Limits of reductionism and redundancy in biology

Most people think of chronic illness as something caused by a specific trigger…an infection, a toxin, or even an autoimmune reaction. And the solution is to find and eliminate that one thing.

But what if that's not how it actually works?

Today, I'm excited to have Dr. Eric Gordon back on the podcast. He's built a reputation for doing what most doctors won't, which is looking beyond the diagnosis to find what's actually driving a patient's illness and figuring out the right order to address it. His clinical work spans Lyme disease, ME/CFS, autoimmune conditions, and mitochondrial dysfunction, and many other forms of dysfunction, often all at once in the same patient.

In 2016, he co-authored a landmark study with Dr. Robert Naviaux, also a former guest on this podcast and a bit of a personal hero of mine, someone who has done some of the most important work in medicine of the last century, with his work on the cell danger response.

In Dr. Gordon's view, chronic illness happens when the body's normal healing cycle gets interrupted and stuck in a persistent inflammatory state.

From that perspective, the problem isn't just the original trigger. It's the state your body has shifted into. And if that's true, it changes how you approach treatment.

That shift in thinking opens the door to very different kinds of interventions. These approaches focus on changing the broader biological environment rather than chasing a single cause.

In this episode, Dr. Gordon and I discuss a therapy that filters and replaces part of your blood plasma and may help remove inflammatory factors circulating in the blood that keep the body stuck.

In this podcast, Dr. Eric Gordon and I discuss:

• Why chronic illness often reflects a body stuck in the wrong healing state; compensations the body makes for stressors are designed to be short-term, not chronic

• What happens when the body's normal repair cycle gets interrupted

• Why the body's response, not the original trigger, can keep people sick

• The surprising role of "old information" in ongoing dysfunction

• Why trying to fix one problem at a time often falls short in people with overlapping conditions

• Dr. Gordon explains why treating the body as a machine will never work - biological reductionism is the fundamental error

• How a fascinating intervention called plasmapheresis works to filter and replace blood plasma and lower inflammatory load

• Why plasmapheresis is gaining attention in chronic illness and longevity

• Dr. Gordon's belief that medicine is faulty because it's hooked on specificity, that the more we can do exactly what we want, the better…but this approach is lacking because we don't know exactly how our bodies work