In 2004, I started training in Allergy and Clinical Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center in Baltimore, and completed that fellowship in 2006, and became Board Certified.

I thought I was ready to embark in medical practice, make my patients happy, and change the world. After all, I have had one of the best medical education anyone can get in the US. I started my practice as an associate professor of medicine at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Tyler, Texas (UTHSCT). I was doing a great job teaching medical students and caring for my patients, until I attended a conference in Dallas in March 2007, and realized that I am not equipped to address the 21st century chronic medical conditions I encountered daily in clinic. That conference changed my life, and the course of my medical career for the better, and I will share that with you later... 

Initially, when I saw obese patients with multiple comorbidities including adult onset allergies, I told them to go lose weight. Many of the patients took offense for bringing up their weight issues because many other practitioners have made them feel as if their weight comes from overeating and sedentary lifestyle. After all, that is what we learned in medical school. We are made to believe that obesity is a calorie in, calorie out problem. 

Do you know that obesity is not uniform in the US? If it were a matter of calorie in, calorie out problem, obesity rate will be the same across the US. We were never taught anything about environmental toxins, their connection to hormone imbalance, and the hormone imbalance impact on chronic diseases including obesity, allergies, and anxiety/depression (I have now written four books on these issues). 

I don’t know if your medical school training was any different… Currently, the same 19th and 20th century medical school curriculum is taught in the US and around the world. We are well trained in the art of differential diagnoses and pharmacology tailored to addressing each diagnosis. We are never taught to look at the impact of the environment and nutrition in health. How many hours of nutrition did you get in medical school? How many hours of environmental medicine did you get in medical school? How many of us know about the obesity maps, the pesticides maps, and the history behind these maps? How many of us know about the CDC biomonitoring and the CDC Fourth Report? How many of us know why we are told to avoid plastics? How many of us know why there is an important warning on common brand toothpastes? How many of know why so many children are reacting to peanuts, dairy, eggs, tree nuts...Do environmental toxins have any role in these reactions? Even as an allergist and clinical immunologist, I was never taught anything about the environment. I know that pollens, dust, molds, pet dander… cause allergic rhinitis, conjunctivitis, and asthma... I learned that many foods and food proteins cause food allergies and until today, when I go to conferences, there is scant information about why all at a sudden different food protein have become monsters that attack humans. When we talk about gluten protein sensitivity, it is as if the gluten protein which until the mid-1990s was consumed in the US and the rest of the world without any real consequences, all at a sudden has become a poison for women, men, and children, especially in the US. 

 When I think about it, many of our practices do not add up. Since the mid-1990s allergies of all sorts have become epidemic. On the treatment front, we are inventing machine guns to kill small birds that BB guns are perfectly capable of killing, if we understood why the BB guns are not working... 

 I think we have lost our way, and the reason is that we ignore completely the toxic environmental factors that play a major role in all the complex chronic diseases of the 21st century. We can no longer use 19th, or 20th century diagnoses and treatment protocols to address 21st century environmentally driven chronic diseases. There is a mismatch between the diagnoses and treatment of environmentally driven health problems, and that's the reason for poor health outcomes. Poor health outcomes beget frustrations for patients and for practitioners. We are all patients!