Stop Suffering and Start Living! Reversing Chronic Pain and Inflammation

In this week's episode of Your Best Life, Karl interviews Dr. Amy Myers, who is the author of The Autoimmune Solution. Amy writes about how to prevent and reverse a full spectrum of inflammatory symptoms and diseases. During the show, Karl and Dr. Myers discuss leaky gut, how to heal your gut, symptoms of autoimmune disease, food sensitivity, toxins, and what you should eat.

Main Questions Asked:

• What took you to this particular focus in your practice?
• When should people start to consider autoimmunity as the cause for their concerns?
• What are the symptoms?
• What foods can we be sensitive to?
• We hear a lot about what we need to eliminate, but what's left?
• What are the proactive positive things we can do from a diet perspective?
• How quickly do your patients see measurable improvement, such as a reduction in pain?
• What role do toxins play?
• What are we supposed to do about the sub-acute chronic stress we deal with daily?
• What are the roles of infection in autoimmunity; are there tests?

Key Lessons Learned:

• Functional medicine looks at the root causes of illness rather than just treating the symptoms.
• By understanding the root causes, one can prevent and, in many cases, reverse disease.

Symptoms of Autoimmune Disease

• Conventional medicine doesn't deal with autoimmune disease well. This is from a prevention, diagnostic standpoint, and treatment. The reason is that the symptoms are vague.
• It takes an average of 6 doctors and 10 years for people to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
• Symptoms include fatigue, brain fog, not feeling themselves, dry mouth, and digestive disorders.
• Dr. Myers sees the reversal of these antibodies and symptoms daily in her practice.
• It is possible to get symptom-free, medication-free, and antibody-free. However, you may not get off insulin or thyroid medications.
• Only 25% of your chance in getting an autoimmune disease is genetic and 75% is environmental factors.

Immunocompromised and Autoimmunity

• Immunocompromised is your immune system being suppressed, which is like HIV.
• Autoimmunity is where your body or immune system views some aspect of your body as foreign.
• The guiding principals behind all chronic disease are looking at our gut, diet, lifestyle, and toxins.

Heal Your Gut

• 60 -80% of our immune system is sitting in our gut.
• Every day, our gut is getting damaged by toxins we breathe, foods we are eat, medications we are taking, and infections.
• Remove the bad things in the diet such as gluten, dairy, grains, legumes, and processed and artificial foods.
• Re-inoculate and replace anything missing.
• Repair our gut. Our gut cells turn over every 24-48 hours.

Leaky Gut

• Most people have this so it is about where you are on the spectrum, as to how leaky is your gut.
• This is caused by the genetically modified and heavily processed foods we eat, sugars, dairy, gluten, and wheat.

Food Sensitivity

• At least 50% of people with a gluten issue also have a dairy issue.
• The peptides in gluten have a similar molecular blueprint to the thyroid, which could be the precursor to Chron's or Grave's disease.
• Those on the autoimmune spectrum should never throw caution to the wind when it comes to food. However, once in a while indulgences are okay as long as everything else is in check.

What Should We Eat?

• Lean organic animal proteins, fish, seafood, fruit, vegetables, and organic dark chocolate.
• As life gets out of control and stress builds, that is when the diet starts to fall off.
• Simply changing the diet and fixing your gut will be a huge lifesaver.

Tame The Toxins

• We live in an extremely toxic world compared to our ancestors. There are around 800,000 toxic chemicals in the air, and we have no control over it.
• The chronic daily exposures are much more harmful and convert the immune system over into an autoimmune state rather than a big one-time toxic exposure.
• Many of us are being born by C-section, aren't being breastfed, eat genetically modified food, and take lots of antibiotics, so our gut biome is not what it should be.
• The two ways to approach this are through prevention and detoxification.
• Everything is cumulative, so any step you take to eliminate factors is beneficial. The goal is to get the count as low as possible.

Stress

• Stress is all about perspective. A lot is fear based and in our head.
• What works for one person to de-stress doesn't necessarily work for another person.
• For some people playing golf is a stress reliever and others it is stressful. Find out what works for you.

Thank you for listening!

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Links to Resources Mentioned

AutoImmune Solution (book)
Amy Myers, MD

2 click to tweet links! (Thanks for helping spread the word!)

Tweet: Are you concerned about autoimmune disease? Learn more w/ @AmyMyersMD & @wellnessgroup http://wellness.com/drmyers

Tweet: Most people have 'leaky gut.' Find out how this affects you w/ @AmyMyersMD & @wellnessgroup http://wellness.com/drmyers