By Terry Willard ClH PhD

This is the second blog in this series. The first one looked at a few mini case studies and a possible framework to look at. I concluded it saying that there might be some controversy as we look at health and the immune system in a different way. I also stated that personally consider that humans are multidimensional beings. As many physicists, and other holistic thinkers believe that we are really holographic projections of higher dimensions. Even though this is what I think is the situation. The following discussion still hold true if the premiss in true or not, so you can completely ignore that statement if that makes you feel better. But considering this information while reviewing this blog will give you a new dimension of perceiving this material.

After observing and working with people in clinical practice for more than forty years, I find that certain people often end up with autoimmune issues. Most are highly sensitive with no release mechanism for their sensitivity and are blessed with an exceptionally strong physical constitution. While it may seem strange to claim that those with the strongest bodies often get the worst diseases, with autoimmune disorders this is often the case. Understanding this seeming contradiction was the piece to the puzzle that took me a while to find, and it was only by looking at health beyond the physical dimensions of a disorder that I found the answer.

One of the biggest questions is: why do Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM) practices like Herbalism, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Naturopathy have more lasting effect on these problems than allopathic medicine?  

What is an Autoimmune Disease?

An autoimmune disease describes a condition wherein the patient’s immune system attacks part of their own body.

Usually, a healthy immune system can discern the difference between the self and the non-self—attacking only foreign invaders, such as germs. In the case of autoimmune disease, the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues as it would with a harmful virus or bacteria. This causes inflammation in the area targeted and various associated symptoms.

Common Autoimmune Diseases:

• Rheumatoid arthritis: Immune system attacks the joints, causing inflammation, swelling, and pain.
• Alopecia areata: Immune system attacks hair follicles, causing hair loss and baldness.
• Type 1 diabetes: Immune system attacks the pancreas and cells that produce insulin.
• Lupus: Immune system attacks various tissues within the body, commonly affecting the joints, lungs, blood cells, nerves, and kidneys.
• Multiple sclerosis: Immune system attacks the nerve cells.
• Inflammatory bowel disease (including ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease): Immune system attacks the lining of the intestines.
• Psoriasis: Immune system over-produces blood cells that collect in the skin, causing plaque buildup.
• Hashimoto’s disease: Immune system attacks the thyroid gland.

Common, life-threatening, difficult to diagnose and ‘incurable’—autoimmune diseases are as mysterious as they are dangerous.

More than 100 different autoimmune diseases have been identified, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) report that 23.5 million Americans are affected. The American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) estimates that number is closer to 50 million Americans, citing incomplete data contributing to the NIH estimate.

Regardless of the discrepancy, both agencies report that the prevalence of autoimmune disease is rising: “There are so many triggers for autoimmune disease, including stress, diet, lack of exercise, insufficient sleep and smoking. Anything that causes chronic inflammation in the body can eventually lead to the development of an autoimmune disease, which could be one reason they’re becoming increasingly common,” said Ryon Parker, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Parker Medical and internal medicine physician at Southern Hills Hospital and Medical Center.

While there is still much to be discovered about autoimmune diseases, managing inflammation and understanding the warning signs can help.

Causes and Risk Factors

Allopathic medicine currently has no answer to what causes autoimmune diseases, but it’s thought to be a combination of genetic factors and environmental influences. “The immune system is so complex, we haven’t even begun to fully understand it,” Parker said.

While many people develop autoimmune disease without any identifiable cause, risk factors include being a woman of childbearing age, having a family history of autoimmune disease, being exposed to certain environmental irritants, and being of certain races/ethnic backgrounds.

Symptoms

Because there are so many different autoimmune diseases—all affecting different parts of the body with varying symptomatic consequences—each specific disease comes with its own unique symptoms. However, most autoimmune diseases have a few common traits:

Inflammation: Swelling, pain, redness, and heat are all common symptoms of autoimmune disease which tend to be concentrated on the body part(s) affected.

Flare-ups: Many autoimmune diseases get better or worse depending on specific triggers, including stress and diet, causing “flare-ups” in symptoms.

Early/mid-life onset: Most autoimmune diseases appear in a person’s teens through early 30s. Most people aren’t born with an autoimmune disease; the disease develops and adapts over time.

Fatigue: Extreme or chronic fatigue are common symptoms, likely because of the energy exerted by the immune system fighting against the body.

Autoimmune Disease and Women

The AARDA reports that women account for 75% of all patients with autoimmune diseases. While there are no definitive answers to why this may be, it’s speculated that women may have more sophisticated immune responses which contributes to overactivity and/or female sex hormones may influence inflammation. 1

Why autoimmunity is most common in women; July 14, 2021, Nature

Autoimmune (AI) conditions are becoming more prevalent, particularly in regions such as the Middle East and East Asia, where case numbers were previously very low, autoimmune expert James Lee of London Crick Institute told the Observer.

 

Diagnosing Autoimmune Disease

Autoimmune diseases are notoriously difficult to identify, and many patients suffer for years without a medical diagnosis.

“With so many autoimmune conditions out there, it can take a skilled clinician to properly diagnose them. Most can be diagnosed with a blood test looking for the presence of specific antibodies, but the doctor has to know which tests to order,” Parker said.

For patients who think they have an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, Parker recommends they ask their doctor about an ANA (antinuclear antibody) test, which can strongly indicate whether it’s an autoimmune disease or something else entirely.

He also suggests patients ask about CRP (c-reactive protein) and/or an ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) test, both of which can detect inflammation within the body.

For different autoimmune conditions, incidence is currently increasing at ranges between 3% and 9% per year. This includes:

• 7.0% increase per year of rheumatic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis
• 6.3% increase of endocrinological conditions such as type 1 diabetes
• 3.7% increase of neurological such as MS
• Coeliac disease shows the greatest increase per year at about 4-9% a year

Other Aspects that are Increasing the Incidence of Autoimmune Diseases

COVID: It has now pretty much been accepted that long COVID is really an autoimmune disease, promising to raise these numbers a lot. 

Researchers, including a professor of medicine at UBC, have discovered long COVID patients can show signs of autoimmune disease a year after catching COVID-19. 80% of COVID-19 patients still had antibodies present six months after catching the disease, targeting their own healthy cells and tissues. After a year, 41% still had the autoimmune disease, according to blood samples.

These results were published in the European Respiratory Journal on Sept. 21/ 22, a major peer-reviewed publication. Will there become a solution to long COVID, or will these people just have to live with it for the rest of their lives?

Alzheimer’s: Several researchers have claimed that many forms of Alzheimer’s are autoimmune disorders kind of between a form of diabetes and a neurological issue.

Microbiome: Epidemiologically, the point is confirmed that if you don’t have the right organisms in your gut at a certain critical point in your development, then there are defects in the immune system.

These much-needed microorganisms come primarily from the natural environment and what’s known as the maternal microbiome—the healthy bacteria we get from our mother in utero, through the vaginal canal, and even through breast milk. These sources of bacteria have been compromised in developed nations due to less exposure to green spaces, a less varied diet, the overuse of antibiotics, and falling rates of breastfeeding and natural birth, Rook argues. People are exposed to a far less diverse range of microbes due to too sterile environments (or, as in the case of antibiotics, peoples’ microbes are killed off), and that means our immune systems are less equipped to deal with the bacteria—good or bad—that comes our way. It’s not so much our cleanliness but our increasingly industrial lifestyle that is blocking the intake of these important microorganisms.

The greater diversity of organisms in our gut, the healthier we seem to be. Our body needs diversity for many reasons, paramount is for the immune system to practice and tune up its response time. Just like a military army, the immune system needs constant training, or it get bored and dysfunctional.  

People who live in developed countries have higher rates of autoimmune diseases than people living in the least-developed countries, and people living in rapidly modernizing nations are more susceptible to autoimmune disease as their countries modernize. Studies show that developed nations have less microbially diverse environments than undeveloped ones, according to Rook, suggesting a strong link between the onset of autoimmunity and a lack of exposure to diverse microbes.

This can be reflected not only in the diversity of microbiome, but it is also reflected in diversity of stress, exposure to germs, cultural and personal stresses. In the developed world we seem to have sanitized our environment with over-cleaning and disinfecting our living and working areas. 

In our politically correct environment, we taken mini-stresses out of the educational programs. Everyone passes tests. Rewards for all children in sporting events to reflect no winner or loser. There seems to be very little consequences for a person’s actions. This doesn’t reflect the stress of adult life. Meanwhile our entertainment and news seem to be full of stress and violence. We perceive this stress, anger, and violence on the inside of a person psyche, not in the outside world. We don’t need to resolve these stresses in our real world, so it is internalized to be worked out in our dream world.  

Cultures that still have a functional tradition of eating fermented foods have substantially less incidences of autoimmune disorders. It is interesting to note the same seems to be true of coming down with COVID, especially long COVID—fermented foods like kimchi and sauerkraut seem to save the day for many people.   

It is recommended that people try to: get more exposure to microbes in the natural world by spending time outside, use antibiotics more judiciously—especially for pregnant or breastfeeding women—and eat a healthy, holistic diet. It is also acknowledged that there’s a limit to how much individuals can do to protect themselves against autoimmunity.

Vitamin D: deficiency has also been linked to autoimmunity. More than a billion people on the planet are vitamin D deficient, according to the International Journal of Health Sciences. A chronic deficit of vitamin D has been linked to such autoimmune diseases as mellitus, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, COVID, and others.

In our next blog (3/5) we are going to address factors that contribute to the cause of AI and start to unravel solutions to overcome these dramatic conditions.  

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^[1] AARP report Aug 10 2021

^[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/jan/08/global-spread-of-autoimmune-disease-blamed-on-western-diet ?