Functional medicine for chronic skin conditions uses lifestyle and environmental interventions.

A popular pub quiz question is What’s the largest organ of the human body?

Many people start to work their way around the body trying to figure out whether it’s the lungs, the intestine, liver or heart, when in fact the largest organ is actually the one that pretty much keeps all those other organs where they should be: the skin.

Millions of people in the UK live with some sort of chronic skin condition – and the statistics relating to each are eye-watering:

Around 15 million people in Britain live with some form of eczema and another 1.2 million suffer with psoriasis. GPs write around 27 million prescriptions annually for these conditions at a total cost to the NHS of £169 million.

Yet in many cases, eczema, psoriasis, acne, rosacea and other skin allergies and conditions can be linked back to food sensitivities, poor nutrition choices and digestive health issues that are found in the gut.

Functional medicine for chronic skin conditions uses lifestyle and environmental interventions to improve food choices, negate nutritional deficiencies and identify and then eliminate problem foods that can cause skin reactions that, on the surface, bear no relation to what’s going on in the intestine.

Gut health can be affected by:

• Yeast, which thrives on sugar, leading to bacterial imbalances that can trigger acne and eczema
• Leaky gut, where harmful substances enter the bloodstream through fractures ion the stomach lining, causing or aggravating skin conditions
• Hormonal imbalances, which promote the production of oils that can lead to acne
• Poor metabolic function

Nutrition is a vital factor in your overall gut and skin health, so making changes to some areas of your nutritional intake can be highly effective in reducing the instances of – or even entirely preventing – chronic skin conditions.

But we also know that these can be difficult to achieve on your own.

At 360 Health Clinic, our specialist private GP service can work with you to help you to first identify the root cause of your ongoing skin problem and then support you in introducing the changes that might be required to resolve the underlying issues.

The body is a complex but integrated networked system and so it’s logical that how we look after the health of one part of it will have an impact – whether positive or negative – on another part.

And so, by working with a science-based approach to functional medicine, it’s possible to modify the response of one part of that networked ecosystem to force positive changes to the health of your skin and other organs.

For more information or to speak to our skin specialists in London, please contact us today.