How to Treat Body-Based Anxiety

… Ellen Vora, M.D., takes a functional medicine approach to mental health that considers the whole person and addresses imbalance at the root.

She’s a Yale and Columbia University educated holistic psychiatrist board-certified in psychiatry and integrative holistic medicine. She’s also an acupuncturist and yoga teacher.

In her new book, “The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body’s Fear Response,” she takes on anxiety, which hits more than 40 million people in any given year. The pandemic drove that number up even more. Even if math isn’t your strong suit, you can understand these numbers:

• An estimated one out of every nine people, or 800 million people, suffer from a mental health disorder, the most common of which is anxiety.
• Up to 33.7 percent of Americans are affected by an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.

Conventional medicine tends to view anxiety as a “neck up” problem of brain chemistry and psychology. Dr. Vora disagrees. She suggests that various physiologic inputs influence anxiety symptoms.

“What we’ve been indoctrinated with is this idea that our mental health is genetically determined chemical imbalance,” Dr. Vora says. “There’s some validity to that, although I think, for the most part, any chemical imbalance is often a downstream effect of a state of imbalance happening elsewhere in the physical body.”