Who is Dr. Tim Jackson?

He combines his background in integrative health and wellness with the emerging field of epigenetics to help others.  He is a featured doctor for the MTHRSupport group of healthcare professionals helping to educate the healthcare community and the public about the role of methylation in both health and dis-ease.

Thanks for stopping by HealYourBody.org! This site, for me, represents the beginning of my life’s work and is the culmination of a journey I started nearly 15 years ago as a pre-med student interested understanding how to truly heal the body.

I finished undergrad at Wake Forest University as a Health Science & Chemistry major with every intention of going to medical school for my MD. I somehow got into strength training and nutrition during undergrad and became interested in what would later become known as “functional medicine.”

I was burning the candle at both ends, working several part time jobs and keeping a perfect GPA, and I really got sick. I was dealing with a lot of symptoms that had me concerned: fatigue, insomnia, joint pain, decreased libido, inability to recover from exercise, constipation and frequent stomach pain. I spent the last two years of undergrad trying to find someone to help me.

My parents relied on mainstream medicine when I was a kid, and I was prescribed antiobiotics like it was candy… so I knew I needed to improve my digestive health and that was my starting place. I began seeing specialists in different areas of functional medicine, and noticed that every doctor wanted to hyper focus on something different, like heavy metals or candida, and few could really make sense of my labwork. While that helped me, as I’d learn over the next few years, there was a lot more to unraveling my health issues than some isolated gut issue.

I spent the next five years working on my gut health while finishing graduate school. I got rid of the bad bacteria, the Candida Albicans, added in probiotics, and restored my stomach acid and bile salts to optimal levels.

But I was still having diarrhea, alternating with constipation. In 2008, I did my first stool test and found a +3 (scale from 0-4) under the Yeast/Fungi section labeled “taxonomy unavailable.” Typically, this suggests ingested mold, so I began working on detoxing the mold. After two years of work and little success, I discovered I had the “dreaded genotype,” making it difficult for me to detoxify mold. It took me another two years to fully detoxify from it.

And then I discovered I had Lyme disease … and I’d probably had it since before college. This explained why I was never able to really heal my gut, despite all the effort I’d put into my own health and healing.

I’ve learned a lot about health and healing throughout my journey, most significantly, I’ve learned that there are many conditions that have to be met to truly achieve optimal health. Addressing one area of dysbiosis will not create the optimal health most of us are hoping and striving for. After over ten years struggling to get healthy, and after working with hundreds of patients, I’ve come to understand that my health journey could have been shortened significantly by a few key things:

• Running the right tests
• Connecting the dots among hormones, digestion, immunity and the nervous system to treat more mindfully. These systems do not exist in a vacuum. Changes you make in one area has a ripple effect across the body.
• Addressing healing in the right order. For example, taking supplements when you have a bad digestive system isn’t effective because you aren’t able to absorb them. Doing hormone supplementation without addressing your GI tract is likely causes all sorts of dysfunction in your hormone cascade, potentially throwing off your thyroid and increasing your toxic load.

The Heal Your Body Philosophy is designed to give you a framework for understanding how your body works so you can make better decisions about your own healthcare, you can better-advocate for tests and treatments that will help your body heal vs. simply managing your symptoms, and ultimately regain the quality of life that you deserve.