Dr. Eric Potter graduated from Vanderbilt Medical School and then went on to specialize in internal medicine (adult) and pediatric care, spending significant time and effort in growing his medical understanding while caring for patients from all walks of life.
Researchers have searched for the root causes of ADHD for decades hoping to hint at successful treatments. Sometimes, they also work backwards, looking at therapies that appear to be helpful and trying to understand why. By understanding how a medication changes dysfunction into function, they hope to uncover the root causes in the process. Functional…
Proverbs 3:5-8 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+3&version=ESV Contradicting the World While we can always trust God’s Word to provide truth, sometimes profound truths arise in the oddest of places. While listening to a lecture from The Great Courses on music history, the instructor emphasized that our current view of music arises from a Greek humanistic mindset. He contrasted this…
Regrets and hindsight are meant to teach us lessons. When it comes to dumping chemical after chemical into our environment without true evaluation of the health effects, this research reminds us of the negative consequences. The Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health released study findings linking prenatal phthalates exposure to motor development effects on girls…
I have said this before, but we need to consider potentially removable triggers for a patient with autoimmune disease before just condemning them to a life of immune suppressing therapies. Discerning the root cause may avoid a lot of unnecessary therapy and prevent a lot of damage. I just don’t understand why conventional medicine ignores…
Proverbs 3:1-4 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+3&version=ESV Let Your Heart Keep My Commandments We strive to imitate our heavenly Father in caring for our patients. He encourages us to remember the teachings of wisdom in this Proverb. We encourage our patients to remember what we teach them about caring for their health. Both encouragements are intended to result in…
In any crime and in any disease, we should start with “who pulled the trigger”? Researchers have long known that not everyone with the HLA DQ2 and DQ8 genetics develop celiac disease, but without one of those genes, true celiac disease is rare. Why do some with the genes develop celiac and some don’t? Even…
Everyone in genetics keeps hunting for the needles in the haystacks. Using data from almost 500 thousand healthy subject and over 230 thousand individuals with one of eight common psychiatric disorders, researchers found 109 genes linked to these mental health conditions. That was a lot of genes to wade through, but today’s computers allow us…
Proverbs 2:16 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+2&version=ESV Eating Cake in the Modern World The modern world summarizes it in this way, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”. We choose righteousness or evil each day. Each day that we choose evil, we take another step down a path that leads to destruction. We cannot have it both…
We live in an age of epidemic metabolic disease without clear answers for why. Many point fingers at dietary factors like sugars and trans fats. Others point fingers at lifestyle factors like sedentary life without exercise. While functional MD’s like myself acknowledge these factors, we also look at toxic contributors to diabetes, heart disease, and…
The “Wanted dead or alive?” debate rages on in the world of probiotics and microbiome research. Functional medicine MD’s like myself already apply microbiome principles in the care of our patients. On the other hand, many detractors in conventional medicine claim that the probiotics we swallow in capsules either cross the threshold of our mouths…