Health Viewpoints
If you asked my doctor, he’d tell you that I have a number of chronic “diseases”—hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid), hypercholesterolemia (blood cholesterol levels higher than considered normal), and eczema. Yet I take no medication whatsoever, not even over-the-counter drugs, feel great most of the time, and have no limitations on my life. My son Ethan was diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s when he was five years old. The doctors told us we would have to put him on powerful drugs that could cause all sorts of side-effects but without them our son wouldn’t be able to function in society. Today Ethan is eighteen years old and one of the healthiest teenagers around. He also takes no medications, has no limitations on his life, and he’s the kind of kid who gets straight A’s without studying, is effortlessly good at most sports, and designs aircraft and race cars in his spare time. So, what is a “disease”?
Professor Jackie Leach Scully wrote an interesting essay on this topic a few years ago which I encourage you to read. She explains that while the definition of disease changes with the human and cultural context “we must have a reasonably clear idea, first what a disease is, and second, which diseases are most worth the investment of time and money.” This highlights the practical matter of labelling a set of symptoms as a certain “disease” so that treatments can be marketed to combat it. The labelling also enables us to track statistics to monitor what is going on in a population and perhaps altruistically address it in a certain way through policy. Quit smoking campaigns of the 1990s are a good example of this once lung cancer was highlighted as being on the rise and the connection was made.
But does the label help you as an individual? You might get a momentary period of relief when the symptoms that have been plaguing you for months or years finally get a name and you feel vindicated that there is, indeed, something identifiable wrong with you. But then you enter the world of the “standard of care,” which includes medication, potential surgery, and ongoing testing. You won’t be told what is causing the disease. Likely, your doctors will just put it down to “bad luck” or “bad genes.” With no known origin, there can be no real cure. So you are expected to hand your future over to the guy in the white coat.
At the same time, medical gaslighting has become more widespread these days. This practice of ridiculing patients is more recently connected with people experiencing adverse symptoms since getting a Covid-19 vaccine, but medical gaslighting has been going on for years. Whenever a doctor cannot identify the reason for the symptom, they will insist that there is nothing wrong and it’s all in your head. It has been instilled in their training that a vaccine couldn’t possibly cause any ill effects, the food you eat is inconsequential, and if nothing shows up in a blood test or imaging then nothing is wrong. They send you home with a pat on the back and a prescription for an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication.
The Intersection of Infectious and Chronic Conditions
While Government agencies and maybe your health plan have been focusing on infectious disease, it is estimated that around 133 million or 43 percent of all Americans are living with one or more chronic diseases. The CDC puts the rate at 60 percent. This includes more than 40 percent of children and adolescents. The rates have skyrocketed in the last two decades. While an infectious disease tends to be self-limiting, a week or two of discomfort, a chronic disease persists for an extended period of time, months or years, perhaps a lifetime. The economic cost is astronomical in terms of spending on healthcare and lost productivity. At the individual level quality of life can be seriously impacted.
The war on germs that started in the early twentieth century has gotten seriously out of hand. We’ve discussed the importance of microbes to our overall health in terms of the synergistic nature of our microbiome. We’ve also seen how the majority of infections are entirely manageable with some common sense and nature-provided assistance. It’s also interesting to note that in fact a bout of certain infectious diseases seems to benefit us in the long run. There is plenty of medical literature documenting tumor remissions after a measles infection for example. A large Japanese study found that a history of measles and/or mumps in childhood significantly protected against deadly heart attacks and strokes later in life. Another study found that each additional contagious disease contracted in childhood, such as measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and scarlet fever increased the protective effect against cardiac events as adults by 14 percent. Yet again God’s mysteries abound.
What if in our effort to stamp out infectious disease we inadvertently encouraged chronic illness?
Illness is the body not functioning optimally. The root cause is rarely just a single factor such as a pathogen. Back to germ theory vs. terrain theory. If your body is healthy, you won’t succumb to a pathogen. If you are unhealthy to start with, a pathogen (such as a virus or bacteria) could throw you into a chronic condition. Maybe it’s the toxin the bacteria excreted (in tetanus for example); or a mycotoxin excreted by mold (a fungi). The toxin could be man-made such as pesticides and all the chemicals we covered in Chapter 4. Ultimately, it’s a huge variety of elements day to day, month to month and year to year that results in health or illness as we discussed in Chapter 3.
But this is actually good news. If we can get to the root cause or causes, we can reverse chronic disease and generate health.
I want to help you think differently. Think beyond the labels. You (or your family member or friend) are not a person with X disease. A medical professional has identified a collection of symptoms or something out of whack in the body which meets the criteria of a particular label. In conventional medicine that opens up a list of drugs that have been approved to treat it. Rarely will they reverse or cure it, but the doctor will be there to let you know what the next drug or the next step is when your symptoms progress. There is another way.
When Your Body Attacks Itself
The three diseases that get the most attention in the developed world these days are cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. They are the top killers no doubt and we will get to them, but millions more people are suffering from a barrage of miserable and sometimes debilitating “mystery” symptoms. Many people suffer in silence; perhaps you’re one of them. Others take months or years of visiting multiple doctors, many of which will tell them there’s nothing wrong. But eventually you might get that label of one or more autoimmune diseases.
I want to tell you the story of my good friend Kimi. I met her in 2020 when she and her military husband moved to California and joined our small-group ministry at church. She had a medical port in her chest and would miss group every few weeks. Initially we didn’t know her that well, so we never asked many questions, but as time went on, she disclosed she was having a type of chemotherapy for an autoimmune condition. Each time she had the infusions it flattened her physically for a week and we got used to bringing her family food to help out. As the months went by each infusion week left her more depleted and she had to take steroids to deal with the severe side effects. It was hard to watch.
Eventually we had grown close, and given my work, I asked for more details on her condition. She disclosed she had been diagnosed with something called Mucous Membrane Pemphigoid and her oncologist insisted she needed these infusions of intravenous Immune Globulin (IVIG) which has a string of nasty side effects associated with it. She also commented that initially she had been diagnosed with Pemphigus Vulgaris but when a new symptom popped up, they changed the label. I probed further into her history as to what caused her to seek a diagnosis in the first place. An itchy throat put her in the hospital when she suddenly became unable to swallow. Tests were generally negative other than basic inflammation. Lots more questions from me on her diet, stress levels (husband in the military periodically deployed!), and other factors. It eventually came out that she’d had breast implants put in years ago. Aha! I thought. Have you considered removing them? Turned out the insurance coverage the US Government provides to its military personnel fully covers the $300,000 for the IVIG treatment, but it won’t pay $5,000 for the breast implant removal. Something is very wrong with this picture.
Friends immediately stepped in to help with the cost and Kimi went ahead with the breast implant removal. The oncologist was extremely upset when she said she was discontinuing treatment. He told Kimi she was an idiot and refused to help out if she ever had a flare up in the future. My friend felt almost an instant improvement a week after the outpatient surgery. She has made significant changes to her diet, a new supplement routine, and other lifestyle changes and a year later, no flare ups. She is still dealing with some of the side-effects of the drugs she was on for years, but the future is looking bright.
The most common examples of autoimmune conditions you’ve probably heard of are multiple sclerosis (MS), lupus, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis (types of inflammatory bowel disease we’ll collectively refer to as IBD), psoriasis, celiac disease, Type I diabetes, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and Graves disease. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and fibromyalgia also have an element of autoimmunity. The incidence of these types of conditions has been rising steeply the last two decades with estimates now of well over fifty million people in the US alone diagnosed with at least one (and if you have one autoimmune condition you are at high risk for another). Millions more struggle with various individual symptoms without having yet got a diagnosis. These are warning signs of a disordered immune system and a red flag of what is to come if steps aren’t taken to reverse the process. Symptoms include digestive problems (gas, bloating, indigestion, reflux, heartburn, constipation, diarrhea), allergies, asthma, brain fog, depression, skin problems, hair loss, headaches, infertility, joint/muscle pain, sleep problems, and more.
If you (or your loved one) haven’t yet received a diagnosis, I’d cautiously suggest the time is better spent researching the likely causes and using the guidance and resources in this book to find solutions. Ideally this would include finding your way to some sort of “alternative” professional such as an integrative, naturopathic or functional medicine doctor who can lend some expertise. But if that is outside of the budget or the health plan coverage available, there is plenty you can achieve on your own.
Let me tell you another secret of the medical industry—there are more than one hundred autoimmune conditions in the diagnostic manual and most of them are not well understood by conventional medicine. Part of the problem is due to the specialization of care as mentioned in the history of Chapter 2. You go to a neurologist for MS, a rheumatologist for RA, a gastroenterologist for celiac or IBD, an endocrinologist for Hashimoto’s or Graves… and if you have more than one condition, you’ll be managing multiple doctors. But these conditions all arise out of an impaired immune system and as we saw in Chapter 6 all of the pieces of your immune system are intricately connected.
There are in fact more similarities than differences between each of these conditions which is why I wouldn’t worry too much about receiving a particular label. In all cases it is a matter of an imbalanced immune system mistakenly attacking and destroying the body’s own tissue. Autoimmunity can attack any organ, enzyme, hormone, or type of cell depending on your genetic predisposition and your unique epigenetic triggers. The elements involved are what give a particular categorization. A doctor might confidently put you in one of these categories, but this can never account for the infinite complexity of the human body and the sensory input of your past or future day-to-day lifestyle that affects it.
Conventional doctors will paint a pretty bleak picture that you have a lifetime affliction and your only options are a range of highly toxic very expensive drugs with nasty side effects that will treat the symptoms and perhaps arrest further progression. Often these drugs are designed to suppress your immune system which is going to leave you open to a host of infections and other problems. These doctors may support you cleaning up your diet a bit but will typically scoff at the suggestion that anything in your diet or environment is causing the symptoms.
Here are some key strategies we’ll look at that are most useful if you are dealing with a diagnosed autoimmune condition or likely heading for one given the range of symptoms you may be suffering from:
- Address underlying infections
- Fix your food with an emphasis on an anti-inflammatory diet
- Correct nutritional deficiencies
- Consider one safe inexpensive medication called Low-Dose-Naltrexone
Everything else we’re discussing in the book such as removing toxins, getting enough sleep, and moving your body are vitally important too but these four are particularly critical as an alternative treatment for autoimmune conditions.
Inflammation underlies every chronic disease. Symptoms are your body’s cry for help.
1 Scully JL. What is a disease? EMBO Reports, 2004 Jul;5(7):650-3. Doi: 10.1038/sj.embor.7400195. Accessed at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299105/
2 Raghupathi W, Raghupathi V. An Empirical Study of Chronic Diseases in the United States: A Visual Analytics Approach. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2018 Mar 1;15(3):431. Doi: 10.3390/ijerph15030431.
3 https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/
4 Data from the Center for Disease Control as summarized in the American Hospital Association piece at https://www.aha.org/system/files/content/00-10/071204_H4L_FocusonWellness.pdf. Also see this article from Life Sciences Intelligence magazine at https://lifesciencesintelligence.com/features/chronic-disease-rates-and-management-strain-the-us-healthcare-system
5 Kubota Y et al. JACC Study Group. Association of measles and mumps with cardiovascular disease: The Japan Collaborative Cohort (JACC) study. Atherosclerosis, 2015 Aug;241(2):682-6. Doi: 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2015.06.026. Epub 2015 Jun 18. PMID: 26122188.
6 Pesonen E et al. Dual role of infections as risk factors for coronary heart disease. Atherosclerosis, 2007 Jun;192(2):370-5. Doi: 10.1016/j.atherosclerosis.2006.05.018. Epub 2006 Jun 15. PMID: 16780845.
7 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Population – With a Disability, 16 Years and over [LNU00074597], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00074597, August 29, 2023.
8 Go to Phinance Technologies which has made the dataset available for study at https://phinancetechnologies.com/HumanityProjects/PIP%20Analysis-Systems.htm
9See additional reading recommendations in Appendix D.
10 The actual number is difficult to assess as there is dispute as to which diseases should be categorized as an autoimmune condition. The American college of rheumatology cites 58 million Americans diagnosed with a rheumatic disease which includes rheumatoid arthritis and lupus but not others. See https://rheumatology.org/press-releases/american-college-of-rheumatology-releases-2022-rheumatic-disease-report-card
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