The health world is ablaze with autoimmune conditions. IBS, Celiac, people's thyroids and mast cells all under siege by our once protective immune system. What gives?
Auto (self) immune (protection) diseases refer to conditions that result from a person's own immune system acting on itself and harming or killing its cells.
I can all but guarantee you and the person sitting next to you are experiencing something traced back to an auto-immune condition.
Type I Diabetes (beta cells)
Rheumatoid arthritis (joints)
Psoriasis (skin cells)
Multiple sclerosis (nerve cells)
Lupus (multi organ)
Inflammatory bowel disease (GI tract)
Addison's disease (adrenal glands)
Grave's disease (thyroid gland)
Hashimoto's disease (thyroid gland)
Myasthenia gravis (nerve cells)
Pernicious anemia (gut lining)
Celiac Disease (gut lining)
All of these things have grown at an exponential rate in the last 50 years. The medical community is uncertain exactly what is causing this rise in inflammatory responses. You hear things like "the immune system attacks itself" and suddenly start to question why the body would disarm something so crucial for its survival. It almost doesn't make sense...
So tradition would lead you to anti-inflammatory medications to quell the response. Cell transplants to replace what your body *mistakenly* removed. Immunosuppressants to keep a clearly overly ambitious immune system in its shoes.
But I equate that logic to seeing that a house is on fire (in-flame-ation) and instead of putting the fire out, you invest in making one of the rooms fireproof. How stupid is that? Who's to say the room won’t burn? Have you been stoking the flames with your lifestyle and nutrition the entire time?
And if what we were doing was working, why question it? But it's not, you see. Is anything actually getting better?
I don't think so. We've taken to patching bullet wounds with band-aids, plugging one hole to have it spill out the other.
Isn't this whole "there's something wrong with our body" thing silly? The body knows the body. Evolution didn't just take a shit in the last 50 years and cross its signals. Ahh yes, thank goodness for the medicine man's advent of Cymbalta to help right the human ship.
What if our immune system is perfectly fine? Maybe it's telling us there's something wrong with those cells.
So then what is the fire in our diabetic bodies that burns our beta cells? What have the beta cells done to deserve this? That is the $400 million question that no one seems to be willing to confront.
I don’t claim to have the answer yet. But I’m investing in finding the flame and hosing down the entire system to allow for new functioning beta cells to take root. I don’t believe the body attacks anything of its own. At least not something as important as the pancreas. Am I the only one who sees it this way?
Can beta cells regenerate? What if beta cell death is something downstream of something greater? Should we be looking at mitochondrial dysfunction and its role in apoptosis (cell death) as a root cause? Would trace minerals and their role in cell dynamics play a role in beta cell function?
Are beta cells just more susceptible to oxidative stress? If so, wouldn’t reducing oxidative stress help? Why the hell is everyone so inflamed?
What do you think? Have you ever flipped the autoimmune idea on its head?