Autoimmunity: the Symptoms and How to Get Better
Imagine that your body is a castle and your immune system is your army fighting off invaders like bacteria. If your army malfunctions and attacks the castle, you may have an autoimmune disease such as lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and/or psoriasis. You may experience pain, fatigue, dizziness, rashes, depression and many more symptoms.
So, the question is: How do I know if I am dealing with an autoimmune challenge, what causes it, and how can I get better?
Keep this in mind, all the immune tips we discussed in last week’s newsletter to get you prepped for the fall season are GREAT for each and every one of us. If you missed it, you can use this link, here.
OK, let’s get up to speed on the essential facts regarding immunity and autoimmunity, so that you understand the difference, and know what to do if you experience your castle on fire 🔥
How your Immune System Works
Your immune system works to recognize and identify an infection or injury in the body. This causes an immune response, with the goal of restoring normal function.
Many people think that when they get sick, their symptoms are a sign that they have a virus or an infection.
However, your symptoms are actually a sign that your body is fighting back against the infection or virus, triggering an immune response.
When you have a cold, you feel run down, your nose is runny, you feel congested - these are the symptoms people complain about. People think “I'm so sick, this is terrible. Why doesn't my immune system work?” But with every one of these cold symptoms, this is actually your immune system at work.
The immune system is made up of thousands of moving parts that all need to work together with balance and harmony.
The key to a proper immune response involves activating the right cells at the right time and shutting them down once the threat has been neutralized. But if the immune system is out of balance, that carefully coordinated response can go off the rails.
What can go wrong with the Immune System?
Sometimes a person may have an immune response even though there is no real threat. This can lead to problems such as allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases. If you have an autoimmune disease, your immune system attacks healthy cells in your body by mistake.
When your immune system overreacts, it sets off a dangerous series of events. The immune system keeps sending out troops even when there’s no real enemy to fight, and those overstimulated immune cells start to attack the body’s own cells, which can:
Cause an autoimmune condition, such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis
Cause ongoing systemic inflammation, which can lead to a range of chronic conditions including type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease
Trigger potentially deadly cytokine storms, which can severely damage the lungs and other organs
The immune system usually guards against bacteria and viruses. When it senses these foreign invaders, it sends out an army of fighter cells to attack them.
Usually, the immune system can tell the difference between foreign cells and your own cells.
In an autoimmune disease, the immune system mistakes part of your body, like your joints or skin, as foreign. It releases proteins called autoantibodies that attack healthy cells.
Some autoimmune diseases target only one organ. Type 1 diabetes damages the pancreas. Other diseases, like systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), or lupus, can affect the whole body.
Women tend to get autoimmune diseases at a rate of about 2 to 1 compared to men - 6.4% of women versus 2.7% of men. The disease often starts during childbearing age (ages 15 to 44).
Some autoimmune diseases are more common in certain ethnic groups. For example, lupus affects more African American and Hispanic people than white people.
Certain autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and lupus, can run in families. Not every family member will necessarily get the same disease, but they inherit a susceptibility to an autoimmune condition based on environmental factors, diet and lifestyle.
A “western diet” increases the risk factor for developing an autoimmune disease. Eating high-sugar and highly processed foods are linked to inflammation, which can set off an immune response.
About 25% of us have some sort of dysfunction of the immune system, including autoimmune reactivity, and around 50 million Americans have a diagnosable autoimmune disease. Meanwhile, millions more people have autoimmune spectrum problems with no explanation for their symptoms. They aren’t diagnosed yet, but unless they change something about the way their body is functioning, that will be the end result.
Autoimmune diseases are reaching epidemic levels, in part, because there are so many of them. Current medicine lists between 80 and 100 different types of autoimmune disorders or diseases. Some of the more common ones include Multiple Sclerosis (MS), Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Hashimoto’s Disease, Grave’s Disease, and Lupus.
Once diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, many believe their only option is to manage the symptoms while waiting for modern medicine to find a cure for the disorder. I’m here to tell you that is not the case.
A functional medicine approach to autoimmune disorders includes the possibility of reversing the disease process by enabling your body to heal itself.
Skeptical? I don’t blame you. If this were true, why wouldn’t every doctor advise you about this? Fundamentally, traditional conventional medicine and functional medicine take a very different approach to chronic disease.
When it comes to autoimmune disorders, traditional medicine tends to focus on stopping attacks and managing symptoms. This may be accomplished by using pharmaceutical drugs to depress the immune system, reduce inflammation, or alleviate other symptoms. This is necessary and can provide much needed relief to patients. When other approaches fail, it may be the only recourse that remains.
However, these pharmaceutical treatments are prescribed after the fact. They focus on stopping attacks in progress and relieving the symptoms of the attack. While this can help patients, if you want restore true health, then you need to figure out WHY the immune system went from functioning normally to attacking your body. This condition did not occur in a vacuum.
Something happened to cause the body to go into an abnormal state of hyper-immunity. That is the focus of functional medicine. The functional medicine approach is not as concerned with the symptoms of a particular disease as much as it is with the underlying cause of the disease.
When the body functions properly, symptoms diminish, and the illness is no longer present.
Functional medicine and traditional medicine might seem to be at odds with one another. But the reality is, they do not need to be.
The primary theories of autoimmunity include a genetic weakness being triggered by an immune system response to toxins; food proteins like gluten and casein leaking into the bloodstream through a compromised gut lining; or chronic viral, bacterial, yeast, or parasite infections.
All of these involve out-of-control inflammation which is an immune system trigger. This inflammatory-immune response can both cause and increase intestinal permeability or leaky gut syndrome, further perpetuating the inflammatory-immune cycle.
The old view of genetics was that it was an immutable force, and that if a family had a certain health problem, it would be just a matter of time before members got the same disease, unless you were very lucky. Today, we know that this isn’t so simple. The field of epigenetics has explored and demonstrated that environmental factors influence DNA expression.
In other words, genetics can give you the tendency to develop an autoimmune disease, but it is your lifestyle choices and your environmentthat determine whether those particular genes get switched on, or stay switched off.
And I have more good news, 77% of the immune system is determined by things we can control. The foods we eat or don’t eat, our toxic exposures, our exposure to germs, our stress levels, and our medications, all play a role in determining health status, including the status of diseases for which we may be genetically predisposed.
Are you on the autoimmune spectrum?
To be diagnosed with most autoimmune diseases, the immune system has to destroy a significant amount of tissue (such as in the brain, gut, or thyroid) to be officially diagnosed. For example, there has to be 90% destruction of the adrenal glands to be diagnosed with Addison’s disease (a disorder in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough hormones). There also has to be severe destruction of the neurological and digestive systems to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) and celiac disease, respectively.
But let’s think about this for a minute – these diseases do not happen overnight! What happens when your adrenal glands are 80% destroyed – you are considered healthy? Or what about when your gut lining is just somewhat compromised? The truth is that diagnosis happens at the end stage of these conditions.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather stop the destruction in its earliest stages, rather than waiting for that degree of dysfunction to do anything about the problem!
This is why I look at autoimmunity as a spectrum. You can be on the low end, with some reactivity, or in the middle, with significant symptoms but are still not conventionally diagnosable, or you can be at the end stage, when a doctor finally says, “Yep, you have (insert your disease here.)”
There are three main stages on the autoimmune spectrum:
Silent Autoimmunity: There are positive antibody labs but no noticeable symptoms. A conventional doctor will likely tell you that you are probably fine, or to come back next year and re-test.
Autoimmune Reactivity: There are positive antibody labs and symptoms, but still not enough to warrant a formal autoimmune diagnosis.
Autoimmune Disease: There’s enough body destruction to be diagnosed, and name the disease.
Among my patients, I find that quite a few of them are at Stage 2, about halfway along the autoimmune spectrum. They aren’t sick enough to be labeled with an autoimmune disease, but their health and bodies are, in my opinion, significantly damaged by the effects of autoimmune reactivity.
Some early symptoms of autoimmune reactivity include achy muscles and joints and fatigue. I say, let’s stop autoimmune disease in its tracks!!!!
What should you do now if you have an overactive immune system?
Early detection of an autoimmune spectrum disorder can give you a sort of “grace period” in which to address the issue, stop the progression, and, in some cases, reverse the autoimmune spectrum symptoms. I start the process with a complete set of functional medicine labs to detect early signs of autoimmunity. The good news is that antibodies can show up on labs several years before the diagnosis of many autoimmune diseases.
One lab I typically run on patients is what’s referred to as predictive autoimmunity. This lab allows us to see whether there is any abnormal immune response against many parts of the body. Some of the more common antibodies we find are:
Stomach: Parietal cell antigens, which are associated with gastric autoimmunity
Thyroid: Thyroid peroxidase antigens, which are associated with Hashimoto’s disease
Brain: Synapsin antigens, which are associated with inhibited neurotransmitter release
Adrenals: 21 hydroxylase (adrenal cortex) antigens, which are associated with autoimmune endocrine disorders
Gut: Tropomyosin antigens, which are associated with inflammatory bowel disease
Joints: Arthritic peptide antigens, which are associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
This simple blood test may be beneficial for someone who:
Has unexplained symptoms but “normal” labs
Has been diagnosed with gluten intolerance
Has leaky gut syndrome
Has already been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease
To be clear, functional labs like this are not used to diagnose autoimmune diseases, which is still done in the mainstream medical setting. We use labs like this to investigate underlying factors and tailor a health program to improve these issues, based on where the antibodies are.
Treating Autoimmune Disorders
As I stated earlier, the functional medicine treatment approach to autoimmune disease doesn’t look at the disease itself. The goal is to fix the function of the immune system. There’s a reason why the immune system is not functioning properly – our goal is to uncover and correct those reasons. Sometimes you can identify and correct them, other times you cannot. But there’s always an underlying reason for the dysfunction.
The approach we take will differ for each patient, but the first step is always to take a detailed health history. What we learn about that individual patient’s history will point us in the direction of detailed testing necessary to uncover the root of the problem.
After testing is complete, we move on to working to correct the problems that we have found. This is a multi-faceted approach that includes dietary adjustments, lifestyle changes, and nutraceutical supplementation.
Often in today’s world, traditional medicine is focused on symptom relief. Upon diagnosis, the doctor-patient conversation usually focuses on “living with” or managing the symptoms of the condition. It’s a foregone conclusion that you have the disorder and your only option is to figure out how to live with it.
Pharmaceutical companies exist because of a desire to relieve symptoms. There are brilliant minds working very hard to improve muscle function, for example, in MS patients. Great strides have been made on the symptomatic front, and patients have benefited from these discoveries.
But managing the symptoms of a disease is not the same as getting better.
Equally great strides are being made on the functional medicine front in uncovering the root causes of autoimmune disorders and understanding how to reverse them. In fact, it’s been said that we’ve learned more about the gut in the past 5 years than was known in the previous 50 years.
And that’s the key to true health - a better understanding of bodily function combined with newer, more advanced tools to uncover biochemical imbalances that lead to dysfunction.
The Bottom Line
Balancing the immune system, delivers the protection you want. When you take steps to keep your immune system in balance, it effectively:
Strengthens your defenses
“Trains” your defensive immune cells to respond properly
Neutralizes pathogens
Controls inflammation
Prevents attacks on your own tissues and organs
Stops dangerous immune system overreactions, before they start
A well-balanced immune system keeps you healthy and vital. So if you’re not feeling your best, at least on most days, your immune system may be letting you know that it needs help.
Your immune system develops over time and adapts to your environment. There are many lifestyle choices that can be made that help to balance your immune system.
Don’t know why you aren’t feeling well? Every person’s needs are different, you can contact the front desk for an appointment. We will review what your specific needs are to find balance and get to the root of the problem, once and for all.
Remember, the (5) Essentials we talk about at Ferguson Life Health Centers are…
Mindset
Nerve Supply
Nutrition
Exercise
Minimizing Toxins
There are NO LIMITS of what you can create, you are POWERFUL and there is nothing that you can not have or achieve! Believe in your power, believe in yourself and let go of what no longer serves you! ♡ Design your life, Create your reality…
This is life changing!
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