The Root Cause Of Autoimmune Disease & The 10 Steps To Help Reverse It | Dr. Mark Hyman

what we see now is a total epidemic of autoimmune disease that is being completely misunderstood 80 million Americans some estimate 100 million Americans who have an autoimmune disease if you collectively take all the autoimmune diseases together combined it's more people that have cancer heart disease or diabetes combined wow okay so how come we don't hear about it why because every specialty has their autoimmune disease you've got the neurologist who've got Ms you've got the GI doctors who've got colitis you've got the rheumatologist who have rhe arthritis you have the dermatologist who have psoriasis and I could go on and on you've got the thyroid doctors who've got grave disease or Hashimoto so essentially everybody's silent the problem is that autoimmune disease is not a bunch of really different diseases it affects different people differently but there are common principles that we can use to address their causes and get people healthy so this is really an epidemic uh and it's getting worse and worse and by the way this is not something you see in countries that are really um living in ways that are traditional for example I just got back from Mongolia on a horseback trip there was no nothing there I mean they were living in Eden in the way that they had done for thousands of years there was no cell service there was no Wi-fi they were living in Ur they were having Yak milk and uh they're they're living close to the Earth they're living on the ground they're living in dirt basically and uh these people don't get autoimmune disease if you look at Hunter gather of tribes they don't get autoimmune disease they uh they don't they don't get allergies they don't get asthma they don't get autoimmune disease and yet in our Western Society we get a lot of these problems allergies asthma autoimmune diseases skin disorders I mean we just see it left and right so the question is why well it's because something has dramatically changed in our modern world and we're going to get into what those things are but we're just seeing so many people with autoimmun diseases and the and the rate of these diseases is going up as infection disase went down and there's some connections there we're going to talk about so we're going to talk about the main causes of autoimmune disease and yes we know a lot of what the causes are even though most judicial doctors don't treat the cost they simply use medication to suppress inflammation and suppress the symptoms which can make people feel better in the short run but don't actually deal with the problem it's like taking morphine and having a broken ankle and being able to walk on it it still kind of works but you know not the best idea and and yes sometimes it can prevent more complications more serious consequences of autoimmune disease such as joint destruction or kidney failure or other things so it's not that medications are all bad it's just that if there's a better way let's talk about it so we're going to talk about the conventional versus a functional medicine approach I'm going to tell you a story about a patient who I had it's just remarkable and if I'm not making this up which I'm not and if this is true which it is then what are the implications of this story of this young girl girl who suffered from one of the worst autoimmune conditions I'd ever seen and her recovery if even one case could get better using a different approach than we currently use shouldn't we be spending billions of dollars studying it no we are not doing that because it's not a drug and yes the biggest profit Center for many of the pharmaceutical companies are these autoimmun drugs it cost about 50 Grand per person per year sometimes more for these medications so let's kind of take a step back and let's talk about what is autoimmunity what causes it and you know why should we be so concerned well autoimmune disease like I mentioned things like rhe arthritis tantic arthritis lupus type 1 diabetes Graves disease higho disease mulos sclerosis Crohn's disease colitis I mean the list goes on um are all diseases where the body is attacking itself um the immune system is out of control it creates systemic inflam and depending on your genetics and the various issues you have it attacks different parts of the body but essentially the process is the same where we create auto antibodies we create antibodies which are normally designed to fight infection or even to kill cancer we create antibodies to then attack our own tissues and that's when we get in trouble so basically we have this Runway inflammation we have um an immune system that's confused and our imun system is supposed to ampty up when we have foreign Invaders like an infection or we have cancer to kill the cancer and that's good or when we're maybe trying to deal with our gut and creating antibodies to different food food things that are in there although that usually is because of a leaky gut and so basically your immune system is is is your first line of defense but when it goes It causes widespread destruction in the body and your own cells and tissues and organs get caught in the crossfire and it's not a good thing just not a good thing it's good when it comes to dealing with cancer when it comes to infections we want that what we see now is a a total epidemic of autoimmune disease that that is being completely misunderstood uh in fact now there's even a conversation about pre- autoimmune disease that a lot of people are seeing positive levels of Ana antibodies which you know we test for at at function health.com which is a testing platform where you can order your own test essentially and get the results and have an interpretation and figure out what's going on so we pick we picking up a lot of people probably 30% of the people that we see just young various healthy people not really sick people generally are showing up with an elevated level of an antibody called anuclear antibody which is an early sign of autoimmune disease so this is really scary to me as a doctor so the question is you know why is the body doing this what is the root cause you know most doctors when they uh think of a patient they essentially go well here's the symptoms here's a lab test okay you have these tests you have these symptoms that are off it means you have this or that disease we name the disease and then we blame the N disease for the problem now this young girl Isabelle I was talking about before she came to see me when she was 10 years old and she had a severe autoimmune disease called dermatomyositis dermatomyositis is a nobody's best friend essentially it's one of the worst auto disease you can Happ that attack everything your joints your skin your liver your blood vessels your muscles I mean pretty much everything gets affected and so you have widespread destruction throughout your body now the doctors didn't say gee why is her immune system so pissed off instead they gave her a pile of drugs steroids Cancer drugs to suppress her immune system they're about to put her on an immune blocker uh called tnfalpha um which is a antagonist which is basically blocking the inflammation marker in the in the blood that's responsible for a lot of autoimmun disease which can be helpful but again like nobody was asking a very simple question is why is she so inflamed in the first place why is her immune system so pissed off now as I mentioned Isabelle had one of the most severe cases of aomin I'd ever seen at 10 years old she had a severe skin rashes that's the dermatitis it's pretty much itis means inflammation she had every kind of itis she had vasculitis which is inflammation of your blood vessels causing rain notes she had gastritis causing inflammation of her sophal tract and causing teral reflux she had hepatitis affecting her liver she had inflammation of her blood cells I don't know what you call that but she had low white count and low red cells she had severe muscle damage so she had Myositis and very severely uh elevated muscle enzymes she had U also severe arthritis and joint swelling so basically everything was under attack now this cute little girl Isabelle was 10 years old she was from Texas she loved riding horses um she couldn't do the most basic things anymore she couldn't squeeze her hand or make a fist her tips of her fingers uh and her toes were totally numb all the time from rain no disease which is the damage of the blood vessels autoimmune condition she had rashness all over her body uh that were irritated she was exhausted she felt miserable her hair was falling out and she was being treated by doctors who were doing the best they could but were using the old Paradigm they were saying okay well she's got inflammation let's get that under control so they give her huge dose of steroids something called solumedrol which is essentially a horse dose of of 12200 milligrams intravenously she have to go to the hospital and get intravenous steroids uh every three weeks just to sort of be able to function she was on Methotrexate which is a chemo drug uh because that suppresses inflammation she was on also aspirin to thinner blood because the inflammation caused her blood to clot she was on acid blockers because of the reflux from her stomach she was on um calcium channel blockers to help open up her blood vessels because of her rain noes I mean let know she was on more drugs than I was in even 80-year-olds Beyond uh and despite these Mega do of medications she wasn't better I mean she was managed they call it managing her disease her labs are all abnormal her skin was still inflamed her joints are still inflamed she just wasn't in the hospital basically uh and and her doctors wanted to add another drug called the TF Alpha blocker things like Remicade or Humera you might have heard about you probably saw the ads on TV because there's tons of ads for these drugs on TV which is a whole another topic that farmers should not be advertising on TV but anyway it basically this drug can be helpful but um if you don't have anything else to do to fix the problem but it increases the risk of cancer and also infections because it suppresses the immune system right so it turns off the inflammation and we need inflammation for cancer and infection but not for autoimmune disease or allergy right so that's the problem um now her mom was not happy with this plan so B see me and uh and we we did a pretty simple program it wasn't that hard but I asked a very different set of questions I asked not you know what's the inflammation but what's the cause not what's the name of her disease but what's the cause of her problem what's pissing off her immune system and so that's the job of a functional medicine doctor to be a detective to look deeply into the root causes and to try to understand why and I always say functional medicine is the medicine of why conventional medicine is the medicine of what what disease do you have and what drug do I give not why in fact I always say just because you know the name of your disease it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you say it again just because you know the name of your disease let's say drama myositis it doesn't mean you know what's wrong or what's causing it right dermat myositis just means skin and muscle inflammation because those are the two most prominent symptoms it doesn't mean anything it's just a fancy medical or describing the symptoms nothing to do with the ca so functional medicine gives us a map to help understand why to understand inflammation I often call myself an inflammology and that's what we should be inflammology and in fact inflammation in autoimmune disease is is a real issue and obviously Allergy and Asthma but also in heart disease and cancer and diabetes and obesity and dementia pretty much all the age related diseases are all diseases of inflammation in my book young forever I did talk a lot about uh how one of the Hallmarks of Aging is inflammation or what we call inflammaging so when we look at the causes how do we start to think about causes systematically how do we have a organized approach to diagnosis about what is causing the body to react to something now what I what we really know is that that you know the body is not really attacking itself on purpose it's trying to do the job that it's supposed to do which is fight bad things right bad things what are the bad things allergens bugs microbes and mostly imbalances in your gut or your microbiome we'll talk about that toxins um and you know also stress and poor Diet also Drive inflamation um and psychological stress physical stresses but but basically there really five causes of almost all disease allergens and that can be a food sensitivity it can be a true allergen like penology it can be microbes it can be something like you know lme disease or hepatitis or anything like that plus it could be just dispos imbalances in the floor in the gut it can be toxins petrochemical toxins environmental toxins uh from pesticides um herbicides Plastics as well as heavy metal toxins flame retardant I mean let goes on so in fact there's a whole school of research now on what we call autens autogen are environmental toxins that trigger an autoimmune response so all these factors need to be investigated we need to look at each person say okayy Do they have any allergy stuff is there gluten sensitivity are they harboring latent infections that might be confusing their immune system do they have a toxin like heavy metals or pesticides what's their diet like are they eating an inflammatory diet uh how much stress do they have all these things need to be considered and need to be investigated and that's really what functional medicine does it helps you investigate the root cause it's really a diagnostic model to think about an operating system to think about the body as a system to think about root causes and to help the body restore balance that's the goal so basically you got to figure out the cost if you want to fix if you want to fix auto immune disease you got to get to the cause and you know unfortunately medicine we don't do a good job with that we a little bit of that but not much right if you have pneumonia it's caused by strepto caco infection okay you give penicillin that's fine but most diseases chronic diseases which by the way six out of 10 Americans have um which are accountable for over 85% of our healthare costs which are now $4.3 trillion yes caused by an infection like uh jepic pneumonia or you know hepatitis C I mean those are real and they need to be treated but that's not really the majority of problems people are seeing so functional medicine docks really understand the body of system it's an ecosystem and we seek the cause we understand the basic interactions between them we know when things go wrong how to fix it and and understanding the interconnections between symptoms and organs and systems rather than all these Specialties you know you know I I always say you know I don't really know need to know anything about you know the fine points of a particular autoimmune disease or be a specialist in that area uh but I need to understand inflammation I need understand the root causes and and I can treat I've never seen a case of drama myositis in my life other than you know what traditional medicine when I was in residency in early early practice but when as as a functional medicine doctor I'd never treated one before but I knew exactly what to do because I followed the methodology of functional medicine it provides that fundamental different fundamentally different way of solving medical problems gets to the root of the illness and understands the disturbances that that really are going on so let's talk about Isabelle a little bit more so uh she she um you know I've seen good doctors and their response was to let shut down this kid's immune system you know let's let's this kid suffering let's just thrill the whole kitchen sink the whole Barn everything at it uh and and that would have been okay she might have done improvements in her symptoms but she would have had high risk for cancer infection osteoporosis muscle wasting psychiatric illnesses and by the way would have cost a huge amount of money forever right this is a 10-year-old girl she's going to be on a drug that cost 50 Grand a year for the next 60 years uh you do the bath that's one person so we're talking about it just an untenable thing so I asked really a simple question with Iselle which is why I didn't focus on what the name of disease was I want to know why she's in fled inflammation started how we can really find the root causes and how we get to restore balance in her immune system so s is not find the cause it's also understanding how to get the immune system working better taking up the bad stuff putting in the good stuff so some insults usually are triggering some confusion we call molecular mimickry there's a theory of is called molecular mimicry that that the for example some food you're eating or gluten you know somehow um confuses your immune system and it thinks your your thyroid is you know some foreign object but it's just crossreacting with the gluten anyti bodies and that's why you end up with with uh autoimmune disease so we were looking for toxins we looking for allergens we looking for bugs for dispos and by the way a lot of autoimmune disease starts in the gut um and and a lot of it expect call leaky gut which clearly she had so when I kind of did her history I very detailed history is really important she have to find out what the story is you know not just oh here's your disease but like what is your background right she had exposure to severe toxic mold and that can be a trigger that's a toxin stotras is black mold and that was in her house and her mother also worked in Limestone pits when she was um pregnant and she exposed a lot of toxins and fluoride even heavy metals U and CH also also had her IM immunizations before 1999 and before 1999 the American Academy of the Pediatrics and the CDC had not removed Prim Marisol from vaccines for childhood vaccines so they're getting a lot of like 167 times the amount of mercury in the vaccines until they go oh wait a minute we haven't add it all up and it's a lot of mercury we better get it out so they did remove it except for flu shots and so if you're getting a um a multi-dose file flu shot which is what most people get uh single dose doesn't have fosol but it's a preservative so when you sitick youing over and over you got a multi-dose file use it but it it uh it's in flu shots so she was getting flu shots every year and now she also loved eat E Sushi so she at large amount of tuna sushi which she ate regularly got even more Mercury she also had a d was very high in sugar lots of dairy she also had many infections over her life uh ear infections sore throats and had and because she was on a lot of immune supressive drugs too and steroids also cause problems she had lots of antibiotics um so lots of antibiotics lots of steroids which causes real damage to the gut so mold Mercury antibiotics sugar dairy gluten junk food all were potential irritants so when I when I dug in I looked at her lab test pretty carefully and um you know on the conventional Labs it they were a mess right so they were you know high levels of muscle enzymes called CPK her liver function tests were off the chart she had many autoimmune antibodies that were not just slightly high they were like off the chart high like highest I've ever seen antinuclear antibodies rid Factor anti- SSA or suar anti bodies anti- double strand DNA anti-np lupus an a lot of big mumbo jumbo medical terms but basically the whole soup of autoimmune antibodies were just off the chart with her and um by the way most autoimmune Specialists do not check any bodies after the initial check they oh they don't ever go back to normal well no they don't if you don't get rid of the cause but they do if you get rid of the cause and we saw that with Isabelle so she had also a lot of problems she had other lots of elevations and other markers inflammation like ctive protein her white C was really low her red cells were low her vitamin D was severely low she had really high antibodies to gluten which by the way is a common cause of autoimmune disease probably the most common and can trigger significant inflammation and leaky gut her Mercury level we did a challenge test was off the chart um in and the only way to really check is is to actually give people a drug it pulls out the metals like d MSA and she had a level 33 normal is less than three so it's very high and at the first visit I simply you didn't do too much I just put on an anti-inflammatory limit dies with no gluten no Dairy no sugar no processed foods got rid of the most common allergens I gave her multivitamin I got her vitamin D B12 and folate um because of the acid blockers blocking that I fish oil which antiinflammatory evening primrose oil which is anti-inflammatory um so I kind of gave her some basic nutritional support and also gave her an antifungal nice stat it's not absorbed but it's used to treat uh yeast overgrowth and I suspected she had that due to the multiple course of anti body through the sah human taking also give her liver support something called inal cysteine support of liver and boost glutathione and I told her parents she probably over time she's fine she's paper off her aser blocker the calcium channel blocker of her Ros and the steroids if she could two months later she comes back and you know I didn't know I know what to expect two months later she came back and she said her symptoms were completely gone her rash was gone her joint pain was gone her hair was going back her muscles weren't hurting there's offer medication her autoimmune markers were much much better her muscle enzymes her liver function her C reactor protein all normal now this just two months then I added um probiotics to help her digestive system heal a little bit and reduce the gun inflammation I got her an a keting drug called dmsa to bind the metals from her tissues and help her exr it and help get off the prazone I gave her some herbs to help her adrenal glands because she was on you know a lot of steroids and she tapered those down seven months later everything was normal all of her lab tests were normal including her white count her liver function her muscle enzymes the autoimmune antibodies except for one called r&p but every other autoimmune antibody that we mentioned that were off the chart Ana REM Factor all that stuff completely normal never see that right her Mercury came down from 33 to 16 after 11 months her Mercury came down to 11 her gut inflammation was gone oh yeah she had a lot of gut inflammation even though she have digestive symptoms she had a test that we look at school testing and why would I look at stool testing for an autoimmune patient but basically every autoimmune patient should have a stool test right we use gix by goova essentially look at Cal protectin which is a marker you can actually get at a regular lab quest or lab core and Cal protectin is a marker of gut inflammation that is super important because um it's used for colitis or Crohn's disease but if you have just slight elevations it all indicates a low level of inflammation so really really important now after year she was off all her medications her lives were normal felt great she was able to ride her horse again the show and she was just so excited and and you know I checked in with her like many years later and she was great and she was still fine and we fixed the problem so when you get rid the cause it's not like Stu keeps coming back now I've treated autoimmune disease for decades this way and I've seen patient after patient we've got resolved not everybody 100% but the majority get better if not cured now uh her case really isn't rare and I take a similar approach pretty much with all autoimmune disease you have to be detective and be an infology and what's going on now if what I'm saying is true like I said before this should be a major effort from the NIH and the US government and uh private um donations to actually fund research to look at this in a different way but everybody's in their silos everybody's got their specialty nobody's thinking of of of the body as a whole system and know even at Cleveland Clinic when we we did research looking at sertic arthritis arthritis comparing top rumatologist there to our Clinic the functional medicine doctors our patients did better in terms of all the objective metrics and the scoring systems for run arthritis and sorc arthritis so I think this is really possible so what are the 10 steps to think about to reverse autoimmun disease well it's really really easy first take out the bad stuff and you have to find it all and so for Isabelle was a lot it was mold it was Mercury it was yeast in her gut it was gluten it was heavy metals know was all the stuff and we have to add back the good stuff we add back the good stuff all the ingredients for good health right Whole Foods right levels of nutrients to balance of hormones light air water movement connection meaning love purpose all these things are really essential ingredients for health so if you have an autoimmune disease I really encourage you to find a functional medicine doctor work with them we see patients the ultra Wellness Center check your Labs out Tri function health.com get your panel done you can see if you have pre- autoimmune disease or other markers and uh and I think you know you'll be able to really move forward so what do you need to do first get tested for hidden infections now there are a lot of things that can go wrong when I say infections it can also be disbiosis which is imbalances in the gut Flora that cause uh leak gut and cause damage where by the way 70% of immune system is in your gut so if there's a a damaged gut lining you're getting coed and and bugs leaking in your immune systems get seeing that it's like ah B what's create an immune response and that's essentially what happens uh but that's probably the most common cause gluten is a big factor in causing leaky gut it's probably one of the biggest Factor because it increases something called zulin which disturbs the tight junctions in the cells that hold them together and allows food to and bacterial proteins and things to leak in but other things to factors too you can have parasite for example parasites are associated with rhe arthritis it can be a Lyme disease which has been linked to autoimmune disease other tick infections you need to be a detective and be able to figure that out uh check for heavy metals check for environmental chemicals really important uh like Mercury um fix your leaky gut really important and that's so important I think we just talked about leaky gut but get rid of the bad bugs G parasites bad bacteria um provide the this this program that you need to actually heal your got we call a 5r program in Function Medicine which is removing the bad stuff like bad foods and inflamatory foods and allergens uh bad bugs and then replacing things that are missing like digestive enzymes or prebiotics reinoculate with healthy bacteria probiotics repair which is provide the nutrients for gut lining healing for example glutamine and zinc and fish oil and evening Primos oil many other compounds are really important vitamin A for healing gut um and and then the fifth R is restore which is to reset your nervous system and um that means dealing with stress differently so super important so make sure you check that also if you think you uh if you have an on disease or you think you might you 100% want to get checked for Cil and you want to look at gluten antibodies antiglide antibodies as well as tissue transaminase antibodies IG and IGG for both and we'll put this all in the show notes but it's super important as a screening test and even if you don't have full-blown Celiac there's non Celiac gluten sensitivity so you may have even with levels that don't approximate a level that would be considered Celiac actually you might still have a lot of reaction so that can be important um also I encourage people to try ation diet as a first step and I wrote something called the 10-day detox diet really important and I wrote this because I saw so many patients in my practice we're struggling with with various autoimmune diseases gut issues metabolic issues pre-diabetes weight issues and by far this is the most powerful therapeutic tool that I have in my Arsenal which is basically an elimination die getting rid of processed food sugar dairy gluten grains beans nuts uh and seeds and things you can have but the other things you can't uh so it's basically lots of veggies protein not suchy veggies and um and and it's quite healing and Powerful so I encourage people to try that it's super low cost super easy to do you can we're going to put a link in the show notes to the uh uh my book The 10A detox side which you can follow as the cookbook as well also um you can take things that help calm your ner immune system down making sure you're on the right nutrients so vitamin D is essential for auto autoimmune disease prevention if you have MS for example we know you have low levels of vitamin D Link to Ms and other conditions so vitamin D fish oil vitamin C probiotics a lot of things are are available and you can find them all on our online store at store. drhyman.com um anti-lam herbs can work great so curcumin Basia Ginger uh often use a product called zyan z zyf l a m and d which is a combination of different herbes also known as inflamin can be very helpful regular exercise very antiinflammatory dealing with stress varant inflammatory so meditation yoga deep breathing sleep is super anti-inflammatory at8 hours every night super important so these are just sort of high level thinking but this is not hard for most people most of the time you don't need a doctor although sometimes you need to do some investigations like a stool test heavy metal test and so forth food sensitivity testing um but I encourage you to really not accept the traditional view of autoimmune disease and to actually start to uh take ownership by digging into the root causes so no no matter what autoimmune disease you struggle with get deeper into it figure out the cause work with a functional medicine doctor you can go to ifm.org and look in your area with a good functional medicine doctor you can uh um get my ebook it's called the 10day detox autoimmune solution give you a basic framework of how to think about it if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here we see as we age there a diminishment and and a decline in the number and the function of our mitochondri and the health of mondri that's why one of the Hallmarks of Aging that I talked about in Young Forever is dysfunctional mitochondria and so key to understanding longevity

Channel: Mark Hyman, MD

Views: 86,962

Keywords: Mark Hyman, Mark Hyman interview, Mark Hyman live longer, Mark Hyman diet, how to live longer, how to age in reverse, nutrition tips, healthy foods, health tips, health theory, fasting tips, how to never get sick again, prevent disease, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, inspiration, motivation

Id: yJASzsdW760

Length: 29min 36sec (1776 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023