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.
Physicians are trained to shut off inflammation with aspirin, anti-inflammatory medication, steroids, and increasingly more powerful immune suppressing medication with serious side effects. But they are not trained to find and treat the underlying causes of inflammation in chronic disease. Hidden allergens, infections, environmental toxins, inflammatory diets, and stress are the real causes of these inflammatory conditions.
Autoimmune diseases, supposedly affect 8% of the French population 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. It you want to cool off inflammation in the body, you must find the source.
Functional medicine, the emerging 21st century paradigm of systems medicine, teaches to treat the cause, not only the symptoms. Functional medicine is a different way of thinking about disease that helps physicians 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!
Autoimmunity : what it is and how it occurs
We are facing an epidemic of allergic, asthmatic and autoimmune disorders. 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 they are connected at their root 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 that should clearly distinguish friend from foe. 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, flush 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 Western countries, autoimmune diseases, when taken all together, are a huge health burden. They are the eighth leading cause of death among women, shortening the average patient’s lifespan by eight years. Unfortunately, many of the conventional treatments available can make you feel worse. Anti-inflammatory drugs, steroids, immune suppressants like methotrexate, and the new TNF-alpha blockers like, can lead to intestinal bleeding, kidney failure, depression, psychosis, osteoporosis, muscle loss, and diabetes, not to mention overwhelming infection and cancer.(1)
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.
Recovering from autoimmunity : 10 steps to heal autoimmune disease
- Check for hidden infections - yeast, viruses, bacteria, Lyme, etc. - with the help of a doctor, and treat them.
- Check for hidden food allergens with IgG food testing with the help of a doctor and take the necessary measures accordingly.
- Get tested for celiac disease, which is a blood test that any doctor can do.
- Get checked for heavy metal toxicity. Mercury and other metals can cause autoimmunity.
- Fix your gut. Because of its role in regulating the immune system, the gut is at the heart of our of immune defence system. That is why the initial aim of nutritherapy is to ensure a good equilibrium of the digestive tract. The Consequences of Having a Deficient Digestive Sphere.
- Use nutrients such as fish oil, vitamin C, vitamin D, and probiotics to help calm your immune response naturally.
- Exercise regularly - it’s a natural anti-inflammatory.
- Practice deep relaxation like yoga, deep breathing, biofeedback, or massage, because stress worsens the immune response.
- Enhance your daily intake of magnesium and B Vitamins by adjusting your diet with foods rich in such nutrients (pulses, healthy fats, whole grains, chocolate, fruit and veg, fish and shellfish) and take a specifically-formulated food supplement designed to reduce stress, such as D-Stress, D-Stress Booster or Mag Boost.
- You can also give a try the the Seignalet diet (2), which is a real alternative to conventional medicine when suffering from autoimmune diseases. In short, the Seignalet diet includes a gluten and a dairy free diet, the eviction of coffee and alcohol and the preferential use of low-temperature cooking methods. More about the Seignalet Diet.