I spent last weekend at an educational seminar on autoimmune disease. This was a bit different than previous seminars which focused on the endocrinology and neurology of autoimmune disorders. This seminar took things to a whole different level and looked at why autoimmune disorders happen in the first place and what we can do to unlock the disorder from the inside. First, let’s get a simple handle on autoimmunity.
There are over 120 different autoimmune disorders recognized at this point. Most of us are familiar with rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s, and psoriasis. These are the classic autoimmune diseases. But in reality, there are as many autoimmune diseases as there are types of tissue in the human body. This is because anytime our immune system decides to attack our own tissues it is called an autoimmune problem. It is as if our own military suddenly decided to attack our own citizens. Wherever an attack occurs we give it a disease name. Many problems that we used to describe as simply caused by aging, we now know are actually autoimmune disorders, such as osteoporosis.
Why would the immune system suddenly start attacking our own cells? Here is the thing, this happens normally your whole life. Our immune system is tasked with destroying invaders to our body, like viruses, bacteria, fungus, and so on. This we already know. What we may not know is that it is also tasked with killing off the old cells. Imagine a society in which if you stopped being useful to the society they chopped you up and fed you to the younger cells – much like the movie Soylent Green released back in 1973. (Interesting side note, the movie was supposed to be about life in 2022. There are some scarily accurate predictions made in that movie.) This is what the body does. There are no old age homes for worn-out cells and no welfare systems for the homeless cells. We see this as the ‘use it or lose it’ principle in the body.
But how do the immune cell military types know what cells to chop up? For that matter how do they know an invader when they meet it? Immune cells have no eyes or ears. They do everything by feel and taste. A way to understand this that may actually be fairly accurate is that bad guys are fuzzy and taste bad while our healthy cells are smooth and taste clean. Old cells start to get a little fuzzy and don’t taste as good as they used to. Sometimes they commit suicide, called cellular apoptosis, which makes them really fuzzy. At a certain point, immune soldiers decide that the old cell feels and tastes like a bad guy, so they chop it up and recycle its proteins. Where autoimmune disease usually starts is little bits of sticky fuzz sneak into the bloodstream from (usually) the gut and attach themselves to various tissue types. The formerly clean and smooth tissues now feel fuzzy and taste funny causing the immune system to attack them. This is why it is said that autoimmune disease starts in the gut.
Some people have a gut lining that leaks this sticky fuzz into the bloodstream from birth – bad genetic luck. Others are born with a sensitivity to certain proteins, sugars, or fats that punch holes in the gut such as Celiac patients’ reactions to gluten. If they were never exposed to gluten they would be fine. Another name for these proteins, sugars, or fats is lectins. Plants create most of them to poison bugs, molds, and other pests (like us) to keep from being eaten. But far and away the most common reason for developing a gut full of holes that let these sticky fuzz bits in is a diet full of crap rancid oils, pesticides, herbicides (like glyphosate), preservatives, sugar, toxins, and a life full of stress. I want to focus on those last few words – a life full of stress.
Did you know that sufficient stress can cause a bleeding ulcer to form in a matter of hours? Ulcers are some serious holes in the gut. The human body is designed to spend only 5% of the day in fight, flight, or freeze-type stress. The vast majority of the day is designed to be spent in relaxing activities or rest. That is not how most of us spend our days. When stressed our body shuts down digestion and repair of the body and shuttles resources to our heart and muscles for quick action. If a bear wanders into your campground, quick action is what you want. But quick action comes at a price. Shutting down digestion means your food is not broken down into harmless bits and pieces. Instead, it ends up full of sticky fuzzy bits and poisons that attack your gut lining and eventually make it into your bloodstream. Once that happens it is only a matter of time before your immune cells start thinking some of your healthy cells are invaders. Living in stress mode is a self-destruction form of slow death.
Now we get to the really ugly piece. Your immune system learns and remembers who the bad guys are. If you are really healthy with a strong gut, then this learning and remembering is a very good thing. It means once your body has had to fight off a particular flu bug or bacteria once, it is ready to make quick work of eliminating them if you pick them up in the future. But what happens when your immune system has been turned against your own tissues. Yes, initially it reacted to the fuzzy bits that attached to the outside of your tissues. But now they are sensitive to any signs that your native tissues are less than totally healthy. Any signs of stress in that tissue and the immune system start treating the cells like they are old cells. Stressed cells taste like old cells to the immune system.
A good example of this is called the “second hit syndrome” in head trauma. A first concussion is not great for you, but you usually get over it. However, because of the inflammation in the area caused by the concussion, the immune cells (called glial cells) in the brain are now sensitized. A second concussion and these cells go completely crazy and start attacking healthy brain tissue that is inflamed from the second concussion causing massive damage and symptoms.
This is where things start to get really interesting. Your immune system is an extension of your emotional system. This was really brought out back in 2010 when the neuro-endocrinologist, Candice Pert, demonstrated that our immune cells were covered with receptor sites for all the neurotransmitters in her book Molecules of Emotion. The same chemistry that runs our emotions inside our head also runs our immune system (and as was later discovered also runs our gut.) These scientifically validated traditional systems of mind-body awareness through such processes as meditation and mind-body therapeutic modalities such as acupuncture. This information demonstrates how closely tied together the mind and emotions are to everything that happens in the body. Chiropractic tied the mind to the body through the actions of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. This worked well for explaining the actions of the subconscious/autonomic/feeling mind on the organs. But much more subtle interactions were being noticed by Chiropractors in interactions between the feeling mind and muscles, tendons, skin, and fascia. There was something more.
Chinese medicine teaches that everything in the body is controlled by the movement of energy through acupuncture meridians. These meridians seem to act as a communication interface between the motivational elements of the feeling mind and the body. They are not responsive to the conscious intentional mind. As these meridian pathways travel across the body, certain associations can be made between each meridian and the various muscles, etc. In the 1960s, the Chiropractic technique Applied Kinesiology was developed which charted and mapped these associations and connected them to distinct patterns of pathology. The functioning of each muscle could then be used to assess the function of various internal body processes and responses to different stimuli. The science of manual muscle testing was born and it has been used to open up vast abilities to understand and participate in the body’s natural healing processes.
This is what my weekend seminar was all about. It was much more exciting than the usual dry lectures on what is going wrong in the body with an autoimmune disease. This class was all about how to test and find what specifically has gone wrong in the body of the patient in front of me, what associated systems have gotten involved, what foods, emotions, and old injuries, are triggering the problems, and what can be done for this individual. Every patient is unique. No two people are the same. Our body today is the sum total of what we came in with and all the history we have had up to this point.
It will take me some time to assimilate all the new techniques presented in this seminar, but as I add them a bit at a time in my practice, you may find me doing some new things during your visits.
Take care,
David