Why Am I Always Sick?
A Functional Look at Chronic Infections and Immune Resilience
To read this article in French, click here.
Did you know? Illness-related absenteeism costs U.S. employers an estimated $225.8 billion annually due to lost productivity from sick days 🤒💼💸
Many people come to me because they’re stuck in a cycle that won’t seem to end. They’ve had the same infections over and over again. Cold sores every other month. UTIs that recur without clear triggers. Reactivations of Epstein-Barr virus, with their familiar combination of fatigue, swollen glands, and brain fog. For many, it is the quiet persistence of sexually transmitted infections that keeps showing up despite consistent antiviral treatment.
These are not dramatic illnesses. They rarely require urgent care. But over time, they begin to shape a person’s life. Their disruptions are quiet but cumulative. Nights of broken sleep. Days lost to fatigue. The gradual erosion of trust in one’s own body. The uncertainty of the next flare, and the weight of something invisible to others but inescapable to oneself.
Eventually, familiar questions begin to surface:
- Why does this keep happening?
- What’s wrong with me?
- Why can’t I stay well?
Often, the responses offered in the conventional model of care are limited. A prescription. A suggestion to manage stress. A vague reassurance that some people are simply “more prone”.
This article will offer a different perspective. Rather than treating each infection or flare-up as an isolated event, we will explore the conditions that allow infections to persist or reappear, and the vulnerabilities - both environmental and internal - that weaken the body’s defenses.
In functional medicine, symptoms are not seen as failures of the body, but as signals. They are messages, pointing to areas where balance has been lost. The immune system does not act without reason. It responds to what it encounters: nutrient deficiencies, chronic stress, microbial imbalance, a high toxic burden, etc. When these underlying factors remain unaddressed, symptoms tend to recur, not because the body is broken, but because it is doing what it can under the circumstances it has been given.
Healing begins when we stop silencing symptoms and start listening.
Signs of a Struggling Immune System
By the time people find their way to me, they are often worn thin; physically depleted, emotionally threadbare. They’ve tried what they were told would help, but still, the cycle persists. Many feel abandoned by their own bodies. Why does it seem to falter again and again, despite their best efforts?
Though the outward expressions differ, most cases fall into one of three immune patterns:
1) Reactivation
Reactivation occurs when a pathogen that has long been dormant is reawakened under immune strain. This is common with viruses like Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, or herpes (oral and/or sexual), which can reside quietly in the body for years before flaring under stress or exhaustion. Malaria, for some, can also relapse in this way.
2) Persistence
Persistence refers to infections that never fully resolve. These may smolder below the surface, mild enough to overlook, yet potent enough to erode vitality over time. I often see this with Candida overgrowth, H. pylori, chronic UTIs, or Mycoplasma pneumoniae (“walking pneumonia”). Long COVID, too, often belongs here, its symptoms a sign of a system still entangled in a low-grade immune response.
3) Susceptibility
While occasional illness is a normal part of life, it's not typical to fall ill every time we are exposed to a microbe. The immune system is designed to protect us from a wide range of pathogens. When even the smallest exposure consistently leads to illness, it indicates a deeper vulnerability rather than mere coincidence.
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It is worth noting that these patterns often overlap. One person may experience frequent transient infections (susceptibility), an unresolved infection (persistence), and the return of a dormant infection (reactivation) all in the same season. What matters is not which category they fall into, but what all three are pointing to: lowered resilience.
Why Does Resilience Falter?
When the immune system begins to falter, it rarely does so because of a single cause. More often, it's the slow accumulation of subtle imbalances that ultimately overwhelm the system’s capacity to adapt. In functional medicine, this is understood as a breakdown in the body’s regulatory capacity: the ability to adjust to challenges, eliminate what is harmful, and nourish what is vital.
From a quantum-biological view, every physiological function, including immunity, depends on coherent signaling, precise communication between cells, tissues, and organs. That coherence is deeply influenced by light, circadian rhythm, water structure, and the electromagnetic environment. In the somatic framework, the nervous system plays an equally vital role. When the system is locked in chronic vigilance, hyper-alert, unsafe, undernourished, it siphons resources away from repair, immunity, and digestion in order to keep the body in survival mode.
In simple terms, a resilient immune system depends on both the nutrients and resources the body has, as well as its ability to handle stressors. When essential inputs like minerals, amino acids, clean water, rest, and connection are missing, the system cannot mount or complete its defense cycles. But just as critically, when there’s too much to detoxify, too much to regulate, too much stimulation, or too little recovery, the system becomes overdrawn, a biological deficit that mirrors financial insolvency.
Take, for example, a woman who keeps getting cold sores, alongside waves of fatigue she can’t explain. On paper, she’s doing fine, eating reasonably well, getting her work done, but her body tells a different story. She’s staying up late, exposed to blue light that confuses her circadian rhythm. Her meals, though labeled “healthy,” are nutrient-poor or incompatible with her biology. She’s wired at work, exhausted at home, plagued by seasonal allergies and gut issues, and increasingly disconnected from any sense of meaning. When we take inventory, it’s clear: her system is depleted, inflamed, and running on fumes. These cold sores are not a fluke; they're a signal that resilience is breaking down.
This breakdown often begins invisibly. Non-stick pans leach endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Tattoo inks and acrylic nails introduce heavy metals and solvents. Mold spores in the home suppress mitochondrial function and stress the immune system. These may seem like small insults, but in a system already running close to the edge, they become tipping points. A person who once bounced back from a poor night’s sleep or a stressful day may now find that even a minor stressor—an argument, a meal, a weather shift—pushes them over the edge.
True resilience is not merely the absence of illness; it is the capacity to support the body's inherent complexity. It calls for meeting the body's needs, lightening its burdens, and restoring coherence across all its systems. Functional medicine seeks to reveal both the essential inputs and the hidden obstacles that shape this balance.
Restoring Coherence
“You don’t have a drug deficiency. You have a nutrient deficiency, a movement deficiency, a sleep deficiency, a relaxation deficiency, a real food deficiency, or a love and connection deficiency.”
The question, “Why am I always sick?”, is rarely answered by pathology alone. It is not a flaw in the immune system we must interrogate, but a deeper misalignment between the body's needs and its reality. Illness, in this light, is not a failure. It is a message - clear, persistent, and often misunderstood.
As a functional nutrition practitioner, I approach the body as a living economy. Not an abstract machine, but a responsive, adaptive system with its own currency, expenditures, and thresholds. Like a financial analyst examining a household budget, I look not only at deficits, but at patterns of spending - what costs too much, what yields too little, and what’s been quietly accumulating interest in the background.
Some imbalances are blatant: nutrient deficiencies, disrupted sleep, chronic inflammation. Others are stealth-like: persistent pathogens, unresolved trauma, toxic relationships. These are the hidden fees and unauthorized withdrawals of the body’s economy, slowly siphoning resources, weakening reserves, and eroding resilience.
Our first task is to audit. Precision testing reveals what’s been overdrawn and what’s been neglected. Then comes the recalibration: replenishing nutrients, restoring circadian rhythms, supporting detoxification. And sometimes, this means confronting deeper liabilities; chronic pathogens that behave not merely as passive drains, but as embezzlers, quietly siphoning off the body’s capital, weakening its infrastructure from within. To restore solvency, they must be identified and removed.
Quantum biology reframes this still further: beneath the visible flows of chemistry lies a lattice of energy and light, where every cell both emits and receives information. When the body is coherent, this network hums - timely, precise, resonant. But stress, toxicity, and trauma distort these signals, introducing static, creating delay, dissonance. The immune system, reliant on these signals for coordination, falters not because it is weak, but because its communication lines are frayed.
Somatic experience completes the picture. The body is not just biology; it is biography. It carries memory in fascia, breath, posture. When stress becomes chronic or trauma unresolved, the nervous system remains braced - locked in patterns that override rest, repair, and immune function. And to release it is to unfreeze assets long held in the grip of survival.
The work, then, is one of restoration. A body in coherence is a body that can respond, fluidly, intelligently, without excess or collapse. Resilience is less a matter of strength than of flexibility. So when we ask, “Why am I always sick?”, we must learn to hear what the body has been trying to say all along. Not that it is broken, but that it is misaligned. That the books are not balancing. That coherence has been lost in the noise of modern life. And that health is restored when the system is, once again, allowed to speak in its own native rhythm.
Ready to Find Your Way Back to Wellness?
If you find yourself caught in the cycle of persistent infections, fatigue, or a sense that your body is no longer responding as it once did, it is important to understand that this is not an inevitable part of aging or something you must simply endure.
The body, when given the opportunity, possesses a remarkable capacity for healing. Whether you’re seeking immediate, personalized insight through the Better Health Bundle, where we will carefully assess your current health and identify actionable steps to begin shifting the balance, or you’re ready to embark on a more profound journey with Reclaim Your Resilience, a 4-month coaching program aimed at addressing the root causes of immune dysfunction, I am here to provide the guidance and support you need.
This process is deeply personal, and I am committed to meeting you exactly where you are. Together, we will uncover the underlying factors contributing to your health challenges, restore balance within your body, and foster the resilience needed to thrive - physically, mentally, and emotionally.
I invite you to reach out today to begin this transformative process.
