Chronic skin issues like acne are never fun to deal with. As it happens, these skin issues are often the result of a buildup of toxins in our body.
Our body is constantly working to find and get rid of toxins. To do this, it needs some kind of pathway to remove these toxins from the body. These pathways are called emunctories.
An emunctory is any tissue that can allow waste to be secreted from the body. When our body is unable to sufficiently remove waste via our emunctories, toxins accumulate in the blood, where they can easily be deposited in tissues and cause us symptoms including joint pain, skin conditions, fatigue, headaches, digestive systems, and sinus congestion, to name a few.
Skin conditions are multifactorial, but they are always impacted by effective elimination. Accumulation of toxins in the blood can result in deposits on the skin as the body attempts to eliminate them.
Your Main Detoxification Systems & Primary Emunctories:
- The liver and intestines, which remove solid waste
- The kidneys and urinary bladder, which eliminate liquid waste
- The lungs, which exhale gaseous waste
- Sweating through the skin
Liver – The Toxin Gatekeeper
The liver is your largest glandular organ and sits on the right side of your body near the bottom of your rib cage. It carries out hundreds of enzymatic reactions per minute, metabolizes carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals. It creates bile to aid in digestion, produces clotting factors and various blood cells, degrades bacteria, alcohol, hormones and all drugs and chemicals entering the digestive tract. It balances cholesterol and blood sugar and is the key to overall digestive, metabolic, immune and hormonal health.
Kidney – The Eliminator
Your kidneys sit near the middle of your back under your ribcage, processing nearly 200 liters of blood per day. Your kidneys regulate electrolytes and along with the lungs control your pH. They filter waste and drugs and regulate blood pressure through hormone production. This is the most important organ for eliminating water-soluble waste.
Gastrointestinal Tract – The Regulator
Regular elimination through bowel function is the most visible sign of proper elimination. Your digestive tract and mucosal membranes house roughly 100 trillion friendly bacteria that assist in digestion and absorption of nutrients, infection prevention and balancing autoimmunity. Toxicity can change the amount and type of good bacteria in your digestive tract.
The Secondary Emunctories:
- The skin
- The mucous membranes of the urinary and genital tract, respiratory tract, and gastrointestinal tract
Skin – The Deposition Centre
Your skin is a window to your digestive tract. When your body is overburdened with toxins it needs a place to store them, to remove them from circulation, stopping further assaults on important organs and glands. Your skin is a large easy target for deposition of toxins improperly removed through the primary emunctories. This is why many common skin conditions like acne, eczema, psoriasis, dermatitis and hives improve with proper elimination.
The cause of chronic skin conditions is multifactorial, but there is always an element of improper elimination and detoxification when the skin is used to express disease. To improve skin health, we have to go back to the basics: we have to support our primary emunctories (our liver, kidneys and gut), get our lymphatic systems moving, clean up the blood by reducing our toxic load, strengthen the immune system/mucosal membranes, and take the burden off the skin as the elimination organ of choice.
Naturopaths often utilize something called Biotherapeutic Drainage to assist this process. Drainage allows the body to eliminate toxins without pushing beyond its physiologic limits. This process opens the primary emunctories to eliminate toxic compounds while improving organ and gland function. This is an important starting point to resolving chronic skin conditions.
To find out more about what Dr. Stephanie Bristow can do to help you, book a FREE 15 min Meet and Greet by calling 403-452-0029 or by booking online.