And another is to address as many other factors as possible that affect immunity during cancer treatment, to be working maximally to minimise the overall risks.

Maintaining your ideal weight, as far as possible, is also a very important consideration, because significant weight loss during treatment can have unwanted effects. In this way you can avoid, for example, the downgrading of repairs, as happens when overall calorific- or nutrient-value decreases – including repairs to the bowel lining, which is essential to nutrient absorption, as well as immunology. But you can also avoid pivotal issues such as not having the brain switch the body’s immune system into ‘I’m in a crisis’ mode, which also leave you vulnerable immunologically.

4. RESTORING YOUR BODY AFTER CONVENTIONAL TREATMENT:

This is a very important area of consideration. Ideally this will:

a. be restorative, generally, and

b. regenerate you in a way that minimises your risks of developing unwanted chronic side-effects of the treatment, and

c. also address (rebalance, recalibrate) any of the things that may have led you to have been vulnerable to cancer in the first instance (please see below).

5. MITIGATING AFTER THE TREATMENT, THE FACTORS THAT COULD HAVE BEEN IMPLICATED IN YOU GETTING CANCER IN THE FIRST PLACE:

Because obviously if you don’t change anything that may have added to your initial risks, and ultimately possibly helped generate your cancer, then you are theoretically going to be at risk of recurrence.

 

In summary the point of this category of Dr Alex’s work is to maximise your chance of not only not having problems as a result of mainstream treatment, and not having too much downtime to recovery, but also putting as much distance as possible between you and cancer. Full stop.

Needless to say having all this in hand not only ‘pays for itself’, in every possible sense, but also adds to the individual feeling that they are NOT at the mercy of cancer, have NOT lost life as they knew it, have NOT lost their grip on their own destiny and life intentions, have NOT lost sight of themselves, and ARE able to get on as speedily as realistically possible. In all that, there is HOPE.

HOPE is not only priceless in cancer – it’s fundamental to positive psychology and therefore brings with it the full benefits of Psycho-neuroimmunology. Another huge advantage. And as PNI doesn’t usually enter into ‘medical statistics’ as to how well people do after treatment for cancer, you can be reassured that your own prognosis stands to be better than most, as you will have had additional weapons in your armoury. And of course those stats won’t have factored in all of the cumulative value of the measures highlighted above.

It is because of all this that Dr Alex now offers the ‘INITIAL CANCER DIAGNOSIS – STRATEGIC’ consultative sessions… to prevent the foggy-mindedness, to spare you the locked-in trauma… and to have all this mapped out so that you know who is in charge! YOU !

We’re here to help.

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