The Chronic Illness Epidemic: How Toxicity Is Driving Modern Disease

Most people expect a toxicity story to have a dramatic middle. A flooded basement, a bad building, a single exposure that explains everything afterward. Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC, spends very little time there. In the second episode of The Healing Terrain, she told Dr. Drew Kidder that the more common story is quieter and far harder to see, and that it has been accumulating for decades.

The scratched nonstick pan still in rotation. The nail polish. The plug-in air freshener. The rideshare with a car freshener that left a two hour headache behind. The dryer sheets. Individually, none of it registers. Together, and over years, it becomes the load a body is carrying while it tries to do everything else.

“The bill is coming due now,” she said, “but it’s actually been building for several decades and it’s multifactorial.”

She does not leave that hanging. Small exposures drive a wide range of chronic diagnoses and symptoms, and the data supports that. It also supports the other direction. “This is all fixable. It is not too late.” Dr. Kidder has called her a hope dealer for a reason.

The shift that has to happen first

Asked what actually moves people forward, Kennally names something that cannot be purchased.

“The first thing is a mindset shift. And I’m not being fluffy with you.” The shift is away from finding the right practitioner with the right intervention, and toward becoming, in her words, your own health detective. The CEO of your own health.

A large part of that work is retracing a timeline. When did this start. When did the body first get your attention. Symptoms, she argues, are not noise to be silenced. They are the language the body uses, and they point in two directions at once, toward the mechanism of damage and sometimes toward the route of exposure. The mold in a first apartment counts. So do the rashes that appeared every winter the basement flooded.

She is blunt about the shortcut she hears from practitioners, which is that everyone has toxins, so a binder gets added to the protocol and the box is checked. “No, ma’am, that is not enough. Toxicants by their nature are very specific in the way they interrupt the body’s own innate healing intelligence.”

She is equally blunt about her own starting point, which was not a place of discipline. She describes herself as lazy about self care and resistant to trying new things, waiting for someone to fix her. She carried more than seven diagnoses. She was told she would be in a wheelchair by thirty five and would not live long after that, and advised to go on disability because she could no longer read an email or write a sentence.

She now runs a year-long certification program for practitioners. “So you don’t have to be perfect to become your own health detective. You start with one thing at a time.” That first thing should be easy on purpose. Swap the scratched pan for stainless steel or glass. The point is not the pan. The point is momentum.

Dr. Kidder extended the thought to how symptoms are usually handled, describing a line he used with patients. If a headache responds to Tylenol for four hours and the answer to the next four hours is another dose, the problem was never a Tylenol deficiency.

Kennally takes it further. “The future doctor is you.” Practitioners function as navigators for as long as they are needed, but the relationship is not what most people assume. “They might have the maps, but you’re the territory. You’re the terrain.”

Energy comes before everything

Kennally states her position on mitochondria as close to a universal rule. Any chronic symptom has a mitochondrial deficiency underneath it, because a body with enough energy would have reallocated resources and resolved it.

What makes that more than an abstraction is that mitochondria are responsive. They are not passive engines running at a fixed rate. “They are listening all the time,” she said, inside the cell and out into the extracellular matrix, effectively asking whether conditions are safe enough to produce energy or whether it is time to go into defense mode.

When a toxicant comes into proximity, they slow ATP production, which is the body’s capacity to do work. The nervous system registers this immediately, and the density is the reason why. There are a million to two million mitochondria per neuron. Brain fog, inflammation, and anxiety follow, and a body that does not feel safe slows detoxification and drainage down further.

“Your body is reprioritizing away from healing, detox and repair right when you need them the most,” she said. Which is why she wants energy support in early, before asking the body to do anything difficult.

There is a catch, and it explains a reaction many sensitive people have had. Give a starving body energy and it will try to do catch-up work immediately. “So if you’ve ever had a paradoxical reaction to mitochondrial support and went, why won’t even energy support help me, why am I broken, you’re not broken.” The support worked. The healing response simply did not feel good. The answer is to ease in, not to stop. Drainage before detox Long-term energy depletion and missing nutrients leave the whole system slow. Nervous system regulation drops. Gut motility drops. Then a detox protocol arrives and asks that system to move a large volume of material out.

Kennally frames the question plainly. “Am I trying to flush a clogged toilet?”

She admits the word does the concept no favors. “Drainage is an ugly word and it doesn’t sound profound, but it actually is miraculous.” Her image for it is water. A moving stream runs clean. A stagnant pond grows algae, collects debris, and the wildlife stays away. Blocked drainage pathways are a stagnant pond, and they create ideal conditions for toxin buildup, pathogen bloom, and fungal overgrowth.

So the order runs bottom to top, and the bottom is daily bowel movements. Without elimination, mobilized toxins are reabsorbed rather than removed.

Above that sits bile flow and the liver, and Kennally points out that this is not a modern invention. The drainage funnel follows the same principles found in homotoxicology and bioregulatory medicine. Different traditions, same order of operations. She also connects it to the small intestine, where budgets tend to disappear. Gut motility is regulated by the nervous system, and bile flow is critical to it. “If you’re not looking above and below, you’re not gonna get anywhere.”

For liver support, she wants more than a single herb. “You’re not going to milk thistle your way through detox in this day and age.” It remains fine for general support in already healthy people. It is not enough to move a genuinely overloaded liver.

She also cautions against trusting standard labs to tell you the liver is fine. ALT and AST track downstream distress, appearing after pathology is already developing, and they say nothing about bile flow or liver efficiency. Her recommendation is to assume some loss of efficiency and support the bile ducts directly, using bile builders and bile movers such as TUDCA alongside a well-rounded kidney and liver formula. The two do different jobs and neither substitutes for the other.

Her last caution is about the most popular version of this work online. Lymphatic self massage is a good maintenance practice. When people feel worse afterward, the reason is mechanical. Lymph moves waste, pathogens, and histamine into the bloodstream, and if liver flow is not there to receive it, the material has nowhere to go. “So you’re ignoring the order of operations in the drainage funnel.”

Where she leaves people

Kennally closed with a reframe rather than a protocol. The body is not malfunctioning. It is responding logically to industrial chemicals, heavy metals, molds, preservatives, and dyes at a scale nothing evolved to expect.

“This is a little step at a time. That’s it. And that is enough. It really is. You lived your way into this. You’ve got to give yourself time to live your way out of it. So give your body grace, because it’s on your side. It wants to feel good. It has not given up on you yet."

Listen to the full episode

The Chronic Illness Epidemic: How Toxicity Is Driving Modern Disease is available on Dr. Talks, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.

*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.