This is a great framework that helps solve health issues and maintaining optimum health for your dog.

Ed adapted this framework to fix his own chronic health issues. It is still relatively new but being used in human health by more progressive health care practitioners.

It is something you can use not just for your dog but your own health and the health of your family members.  We are using it to help identify any health issues with our own dogs and to help keep them healthy. It is a very powerful and useful framework.

Let’s start from the top white boxes and work across.   

All health issues can manifest as a result of any one of these 5 areas:

1. Consummables: what we eat is being recognized as the biggest effect on our health, and health conditions and diseases mostly come as a result of the consummables we put into our bodies.
2. Environmental: the chemicals we breathe or put on our bodies through cosmetics, and the electromagnetic radiation we get exposed to through airplane travel, WIFI, mobile phone signals, microwaves for cooking, bluetooth, IoT devices, etc.
3. Pathogens: any virus or bacteria that takes up residence in our bodies.  It can include beneficial bacteria that overgrows to levels where it is no longer beneficial.
4. The brain is its own area because effects from the previous three areas can affect the brain and diminish its function, and even if issues are fixed in the other three areas, the brain can remain in a compromised state. This area would also include psychological issues, which as we are learning in humans, is enormously affected by what goes on in the above three areas.  
5. The last area is physiology.  Physical imperfections, like a defective heart valve, just plain wear and tear on the joints or colds, flues, or other seasonal sicknesses. Health issues that can be readily seen or identified are lumped into this category.  

And that is it.  You can classify any condition or disease or health issue that manifests from any one of these five areas. It is not any more complicated than that.

Next let's discuss the colored boxes, working from the bottom, up.

1. All health issues end in symptoms that are seen and/or felt.
2. Before that is a diagnosed disease or condition.
3. And, before that is the pathology, or underlying mechanisms causing the disease or condition.  This box is where testing is done, if possible, that would then lead to a disease or condition diagnosis.
4. And before that is epigenetic factors that cause the pathology.  Epigenetics is the environmental effects on DNA that cause the DNA to express itself in a certain way. Epigenetics is our lifestyle, what we do, how we live, what we put in, on and to which we subject our bodies.  In humans, it is estimated that 90% of the cause of health disease and conditions is due to epigenetics.
5. And finally, before that is genetic factors that predispose one to a specific pathology.

In a nutshell, all you are doing is working backwards from what is seen or felt till you get to the root cause of the health issue or symptom so that you know how to properly treat it.

Sounds easy and logical, but western medicine is not taught this way. In our experience, with all the human and veterinary doctors we have seen over the years,  it does not go beyond pathology to treating health.  Even alternative pet medical providers do not use this approach.

They will throw supplements, prescription drugs, procedures or operations to treat the issues and symptoms, but they rarely ask what is the root cause of these issues or symptoms.

Without finding out the root cause in epigenetic or genetics, you may never fix the issue, and it keeps reoccurring or manifests elsewhere as other conditions or diseases.

Many times health issues have nothing to do with genetics, but epigenetics. If you are a smoker, then you are inflicting epigenetic effects on your lungs that increase the chances for the cancer genes to take hold.

But if you are predisposed to lung cancer already due to a certain genetic makeup, then you will have increased chances to lung cancer if you smoke.

But some people smoke all their lives and live to old age without lung cancer.  It is possible these people have a genetic makeup that decreases their chances for contracting lung cancer.

Getting to the root cause of health issues through epigenetic and genetic factors will help you understand and treat the underlying causes. Do as much as you can to understand your genetics and how they are influenced by epigenetics, and if you adjust your lifestyle accordingly, then you may have a dramatically improved chance for better health.

Now, with all that said, medical research and knowledge is far more advanced in humans than it is in dogs.  The study of epigenetics and genetics in humans is still very early but has already shown huge benefits.

But genetic testing it is still very early in pets.  There are some general rules of thumb for each breed that most veterinary doctors can help you with, but it gets fuzzy after that if you want to do specific testing for your dog.  As we learn more in working with our pet health practitioners and what we read and learn about in the field of pet health, we will do our best to report here on our website and via our subscriber emails.

Our goal is to positively impact the lives of as many dogs and their families as we can, in part through our extensive library of video, infographics and text articles. If you like our work, please consider supporting us through a donation!