Why we need a detox plan: Modern life and heavy metal toxicity

Everybody needs a detox plan, for the simple reason that they are alive.

Modern life has led to rising rates of many degenerative diseases and other health problems. One of the greatest concerns is toxicity – specifically heavy metals, chemicals, radioactive metals and other toxins.

Many toxins that people have been widely exposed to throughout the world are “bioaccumulative”, which means that they gradually accumulate inside of our organs and tissues over the years – until health problems and chronic diseases eventually develop. This is especially true of mercury, lead and radioactive contamination – which have widely polluted our soils, food, water, air, teeth and bodies.

These same toxins also readily – and preferentially – cross the placental barrier into the foetus of the unborn child, just at the time when the brain and other organs are developing. This compounds the toxicity problem from one generation to the next. Have you ever noticed how young people today are in some cases not as robust as their grandparents?

How to make the best detox plan using Living Systems Medicine

Living Systems Medicine (LSM) has acquired a strong reputation for providing wellness tools that help your system, through improved self-management, to deal with this modern toxic assault on our health. Throughout the world, people are turning to LSM as the first choice approach when it comes to heavy metals.

Once you understand the need to make a detox plan in the modern world, Living Systems Medicine is the number one choice. This is for many reasons, including LSM’s sequential organ resonance support, its depth of penetration, its specificity and more.

Above all, it is important to understand that Living Systems Medicine itself does not “detox” you. It helps your system to detox itself – and this is the “secret sauce” that makes LSM such an exceptional system. It does this through emphasising The 5 Key Organ Systems – a fundamental aim which is not even attempted in most other prevailing “detox” approaches out there.

By way of parallel, if you wanted to clean up, say, France, would it be more effective to airdrop some sponges and cloths along a few accessible stretches of the French coast, or to work with the existing cleaning infrastructure in the whole country so as to help them improve their methods? As this example demonstrates, the use of “detox substances” is, like those airdropped sponges and cloths, a self-defeating and ineffectual approach, making it an inferior detox plan. LSM aligns itself instead with the second option, which is far more sensible – and that is why our unique approach to making a detox plan is to focus on The 5 Key Organ Systems.

A detox plan is important, but what about other factors besides toxins?

Important as a detox plan is, toxicity is far from being the only issue that Living Systems Medicine looks at. LSM helps the system to deal with the resonances of a wide range of other factors too.

Here is a list of resonances of common factors which are found and addressed in the Living Systems Medicine approach at a whole-system level, according to a systems science prioritization process. These are common “primary factors” for LSM treatment, or what we call “nonlinear entry points”. These may or may not overlap with what were the actual “causes of disease” (more on this further below). This list shows just a few specific examples, as a quick flavour:

  • Information deficits in The 5 Key Organ Systems
  • Mercury toxicity
  • Glyphosate
  • Radioactive metals
  • Sunlight deficiency
  • Vitamin D deficiency
  • Magnesium deficiency
  • Impaired sleep
  • Loss of a sense of meaning in life, or in a particular area of life
  • Lead
  • Cadmium
  • Arsenic
  • Aluminum
  • Wheat
  • Lack of healthy fats for the brain
  • Electromagnetic radiation
  • Epigenetic impairments
  • Herpes
  • Epstein Barr
  • Flu
  • Yeast infections
  • Worms
  • Lyme Bacteria
  • Strep
  • Staph
  • E. coli
  • Iodine deficiency
  • Zinc deficiency
  • Sulphur dysmetabolism
  • Iatrogenesis
  • Mold
  • Emotional traumas
  • X-Ray effects
  • Head injuries

This makes Living Systems Medicine the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ approach to clinical practice, centering around health-related detective work – but with systems science tools to guide us. Any fans of the fictitious detective hero Sherlock Holmes will also know that in order to be a great detective, Holmes undertook a constant study of multiple unrelated fields of knowledge – as well as his own original research “monographs” – which is in other words all an example of systems science. Systems science involves connecting many different fields of knowledge which are not normally connected – as advocated by Bertalanffy, the founder of General System Theory in the 1950s.

So it is systems science – not linear science – that made Sherlock Holmes a great detective. By comparison, the local police that he was often helping out tended to view crime scenes with more of a tunnel vision that is characteristic of linear science – leading to their many infamous mistakes in Sherlock Holmes stories.

Above all, Living Systems Medicine prioritises from amongst all the possible factors, to determine a a sequence of treatments for the whole system which is based on systems science.

Ailments, diseases and the self-management of living systems

Let us consider the approach that Living Systems Medicine takes to all the primary factors listed above.

If we stumble and fall in the road, grazing the knee, that is not a disease – it is only an ailment. Still, we pick up and carry on and it is quickly forgotten. The most incredible observation about such an incident is that you don’t have to do anything about it – your own body heals the graze on its own!

This is a simple observation of what we call the intelligent self-management of living systems. Your own body is an example of a living system, and as such it is subject to the universal properties of living systems – of which this is the most important one.

How does such an extraordinary thing take place? That is the subject of study in living systems science.

A disease, on the other hand, represents a situation where we don’t have only an ailment, but a health problem that is persisting for a long time. This represents a failure of your body’s self-management, in ultimate terms – although your body will still be helping you by optimizing a dynamic state of equilibrium which is the best of all possible outcomes within the existing conditions.

Is there anything that can be done, in such a situation, to fix things? That is to say, to get the body back to a better state?

In Living Systems Medicine we do not fix the disease. We do not target the disease at all. Nor do we treat the causes the disease (although if these are external in nature such as when we have a daily re-exposure to environmental toxins, we may recommend that a person takes steps to avoid those re-exposures). Instead, we help the whole system to manage itself more intelligently.

In short, we look to find what we call the best nonlinear entry points, to help the system back on its way to better self-management of its health – just like that time where you stumbled in the road but managed to get past it, as you picked up and carried on.

What do we mean by “root causes of illness”?

We often refer to “root causes” – yet actually there is no such thing as a true “cause” in living systems, technically speaking, as everything consists of interconnected nodes within the system. This principle is drawn from network theory, an important branch of systems science. The human body, as a living system, operates as a network of nodes.

Nonetheless, it is useful to talk about causes, in order to better understand the factors which have prevented the system from self-managing better – and in particular those causes which had the biggest impact on this, which we can call “root causes”. Like the roots of a tree, these are factors which can influence the whole growth and health of the rest of the tree. Sometimes we may alternatively refer to these factors as “upstream”.

More broadly, we can say that there are “primary factors” of two types. There are what we call “nonlinear entry points” (or “leverage points”) – which take up our treatment focus in Living Systems Medicine; and secondly, in the past, there were “nonlinear exit points” (root causes of illness) where the system was thrown off track. These two can be explained as follows:

  1. Nonlinear entry points:
    • These are the places where we can achieve the “biggest bang for our buck” now and in the future. This is a future-driven analysis, rather than an analysis of the past. In other words, it is a call to action. This is where we look for “the tide that lifts all boats”. We sometimes refer to these as “leverage points” – as a symbol of nonlinearity, like the way you can lift a large boulder using a small lever. This is our focus in Living Systems Medicine, and therefore we also refer to these as “primary factors” as listed above. Some of these primary factors may also be acting as “obstacles” (more on that below). Some may also overlap with factors that may have been “root causes” as described below under #2, but that is not the reason we address them. For example, the main method used to help a system get back on track may be different from the main factor that set it off track in the first place – hence our nonlinear entry points are not necessarily root causes. Nonetheless it is essential to look into the case history and explore root causes that took place, as this helps us to find out what has happened, in order to better understand what has prevented the system from self-managing better.
  2. Nonlinear exit points:
    • These were the places where the system had a nonlinear impact in the past which pushed it towards a state of worse health, leading to disease. We refer to these as “root causes of illness”, for the sake of making ourselves easily understood in everyday conversation. Root causes are, themselves, a type of nonlinear event – but for moving towards disease rather than health. These represent factors in the past which had such a profound impact on the system that we can call them “root” causes, because they had a nonlinear quality (i.e., a big impact from an apparently small input). We prefer to focus on “root causes” rather than simply general causes, triggers or secondary factors – because we want to imply priority. This is like the hidden roots of a large tree. We want to imply a hierarchy of importance in relation to all past factors in a case – and also to draw attention to the fact that there may be less obvious or immediate factors involved, hidden like roots in the soil, and these factors could be festering for a long time. A typical example of this might be heavy metal poisoning which gradually accumulates in the tissues.

What do we mean by “secondary syndromes”?

Systems science requires us to make a clear distinction between primary and secondary factors. Think of this as “upstream” and “downstream” factors.

Taking mercury toxicity and leaky gut as two examples, we refer to leaky gut as an important “secondary syndrome”, rather than a primary factor, because this represents a change in functionality of a part of your body which does not happen randomly (remember, your body is an intelligent living system). In other words, anything that happens in your body’s terrain – such as a leaky gut, a state of inflammation, an allergy or a process of brain degeneration – happens for a reason.

Therefore, while addressing these secondary syndromes as a part of Living Systems Medicine, we also emphasise the need to walk upstream and look for primary factors behind them. In our treatments we look for primary factors which can be our main nonlinear entry points for helping the whole system to improved self-management.

The importance of looking for obstacles

The term “nonlinear entry point” can sometimes also overlap with the term “obstacles” which we also use often. We routinely investigate obstacles in Living Systems Medicine, because they play a major role in stopping the system from helping itself. The primary factors previously listed above can also act as obstacles, depending on the case.

An obstacle is when there are ongoing factors – especially those external to the patient – which block the system’s ability to restore itself to better health.

An example of this could be a daily re-exposure to a toxic metal in your workplace. Here we are not just talking about a cause of disease in the distant past, but an ongoing obstacle that could be preventing the system from climbing back out of the hole of disease that it fell into.

One of the reasons why many therapeutic approaches lead to poor outcomes in complex cases is that unlike Living Systems Medicine they fail to undergo a comprehensive appraisal of obstacles – and the nonlinear entry points that enable us to help the system overcome those obstacles.