9 Tips for Addressing Autoimmune Disease
I’m not a fan of conventional western medicine. (If you’ve been reading my blog even casually, you know that’s a redundant statement.) It’s good for what it’s good for: acute bacterial infections, trauma, emergency care, that sorta thing, but for the treatment of chronic illnesses, it falls abysmally short. And disease prevention? Western medicine simply doesn’t put its attention there, and that’s why most doctors are so ignorant in that arena. For the most part, they don’t understand the importance of nutrition and detoxification, two absolutely essential factors in healing from any illness. I just can’t get down with the whole western medicine paradigm because it’s not intuitive to treat an illness with a drug to cover up or manage the symptoms, while ignoring the root cause.
For this reason, I have always been a fan of what has been called alternative medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine, holistic medicine, breakthrough medicine, and now functional medicine. Lots of names, but all referring to the same general philosophy, which is that in order to treat an illness, the underlying causes must be addressed, and we must look at the whole person, not just the diseased part. I feel so passionately and so strongly about this because it’s working for me, and because there are so many people suffering that don’t have to be.
The following 9 tips for addressing autoimmune disease were taken from an article on www.healthiertalk.com written by Dr. Mark Hyman, MD, founder of The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, MA. Dr. Hyman specializes in functional medicine. In his own words:
Functional medicine moves beyond diagnosis-based medicine to incorporate new research that for the first time allows treatment of the underlying causes of disease.
It works with the body’s natural forces to achieve a state of what Dr. Hyman calls UltraWellness—lifelong good health and vitality. Functional medicine creates UltraWellness by combining a broad range of treatments to help restore and optimize normal function and health, including conventional therapies, herbal treatments, and alternative methodologies, in one encompassing, patient-centered approach.
9 Tips for Addressing Autoimmune Disease
(If you really want to educate yourself on these issues, click on all the links throughout – Dr. Hyman’s blog is very informative.)
- · Read The Autoimmune Epidemic
(affiliate link). This book will tell you why we have this problem, and how to fix it.
- · Find a functional medicine doctor who can help you address autoimmunity. (I suggest fining a center that specializes in this. There’s a comprehensive list of these centers in the back of Suzanne Somers’ book Breakthrough which I highly recommend.)
- · Get tested for mercury and other heavy metals.
- · Get tested for celiac disease (an autoimmune reaction to wheat and other gluten-containing grains), which causes over 60 autoimmune diseases. And consider eliminating other inflammatory foods from your diet such as dairy, eggs, corn and animal fats for a few weeks to see if it makes a different your symptoms.
- · Take immune-balancing nutrients and supplements, including vitamin D, essential fats (like EPA/DHA and GLA), and probiotics.
- · Practice deep relaxation daily through yoga, meditation, biofeedback, or anything that reverses the stress response.
- · Practice the precautionary principle, which says that we should avoid anything with the potential for harm. In the US, something has to be proven harmful before it is taken off the market. In Europe, something has to be proven safe before it is allowed on the market. This is also known as “better safe than sorry.”
- · Learn how to boost your body’s own detoxification system
Have you tried functional medicine? How has it helped you? If not, what’s stopping you?
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Great post. Informative and well written as usual. Do most of these tips apply if all systems seem healthy and functional? Is it still worth looking into and practicing them?
Hi Devon. Functional medicine, in addition to all its other names is also known as anti-aging medicine and preventive medicine, because if you practice it, you will prevent diseases from developing in the first place and slow (and often reverse) the aging process, which is essentially synonymous with disease process. Which is to say that if you’re healthy, these tips are just as important to practice because you’re cutting disease off at the pass. Here’s an example: According to the nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group, the average newborn baby has 287 known toxins in his or her umbilical cord blood. We’re toxic before we even enter this world! Detoxification is an unfortunate necessity even for those who aren’t currently showing any symptoms of illness, simply because we are living in a world more toxic than at any other point in history. There’s a significant contingent of the medical community that believes cancer is the result of toxic overload of our systems. And ditto for autoimmune illnesses. So simply eating a cleaner diet and detoxifying your system regularly will do wonders.
Good practical info – thanks.