Most of us are raised with a rather reactive and passive relationship with healthcare. You see your doctor or dentist only once something goes wrong and expect them to fix it.
But functional and biological medicine remind us that by the time you get symptoms, most conditions are fairly well advanced – and often more costly to treat. Fortunately, there are a number of technologies available to help us spot potential problems before they get to that point.
Thermography is one of those technologies – one that we’ve just recently begun making available in our office via the Texas Thermography Clinic.
Thermography is a radiation-free way to scan your body for early signs of dysfunction or imbalance on the cellular level. It’s been used by European integrative doctors for over 30 years and was FDA-cleared for use in the US in 1997.
The technology itself is based on your body’s ability to thermoregulate. This ability to keep a steady temperature is controlled by your autonomic nervous system.
When your internal temperature changes, your hypothalamus is signaled to initiate changes to bring your temp back to its norm. You sweat; your blood vessels widen or contract; your muscles and other organs generate heat – that kind of thing.
So by making a sort of heat map of your body, thermography aims to shed light on this key aspect of your body’s self-regulating abilities.
Texas Thermography Clinic uses a particular type of thermography known as thermometry. This technique uses a lightweight, infrared sensor to measure the temperature of your skin. The scanner is somewhat similar to a wand thermometer that a nurse or doctor swipes across your forehead to check for fever. But with thermometry, more than 100 points are checked, including points on the teeth and jaws.
This is followed by a 10 minute period in which you’re exposed to a cold stimulus. Then the thermographer takes readings of those same 100+ points again. Differences in the readings reflect how well your organs and tissues are functioning and how they deal with physiological stress.
Both sets of readings are run through a sophisticated computer program which maps out the temperature patterns of your body. That information can help your doctor identify imbalances that you can address proactively – through follow-up diagnostics and, as appropriate, treatment – before they can become bigger problems.
You can see how this is a perfect fit with our holistic, biological approach. Prevention is the foundation.