Autoimmune Conditions

Autoimmune disorders are unchecked, runaway, inflammatory conditions. All of them. There's an inflammatory process happening in the tissues that are causing the symptoms. Now that being said, everyone likes to start by treating inflammation. Well, inflammation is the cause of the symptoms, but if you don't treat what's causing the inflammation, then you will always be treating the inflammation.

Same with chronic infections. If you don't treat what's causing the inflammation leading to the chronic infections, you'll always be treating the infection because an inflamed body is a breeding ground for infection.

In the case of an autoimmune disorder, the inflammation that's going on in the body is causing the immune system to lose its ability to differentiate between what is good and what is bad; who’s a friend and who’s a foe.

The immune system loses that ability because of either local or systemic inflammation (or both). 

Inflammation is just a symptom. It is the body's response to being irritated. So if the body is being irritated, it will naturally become inflamed. And until it is not being irritated anymore, it will stay inflamed. It will continually be inflamed. You have to remove the irritation in order to stop the inflammation.

There's basically two things that have to happen in order to correct an autoimmune disorder from a natural health standpoint. Number one is detoxification. You must detoxify. You must eliminate as much of the irritation in your body as possible. You have to get the toxic waste out. You’ve got to get rid of anything that's causing irritation in your system....accumulated waste, chemicals, heavy metals, chronic infections, etc...in order to get well. 

Let me give you an example. Say you have a sliver in the bottom of your foot. You go to the doctor, and they fit you with an orthotic so you can walk without putting pressure on that place where you have the sliver in your foot. Well, that causes your gait to be off. Then with time now you have to wear a back brace because your back's out all the time because your gaits off because you're wearing an orthotic on your foot because there's a sliver in your foot. Right? Now we go a little farther, and now you're having headaches because your neck is out of alignment because of these things.

Instead of treating the symptom of your foot hurting, why don't we go back and take the sliver out of your foot? Doesn't that make more sense?  This is what’s happening in those with autoimmune disorders. They’ve got symptoms because they have a sliver in their foot (toxins). We have to remove the toxic irritations in the system in order for the system to heal.

Autoimmune disorders are chronic inflammatory conditions. Unless you reduce the inflammation, the condition won't change.  In fact, it will get worse. The fastest way to correct inflammatory conditions is to detoxify, just like the fastest way to heal that foot with a sliver in the bottom of it is to pull the sliver out. Will the foot ever heal if the sliver's still in it? No. It's not going to heal.  You're going to go through inflammation then infection then back to inflammation then it's going to settle down. Then over time it will become inflamed again and infected and back to inflamed and then settle down again. It will go like that over and over and over again.  Everyone that is dealing with an autoimmune disorder is in this same cycle. They have inflammation. Things get inflamed.  They go into a more degenerative process where there's some infection involved. That gets resolved by the immune system.  They go back into an inflammatory state. That starts to settle down. Then they get inflamed again. So they have good days, and they have bad days. That's the cycle. It's called irritation, inflammation, infection. They're like steps in a ladder. You start with irritation. It progresses into inflammation. Once inflammation sets in you have the door open for infection.

Everyone dealing with any type of autoimmune disorder is in this cycle. It really doesn't matter if it's MS, Crohn's, or Fibromyalgia. The label doesn't matter. If it's a chronic inflammatory condition, this is the cycle people are in. This irritation causing inflammation, inflammation opening the door to infection. The only way to break that is to detoxify. It’s the fastest, the cheapest, and the most effective way to break the cycle (if you know what you’re doing).

You can't detoxify forever, but you have to detoxify and then fortify and detoxify and fortify. You’ve got to clean house and rebuild, and clean house and rebuild. That's how you can save yourself from this autoimmune condition that you may have.

The second step in this process of correcting chronic inflammatory conditions in the body is proper treatment and cultivation of the microbiome. In particular, the gut microbiome, which consists of layers of microbes that line our digestive system.  It is responsible for the majority of our immune response (up to 80% of our immune response is trained into our immunologic cells by our gut microbiome), and our neurotransmitters (chemicals that carry messages in our nervous system). 85-90% of the serotonin and dopamine in our body is produced in our gut.  When our gut microbiome is out of balance, we call that dysbiosis.  You can get there very easily by eating the standard American diet (which is full of pesticides, herbicides, artificial colors and flavors, and preservatives).  Preservatives are either antifungal or antibiotics, so if you're eating a lot of food with preservatives in it, you're taking small amounts of antifungals and antibiotics every day that you eat that food. This kills some of the fungal and bacterial forms in your gut, causing an imbalance. Pharmaceuticals, cleaning products, body products, and stress can also negatively affect your microbiome.

Your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, throat, upper respiratory tract, skin, urinary tract, and reproductive tract also all have a microbiome. Let's say you have allergies and you're having sinus issues. The reason the microbiome in your sinuses is allowing for inflammation to occur so easily is because the microbiome in your gut is imbalanced.  If the gut microbiome is unbalanced, the sinus microbiome will be as well (along with all the others previously mentioned).  Have problems with your skin? It's likely because your gut microbiome is imbalanced. Until that gets fixed, you'll always have those problems. It has to start in the gut.  The bottom line is that the imbalance in the gut microbiome that causes the immunologic dysfunction leads us to chronic inflammatory disorders.

Disruption of the microbiome causes leaky gut. Leaky gut in turn causes a constant irritation to our immune system causing inflammation throughout our entire body, causing our immune system to lose the ability to differentiate between what's a nutrient, what's a toxin, what's a helpful enzyme, what's a toxin, what's healthy tissue, what's not, what's heavy metals, and what's not.  The immune system loses that capacity to differentiate the more inflamed the body becomes.

So if we want to stop inflammation, we don't take an anti-inflammatory. That's only going to work for a limited time, even if we're using natural anti-inflammatories.  In order to shut down these inflammatory processes that are causing the creation of these chronic autoimmune disorders, we have to fix the microbiome, which first requires detoxification. Say there's an empty lot between a couple houses, and we go and buy that empty lot.  We want to put a garden on that lot, but there's every kind of weed you can imagine growing in there, along with 20 years of garbage that’s been deposited there as the unofficial neighborhood dump.  Do you just start planting stuff?  Of course no!  First you have to clean it out, getting all the waste and weeds out of there.  We also have to remove the waste from our microbiome.  Accumulated waste is the breeding ground for parasites, fungus, and bad bacteria, all of which grow alongside the accumulated waste in our gut to help break it down. So the more accumulated waste you have, the more pathogens are going to be present. You want to get rid of them? Remove the waste. Take their food supply away. It's almost too simple.

So detoxification of the microbiome has to be our first step. Once that has happened, we move on to natural anti-inflammatories including many spices (turmeric, ginger, cayenne, basil, boswellia, frankincense, etc).  These spices carry molecular oxygen…the more spicy the substance, the more molecular oxygen it carries. Molecular oxygen from spices gets imparted to our body allowing it to heal itself.  Everything in our body heals better in the presence of oxygen, including inflammation going down.

You won't get a whole lot of long-term benefit unless you detoxify before you start taking them.  Once you've done that, then natural anti-inflammatories and antioxidants work great and are the most important things to start taking after you've detoxified. After a short period on those, then you need to start introducing probiotics.

Digestive enzymes can also be very helpful, even while you're detoxifying.  They break down the food that you're consuming and keep it from remaining too large of particles, causing less irritation to the gut lining. Many people can actually consume foods that they're allergic to if they consume it with enough digestive enzymes. 

So to correct autoimmune disorders, it comes down to detoxification and correcting the microbiome. These are the two things that you have to achieve. You achieve those things and your body will heal itself.

-Based on transcription from Dr. Daniel Nuzum