Hiya Smarties!
Check out this fabulous guest article by Mark Hyman, MD, to provide clarity on inflammation and autoimmune diseases from my blog archives.
This information is always timely. Hope it helps! Take it away, Mark…
Inflammation is a “hot” topic in medicine.
It appears connected to almost every known chronic disease: from heart disease to cancer, diabetes to obesity, autism to dementia and even depression. Other inflammatory diseases, such as allergies, asthma, arthritis and autoimmune disease, are increasing at dramatic rates. As physicians, we are trained to shut off inflammation with aspirin, anti-inflammatory medication, such as Advil or Motrin, steroids and increasingly more powerful immune-suppressing medication with serious side effects. But we are not trained to find and treat the underlying causes of inflammation in chronic disease. Hidden allergens, infections, environmental toxins, an inflammatory diet and stress are the real causes of these inflammatory conditions.
Autoimmune diseases now affect 24 million people and include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, thyroid disease, inflammatory bowel disease and more. These are often addressed by powerful immune suppressing medication and not by addressing the cause. That’s like taking a lot of aspirin while you are standing on a tack. The treatment is not more aspirin or a strong immune suppressant but removing the tack.
If you want to cool off inflammation in the body, you must find the source. Treat the fire, not the smoke. In medicine, we are mostly taught to diagnose disease by symptoms, not by their underlying cause. Functional medicine is the emerging 21st century paradigm of systems medicine that teaches us to treat the cause, not only the symptoms, and to ask why you are sick, not only what disease you have.
Functional medicine is a different way of thinking about disease that helps us understand and treat the real causes of inflammation instead of finding clever ways to shut it down. Medicine as it is practiced today is like taking the battery out of a smoke detector while a fire burns down your house!
Autoimmune conditions are connected by one central biochemical process: a runaway immune response also known as systemic inflammation that results in your body attacking its own tissues.
Autoimmunity: What is an Autoimmune Disease and How It Occurs
We are facing an epidemic of allergies (60 million people), asthma (30 million people) and autoimmune disorders (24 million people). Autoimmune diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, celiac disease, thyroid disease and the many other hard-to-classify syndromes in the 21st century. These are all autoimmune conditions, and at their root, they are connected by one central biochemical process: a runaway immune response also known as systemic inflammation that results in your body attacking its own tissues.
Your immune system is your defense against invaders. It is your internal army and has to clearly distinguish friend from foe — to know you from other. Autoimmunity occurs when your immune system gets confused and your own tissues get caught in friendly cross-fire. Your body is fighting something — an infection, a toxin, an allergen, a food or the stress response — and somehow it redirects its hostile attack on your joints, your brain, your thyroid, your gut, your skin or sometimes your whole body.
This immune confusion results from what is referred to as molecular mimicry. Conventional approaches don’t have a method for finding the insult causing the problem. Functional medicine provides a map to find out which molecule the cells are mimicking.
Interestingly, autoimmune disorders occur almost exclusively in developed countries. People in poor nations without modern amenities like running water, flushing toilets, washing machines and sterile backyards don’t get these diseases. If you grew up on a farm with lots of animals, you are also less likely to have any of these inflammatory disorders. Playing in the dirt, being dirty and being exposed to bugs and infections trains your immune system to recognize what is foreign and what is “you”.
In this country, autoimmune diseases are a huge health burden. They are the eighth leading cause of death among women, shortening the average patient’s lifespan by eight years. The annual health care cost for autoimmune diseases is $120 billion, representing nearly twice the economic health care burden of cancer (about $70 billion a year).1
Unfortunately, many of the conventional treatments available can make you feel worse. Anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil, steroids, immune suppressants like methotrexate, and the new TNF-alpha blockers like Enbrel or Remicade can lead to intestinal bleeding, kidney failure, depression, psychosis, osteoporosis, muscle loss, diabetes, infection and cancer.2
When used selectively, these drugs can help people get their lives back, but they are not a long-term solution. They shouldn’t be the end of treatment but a bridge to cool off inflammation while we treat the root cause of the disease.
If you have an autoimmune disease, here is what you need to think about and do.
Nine Steps for Treatment of Autoimmune Disease
1. Check for hidden infections — yeast, viruses, bacteria, Lyme, etc. — with the help of a doctor and treat them.
2. Check for hidden food allergens with IgG food testing or just try The UltraSimple Diet, which is designed to eliminate most food allergens.
3. Get tested for celiac disease with a blood test that any doctor can do.
4. Get checked for heavy metal toxicity. Mercury and other metals can cause autoimmunity.
5. Fix your gut.
6. Use nutrients, such as fish oil, vitamin C, vitamin D and probiotics, to help calm your immune response naturally.
7. Exercise regularly. It’s a natural anti-inflammatory.
8. Practice deep relaxation, like yoga, deep breathing, biofeedback or massage, because stress worsens the immune response.
9. Tell your doctor about Functional medicine and encourage him or her to get trained. Go to http://www.functionalmedicine.org/ for more information and to get a copy of the “Textbook for Functional Medicine”.
Give these steps a try and see if you don’t start feeling less inflamed. The answers are right in front of you. Treat the underlying causes of your illness and you will begin to experience vibrant health once more.
For more information on how to optimize your health, see Dr. Hyman’s website.
Now I’d like to hear from you. Have you been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease? How is your doctor treating you? Have you been frustrated by the medical advice that you’ve been given? What steps have you taken to get to the root of the problem, and what have your results been? Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below.
Love and health,
References
1. Nakazawa, D. (2008). The Autoimmune Epidemic. Simon & Schuster. New York.
2. Siegel, C.A., Marden, S.M., Persing, S.M., et al. (2009). Risk of lymphoma associated with combination anti-tumor necrosis factor and immunomodulator therapy for the treatment of Crohn’s disease: a meta-analysis. Clin Gastroenterol Hepatol. 7(8): 874-81.
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My son just diagnosed with mild crohns ilietis afraid to start drugs entocort and then remicade or possibly entocort and then pentasa his symptoms diaria and fatigue started eating small meals drinking lots of fluids excersising everday started taking probiotics and 1 fish oil a day all test look good and healthy except of course crohns, it’s been 3 weeks since diagnosed don’t know what to do let him continue what he’s doing or start meds don’t want condition to get worse!!!
I was diagnosed with Auto-immune Hepatitis about a month ago after my first-ever visit to a hospital for myself. I was there 8 days while they did tests and tried to understand why someone who never used drugs and lived a healthy lifestyle would develop this disease. Now have been put on the immune suppressant drugs, Prednisone and Azathioprine. For now, I accept this as a temporary patch because by the time I went to the hospital I was in pretty bad shape. Everything I was doing to strengthen my liver wasn’t working. My skin and eyes were yellow (bilirubin at 20, enzyme counts in upper 1000s), extreme fatigue, ascites, blurred vision; I obviously needed help. Thankfully, there was no scarring of my liver, just inflammation. However, I do not want to stay on immune suppressants for the rest of my life. I am still trying to determine what caused this to happen. I have my own ideas but doctors are not interested in them. I have been doing tons of research and about this disease I previously knew hardly anything about. I wish I could convince my GI doctor and others to read and be open to more holistic ideas. My doctor is a good person just too set on only using conventional drugs.
Thanks to Dr Sebi.. The great man who cures all known diseases, Dr Sebi is a healer, pathologist, herbalist, biochemist and naturalist, who immigrated from Honduras and who has committed his life to the service of helping people cure their diseases. In 1988, he took on the Attorney General of New York in a Supreme Court trial where he was being sued for false advertisement and practice without a license after placing ads in a number of newspapers, including the New York Post where he had announced: “Aids has been cured by the Usha Research Institute, and we specialize in cures for Sickle Cell, Lupus, Blindness, Herpes, Cancer, Als and others. Pre-trial, the judge had asked Dr. Sebi provide one witness per disease he had claimed to cure however when 77 in person witnesses joined him in court, the judge had no choice but to proclaim the Doctor NOT GUILTY on all accounts, proving he did in fact have the cure to all the diseases mentioned in the newspapers. Several celebrities have sought out healing through the Doctor including: Michael Jackson, Magic Johnson, Eddie Murphy, John Travolta and the deceased Lisa Left Eye Lopes who proclaims in the video: “I know a man who has been curing AIDS since 1987”.. i want to inform the public how i was cured from ALS(MND) by Dr Sebi, i visited different hospital but they gave me list of drugs which is very expensive to treat the symptoms and never cured me. I was browsing through the Internet searching for remedy on ALS and i saw comment of people talking about how Dr Sebi cured them from ALS, CANCER, HERPES, DIABETES and so on… when i contacted him he gave me hope and send a Herbal medicine to me through courier service that i took and it seriously worked for me, am a free person now without problem, my ALS result came out negative. I pray for you Dr Sebi. Am fully cured. you can also get your self cured my friends if you really need my doctor help, you can reach him now: (drsebiherbalisthealinghome12@gmail. com) You are indeed a HERO!
Having surgery in a few weeks for strictures in my small bowel, then starting Remicade infusion’s for the first time after surgery, I don’t want to take Remicade but have to to keep my insurance money coming in or I’ll be cut off by refusing therapy. can I still try functional medicine while taking my Remicade infusion’s,i’m 50 years old I’ve lost 40 pounds at 5’7″. I’ve had One resection at the age of 19 and been treated surgically for two anal abscess and fistula in the past six months
After two and a half years of steroids for pmr I’m down to 2.5mg. Life has been he’ll. So many side effects, infections and feel so ill constantly at the end of my tether. Doctors don’t seem to care. I’m exhausted, bloated, head and neck pain, no appetite, feel so fed up running to the loo then don’t go, scared to go out in case I pick something else up. Feel like it’ll never end but no one listens. Don’t sleep well and have a weird disconnected feeling lots of the time. I’m desperate, just want to wake up feeling well for once. Sorry for the rant have no on to tell
Question,how to treat bewer yeast autoimmune disease.Which causes someone to get drunk from foods turning to alcohol.
He had a bleeding ulcer about 25 years ago from taken too many goodie powders.
I have mctd, scleroderma, myositis, lupus. I take mycrophenelate, 1,000mg daily. I was on 3,000 and my liver didn’t like it. Now rituxan my 2nd infusion last week. I’m very tired. Thank you Erin. PS my Doctor doesn’t know about food. I’m learning about it myself. I’m 64 now. Not well since 40yrs old. Also behcets, thyroid
Hi I have Multiple Sclerosis and Epstein barr along with fibromyalgia. I recently had blood work and for the first time my white blood count and red blood count and platelets are all off the normal values. My WBC is 1.7. My doctor told me to stop my MS medication Copaxone and today I noticed I broke out in cysts on my face. I really do not know what to do or where to go. I am afraid that I have caught an infection and how will my body fight the infection. I am scared. I also have hypothyroidism.
Katherine 32, Michigan, diagnosed with stage 2 primary biliary Cholangitis, talking 1000 mg of URSO a day, 100 mg of rifampin,
I’m grateful for them but I would love to find a better way. I’m told t there is nothing else to do but eat healthy and take the medicine. They give me 10-15 years before I will need a transplant. I have a two year old.
Hi, I’ve been diagnosed with CREST, sjogren syndrome, vasculitis, and small fiber neuropathy all since August of last year! I constantly burn from a high inflammation level! I’ve seen specialist after specialist, regular doctors and even natural doctors! It doesn’t seem to be getting better, and I’m to a point where I just don’t know what to do anymore! As I type this, my body is so inflamed! I need help!
Hi Kris. My beautiful friend told me about you. Yes i have been diagnosed with ibd (ulcerative colitis ). Ive been told by gastroenterologists that diet has no part to play in treating this condition and im currently taking sulfasalazine to help with the inflammation. Ive tried the specific carbohydrate diet but that i found so restrictive and alot of the ingredients in the recipes i couldnt find in Australia. And i got quite depressed trying to stick to that strict diet. Im looking into fmt (fecal matter transplant) but please can you give me any advice for my condition as ive spent many a night crying myself to sleep. I was diagnosed in 2014 and im now 38 years old. Much love and hugs. Xxxxx
I have rheumatoid arthritis. I have worked on all rhe aspects points 1-9 but by and large I’ve had to initiate everything. I am on methotrexate but have a very high anti cpp of 130. So I stay on methotrexate abd plauenil. I have all other levels now at normal like ESR etc. i have also included remedial massage in the last 3 years (I’ve been disgnosed 4), have traibed as a yoga teacher and exercise every day, been to a hieticisn and gastroenteroligist and meditste daily.
I am a 38 yr old female. Three years ago I became ill and was given zpack, then a ten day course when it didn’t clear, then took 2 more rounds of antibiotic for strep throat, as I have young children. Since that time, I have not been the same. Something has clicked in my body.
My skin started looking red on my face and felt sunburnt all the time, also my scalp felt tender/burning, my eyes became sensitive to the sun. After seeing 3 seems, they said I had Rosacea, but even my arms felt like they were burning. hi felt like I had chills up and down my back. I went for allergy testing, wasn’t allergic to anything, I tested my house for mold, nothing. The dermatologists basically told me this is what I had and they offered me Oracea. I didn’t even look flushed, I was just more irritated from all the topicals they gave me.
I felt it was more systemic.
I suspected Candida/leaky gut since I had exposed myself to so much antibiotic. I eliminated dairy, wheat, sugar of all kind and processed foods for 13 months. My body felt better, but my face had still sting and was super sensitive, even tho my face wasn’t red. I slowly added foods back with her permission but wondered why she didn’t have me on certain enzymes or glutamine.
I desparately went to NYC to see a holistic dermatologist. He was very expensive and tested me for viruses. Came up I had an off the charts Epstein Barr virus in the past. I am assuming it was when I thought I was sick and was given zpack and a 10 day course.
This Dr had immunology background but he pointed out I had a lot of cloggrd pores. This was the beginning of me self diagnosing Sebborhaic Dermatitis. This Dr I saw two times and he diagnosed me two times with lupus. I have also had positive ANA tests along with a negative one. All other lupus testa came up negative and I had an x-ray on my hands and feet for rheumatiod arthritis. Feet showed nothing and hands showed osteo.
My two joints in my two big toes have been hurting for over a year, as I was diagnosed with Hallux Limitus. The podiatrist I saw thought it was very unusual for a healthy person to have this on both toes with constant Inflammation. He asked me if I was tested for anything or if arthritis ran in my family. It doesn’t and neither does autoimmune diseases.
Just over the last few months I have had eye issues, blepharitis. I know people with Sebborhaic Dermatitis get this sometimes. I just hink it’s really unusual that I have all chronic issues, with no cures, just treatments.
I was off my diet as the eyes and feet and hands have developed, oh and my hair seems to be thinning as my scalp is always inflamed with my face….but I am back to a clean lifestyle. Looking for a functional Dr to test me for toxic metals and anything my gut has or doesn’t have. I am still battling these issues and just want to turn the inflammation faucet off. Thank you for writing this article. It encourages me to take the next step.
I have tried everything. The rashes and acne and joint pain thinning hair doesn’t end.. I used to be attractive I feel like I’ve aged a hundred years in 2 years. . I’m 51 and I have no interest in living like this. My diet consists of chicken breast and salad. No bread no grain no dairy no chocolate no processed food no refined sugar. Nothing. I am starving to death and nothing works. I give up.
Diagnosed with burning tongue syndrome. Not one dr tried to get to source. Prior to that I had sibo for 5 years before it was diagnosed. With the help of holistic medecine and my own research l am now able to eat normal. I developed an inflamatory ulser which was biopsied. Since then major trouble on left side of tongue. Biopsie was normal the only treatment offered was colonazepan doesn’t work on my request I had an mri. Bloodwork. Allergy testing mouth swab a.l normal. I am a cancer survivor 20 years my tongue is constantly irritated and burning. This looks normal to dr. What functional testing can I do to get to source this is pure hell tried everything out there nothing works l feel as though the Drs could care less because they can’t fix it
on tongue during this time. Saw many oral surgeons ,I was told it should be biopsied because it wasn’t going away
I was diagnosed with seronegative rheumatoid arthritis 6 months ago. I had various symptoms in the past 2 or 3 years which pointed to this ultimate diagnosis. However I have also experienced a very sensitive sense of smell during this time. Anything perfumed, soapy or smoke and fumes become overwhelming and also take on a strange smell all of their own. I’ve often wondered and suspected that this is linked to my disease. I can also become nauseous and head achy with certain smells. Just a thought.
Good Day, I have had fatigue, muscular pain , tummy problems for the last 5 years , I am a 43 year old female, no diagonis, last trip to hospital where a specialist said I had Vit D deficiency and put me on an anti depressants called Cymbalta to help with pain management – frustrated have good and bad days
Yes, I was diagnosed that I have an autoimmune disease it is vasculitis. My Dr. has always prescribe me steroid like prednisone, methylprednisolone and many more. I thought and trust my Dr. that these medicine could help me reduce the inflammation that I suffered every day, but steroid makes my diseases severe. I followed what they’ve said, but it doesn’t work. Now, I am just praying that God would heal me, using His servants.
Yes, I was diagnosed in October with PLC. If I quit the steroid cream or the Doxy-cycline it gets worse. I itch constantly. I heard that an anti rejection drug could help but I am on Medicare and can not afford anything close to that. It is on my hands, top of my feet, both legs, head and parts of my back. I’m at my wits end wondering what to do.