https://www.drangiemartinez.com/, https://p.bttr.to/3CNMr0c, https://drangierootcause.substack.com/?r=237ugp&utm_campaig

Root-Cause Medicine, 8790 Ralston Road, Arvada, CO (2026)

07/28/2026

Starting the day with high protein is foundational for metabolic health.

It improves blood sugar control, supports lean muscle, and helps regulate appetite, especially important for women in perimenopause and menopause, where the body becomes more sensitive to underfueling and metabolic stress.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases

🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

© Copyright 2026 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

07/26/2026

That food baby after fibermaxxing? That was a test. Your gut just failed it.

The trend has the direction right.

Over 90% of Americans never hit the recommended 25 to 38 grams of fiber a day.

But fiber is not digested by you. It is fermented by your gut bacteria. When the microbes that do that work are depleted, when motility is slow, when bile flow is low, a fiber load has nowhere to go. It sits, ferments, and produces the gas and distension you're calling a food baby.

Most people push through it.

I read it. Painful bloating after a fiber increase points to compromised microbiome terrain: low microbial diversity, possible overgrowth, sluggish transit.

Stacking a trend on top of that doesn't build a healthier gut. It hands a bigger workload to the system that already failed the smaller one.

Terrain first. Trends last. That's the order.

If fiber makes you bloat, don't push through it. Investigate it.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases
🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/26/2026

A peptide did what the steroid taper alone couldn't finish. She'd built real stability with ulcerative colitis through foundational gut work aimed at immune tolerance, microbiome rebalancing, gut lining repair, and a diet structured around actual triggers. Then a trip to Mexico triggered an infection and bloody diarrhea. Her usual steroid protocol did not hold. We added BPC-157 alongside the taper for angiogenesis, nitric oxide signaling, and intestinal barrier repair. Within four weeks, the bleeding slowly resolved. Steroids controlled the inflammatory signal. They didn't rebuild the barrier. That is the order of operations: control the signal, then rebuild the barrier. Dr. Angie Martinez, MD, IFMCP | Root-Cause Medicine | Arvada, CO. Direct-pay functional medicine for complex cases. 🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call.

07/25/2026

Most longevity clinics have never tested your grip strength.

They will still sell you a peptide protocol on day one.

I see this constantly. A patient walks out with hormone pellets, a cognitive stack, and a peptide bag before anyone has measured whether their cardiovascular system, inflammatory terrain, or metabolic capacity can hold any of it. That is ceiling work sold as transformation. It is the most expensive mistake in this industry.

Before a clinic earns the right to sell optimization, it has to establish the floor.

Metabolic terrain first: muscle mass + function, because muscle drives insulin sensitivity, glucose disposal, and resting metabolic rate. Inflammatory burden next, because unresolved inflammation destabilizes everything layered on top of it. Cardiovascular risk last but non-negotiable, evaluated early and specifically. It is the domain longevity medicine gets to too late and too narrow, and it decides whether a longer life is also a functional one.

None of this gets measured by a symptom questionnaire. It gets measured by function. VO2 max. Sit to stand. Grip strength. These numbers predict how long and how well a system holds up better than any biomarker panel sold as a longevity package.

Only once the floor is documented and stable does cognitive optimization or hormone management belong in the conversation. Hormones are signals. They act on terrain. Optimize the signal before the terrain can hold it and you amplify instability, not resolve it.

Stabilize before you stimulate. Terrain first, ceiling last. That is the order of operations. It is the entire difference between a longevity clinic and a longevity experiment.

Before your next consult, ask what floor work was done before anything was prescribed. If the answer is nothing, you already have your answer.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases
🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/24/2026

Should you microdose GLP-1? People are asking me this every week now.

The whole internet debate has collapsed into one question: Is this just a fad with no scientific backing sold by the online weight loss platforms?

I have used GLP therapy in practice for six years.

The size of the dose matters far less than the metabolic terrain it lands on.
When I run a full workup and find poor fat oxidation, high sympathetic drive, and low metabolic flexibility, even a standard dose is too much. The body reads it as starvation and burns muscle for fuel.

The patient loses the exact tissue that protects their metabolism.

So, the honest answer is no if you mean ordering a microdose online and taking it alone. And consider yes, if it is part of a comprehensive plan when the dose is matched to your metabolic terrain and sourced from a pharmacy that is third-party tests.

A dose is not a plan.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases
🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/24/2026

Mercury was the exciting answer. A hematocrit of 56 was the correct one.

Her metabolic testing was the kind you'd frame and hang on the wall.
Mitochondrial function moved from a clear limitation to excellent, HRV climbing toward optimal, fat-burning restored. By every metabolic measure, recovery. And she still couldn't find her words, her name recall was slipping, and pulling routine data at work took twice as long.

When the numbers are that good and the brain still isn't working, the pull is to reach for a villain. There was one. Residual mercury, a failed visual contrast screen, the whole detox story ready to be told. It's satisfying. You can fight a heavy metal.

The correct answer sat in the CBC the whole time, and it was boring.
Hematocrit 56, RDW 22, a smear that had been quietly abnormal for months. Not a toxin. Thick blood. A high hematocrit raises blood viscosity, and thicker blood moves slower through the smallest vessels feeding the brain. Delivery drops, and word-finding, visual processing, and mental stamina drop with it, no matter how well the mitochondria are running.

Here's the part nobody says out loud. The dramatic diagnosis is easier to sell to the patient and easier for the clinician to feel heroic treating. Nobody feels like a hero managing a hematocrit. That gap is where people get treated for the wrong thing for years.

This is an order of operations problem, not a supplement problem. At Root Cause Functional Medicine we follow the objective abnormality, not the interesting one, and read the whole system before naming the enemy. The exciting answer and the correct answer are rarely the same answer.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine 📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases

🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/24/2026

A patient asked me if she should start BPC-157, 150mcg, for her rotator cuff. I told her not yet.

She wanted the peptide. Her insulin was 13, her zinc was 60, her B12 was 380, and her omega index was 2.3, nowhere near what her tissue needed to rebuild cartilage. Her estradiol was under 30 with no hormone support. She wasn't eating enough protein. There was no floor for a peptide to land on.

I built the basics first. Protein, zinc, B12, omega-3s, and her hormones, before we ever talked about a peptide again. That's the order of operations.

Spending money on the wrong thing at the wrong time is the most expensive part of functional and regenerative medicine.

: Dr. Angie Martinez, MD, IFMCP | Root-Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases
🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/23/2026

𝗛𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘆𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗼𝗺𝘀 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝟰 𝘃𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲. 𝗦𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝘁 𝗮𝗺𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗻𝗴.

Four visits. Seventy eight, sixty seven, seventy five, sixty three. Read as a straight line, that looks like someone getting worse, not better. She was not getting worse.

Her hs-CRP, the marker I use to track active inflammation, moved from 12 mg/L down to 2 mg/L across those same four visits. That is a body coming out of a genuinely inflamed state into a normal one. The composite score was never the number I was watching most closely. That one was.

A single score cannot tell you what capacity someone has built. It can only tell you what happened to average out on one particular day.

I was not trying to make her score climb in a straight line. I was helping her hold her system together long enough to build the capacity for something no lab panel measures directly, 𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲. She used that capacity to finally leave a career she could no longer sustain herself inside of.

Metabolic capacity is life capacity. Sometimes my job is not improving a number. It is helping someone hold it together long enough to find the capacity to make the decision that actually changes her life. Capacity before complexity is still the order of operations, even when the complexity is a career, not a lab value.

If your progress has not looked like a straight line and you have quietly wondered whether that means it is not working, that is exactly the kind of pattern a discovery call is built to read correctly.

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine
📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases

🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

07/21/2026

I am Dr. Angie Martinez, MD, a functional medicine physician at RootCause Medicine in Arvada, Colorado.

I often recognized a bidirectional relationship between estrogen and histamine that is frequently missed in conventional and functional medicine workups.

Excess estrogen stimulates mast cells to release histamine, while elevated histamine suppresses the enzyme diamine oxidase (DAO) and signals the ovaries to produce more estrogen. This creates a self-reinforcing loop that can explain why women experience cyclical symptoms including premenstrual headaches, bloating, skin flares, anxiety, and histamine intolerance that worsens in the luteal phase.

Breakdown:
Estrogen 🧬 ↑
↓
Triggers Mast Cells
↓
Histamine 🔥 ↑
↓
Blocks DAO 🚫
(can’t break histamine down)
↓
Histamine builds ↑
↓
Signals Ovaries 🥚
↓
Estrogen ↑
↺ a cycle 🔁 your body can get stuck in

how it can show up:
headaches 🤕 • bloating 🤰 • skin flares 🧴 • anxiety 😰

histamine issues (often worse before your period) 🌙

Treating estrogen or histamine in isolation, without addressing the underlying feedback loop, is a primary reason these symptoms persist despite standard hormonal or antihistamine interventions

—Dr. Angie Martinez | Root Cause Functional Medicine 📍 Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases 🔗 Link in bio to schedule a discovery call

© Copyright 2026 RootCause Medicine. All Rights Reserved

07/20/2026

Your overnight symptoms may not be only about hormones.

A fasting glucose of 78 can look reassuring, and the CGM still caught her glucose dropping overnight. Hyperglycemia gets the attention, but the nocturnal lows are the ones that can destabilize cortisol, cognition, and hormone signaling, and they barely register in most workups. Her prior plan was already moving toward hormone optimization while the metabolic floor was giving out at night: low insulin, low leptin, CO2 of 20, minimal reserve underneath a high functioning presentation.

This is where context matters. You cannot layer a hormone signal onto a system that loses glucose stability every night and expect repair. The wearable found the pattern, and years of pattern recognition told us what it meant. Glucose stability, liver, and nervous-system load had to be sequenced before any hormone signal went in. We used the CGM data to time nighttime protein, stabilize overnight glucose, and build the floor before touching the ceiling.
Symptoms are often messengers from a larger biological conversation. The goal is not perfection, it is greater biological stability.

Link in bio to schedule a discovery call.

—Dr. Angie Martinez, MD, IFMCP | Root-Cause Medicine Arvada, CO | Direct-pay functional medicine for complex chronic cases

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