“
God whispered, "You endured a lot. For that I am truly sorry, but grateful. I needed you to struggle to help so many. Through that process you would grow into who you have now become. Didn't you know that I gave all my struggles to my favorite children? One only needs to look at the struggles given to your older brother Jesus to know how important you have been to me.
”
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Shannon L. Alder
“
After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.
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Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
“
As with many life-altering events, an autoimmune illness is almost guaranteed to cause you to re-evaluate your priorities.
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Joan Friedlander (Women, Work, and Autoimmune Diease)
“
Dr. Cai Song is an internationally known researcher at the University of British Columbia and co-author of a recent textbook, Fundamentals of Psychoneuroimmunology. “I am convinced that Alzheimer’s is an autoimmune disease,” says Dr. Song. “It is probably triggered by chronic stress acting on an aging immune system.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
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Many empaths are diagnosed with chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia, CFS, lupus, and various autoimmune diseases, as well as psychological disorders such as agoraphobia, social anxiety, ADHD, depression, sensory processing disorder, among many others.
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Aletheia Luna (Awakened Empath: The Ultimate Guide to Emotional, Psychological and Spiritual Healing)
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Do you know about the spoons? Because you should. The Spoon Theory was created by a friend of mine, Christine Miserandino, to explain the limits you have when you live with chronic illness. Most healthy people have a seemingly infinite number of spoons at their disposal, each one representing the energy needed to do a task. You get up in the morning. That’s a spoon. You take a shower. That’s a spoon. You work, and play, and clean, and love, and hate, and that’s lots of damn spoons … but if you are young and healthy you still have spoons left over as you fall asleep and wait for the new supply of spoons to be delivered in the morning. But if you are sick or in pain, your exhaustion changes you and the number of spoons you have. Autoimmune disease or chronic pain like I have with my arthritis cuts down on your spoons. Depression or anxiety takes away even more. Maybe you only have six spoons to use that day. Sometimes you have even fewer. And you look at the things you need to do and realize that you don’t have enough spoons to do them all. If you clean the house you won’t have any spoons left to exercise. You can visit a friend but you won’t have enough spoons to drive yourself back home. You can accomplish everything a normal person does for hours but then you hit a wall and fall into bed thinking, “I wish I could stop breathing for an hour because it’s exhausting, all this inhaling and exhaling.” And then your husband sees you lying on the bed and raises his eyebrow seductively and you say, “No. I can’t have sex with you today because there aren’t enough spoons,” and he looks at you strangely because that sounds kinky, and not in a good way. And you know you should explain the Spoon Theory so he won’t get mad but you don’t have the energy to explain properly because you used your last spoon of the morning picking up his dry cleaning so instead you just defensively yell: “I SPENT ALL MY SPOONS ON YOUR LAUNDRY,” and he says, “What the … You can’t pay for dry cleaning with spoons. What is wrong with you?” Now you’re mad because this is his fault too but you’re too tired to fight out loud and so you have the argument in your mind, but it doesn’t go well because you’re too tired to defend yourself even in your head, and the critical internal voices take over and you’re too tired not to believe them. Then you get more depressed and the next day you wake up with even fewer spoons and so you try to make spoons out of caffeine and willpower but that never really works. The only thing that does work is realizing that your lack of spoons is not your fault, and to remind yourself of that fact over and over as you compare your fucked-up life to everyone else’s just-as-fucked-up-but-not-as-noticeably-to-outsiders lives. Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas, because those people have no spoons at all and you don’t see anyone judging them. Personally, I always compare myself to Galileo because everyone knows he’s fantastic, but he has no spoons at all because he’s dead. So technically I’m better than Galileo because all I’ve done is take a shower and already I’ve accomplished more than him today. If we were having a competition I’d have beaten him in daily accomplishments every damn day of my life. But I’m not gloating because Galileo can’t control his current spoon supply any more than I can, and if Galileo couldn’t figure out how to keep his dwindling spoon supply I think it’s pretty unfair of me to judge myself for mine. I’ve learned to use my spoons wisely. To say no. To push myself, but not too hard. To try to enjoy the amazingness of life while teetering at the edge of terror and fatigue.
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Jenny Lawson (Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things)
“
And so it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
“
My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way? My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.
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Melissa Febos (Girlhood)
“
As it happens, the higher the hygiene standards in a country, the higher that nation’s incidence of allergies and autoimmune diseases. The more sterile a household is, the more its members will suffer from allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thirty years ago, about one person in ten had an allergy; today, that figure is one in three.
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Under-Rated Organ)
“
An abusive culture, to me, is any culture that needs to single out and exclude a group. It’s always a less productive culture because the organization’s energy is diverted from lifting people up to keeping people down. It’s like an autoimmune disease where the body sees its own organs as threats and begins attacking them. One of the most common signs of an abusive culture is the false hierarchy that puts women below men.
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Melinda French Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
“
The bottom line is this: environmental toxins are all around us, and they stimulate the production of free radicals, which can cause axidative damage to any kind of cell, be it muscle, nerve, liver, kidney,, heart, brain, and so on, and cause autoimmune disease.
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Stephen B. Edelson, M. D.
“
I know many people who are suspicious of diagnoses—they think of them as labels that reduce or stigmatize. I knew, already, that a diagnosis was not going to answer all my questions. But I craved a diagnosis because it is a form of understanding.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
“
Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Hormones are the presumed culprit, but how exactly female hormones trip up the immune system when male hormones don’t is not at all clear.
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Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)
“
There is a loneliness to illness, a child's desire to be pitied and seen. But it is precisely this recognition that is elusive. How can you explain and identify your condition if not one has any grasp of what it is you suffer from and the symptoms wax and wane? How do you describe a disease that's not always there?
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
“
a person with an ACE score of two or more had twice the odds of hospitalization for autoimmune disease as someone with zero ACEs.
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Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity)
“
Stomach acid is so important to protect your gut barrier that my colleagues at the Medical College of Georgia (where I went to medical school) are starting to use baking soda as a treatment for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age (The Plant Paradox, #4))
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So many modern diseases, including heart disease, depression, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and all the autoimmune diseases (such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus), occur in part because our body’s immune systems produce excess chronic inflammation. In chronic inflammation, the immune system stays on too long and may even begin to attack the body’s own tissues, as though they were outside invaders. The causes of chronic inflammation are many, including diet and, of course, the countless chemical toxins that become embedded in the body. Chronically inflamed bodies produce chemicals, called pro-inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to pain and inflammation.
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Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
“
Why are entire flocks of industrial birds dying at once? And what about the people eating those birds? Just the other day, one of the local pediatricians was telling me he's seeing all kinds of illnesses that he never used to see. Not only juvenile diabetes, but inflammatory and autoimmune diseases that a lot of the docs don't even know what to call. And girls are going through puberty much earlier; and kids are allergic to just about everything, and asthma is out of control. Everyone knows it's our foods... Kids today are the first generation to grow up on this stuff...
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Jonathan Safran Foer (Eating Animals)
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Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. ” —HIPPOCRATES
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
“
Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope,
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Raven Leilani (Luster)
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A survey taken by the association found that 45 percent of patients with autoimmune disease were labeled as chronic complainers early in their diagnostic journeys, with the resulting delay in diagnosis often leading to organ damage from lack of appropriate treatment.
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Laurie Edwards (In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America)
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The 40-hour work week, long considered the gold standard, has quietly and insidiously stretched into 50 to 60 hours. Despite this accepted practice, social commentators and the average person agree that functioning at such a pace can't possibly be good for one's mental or physical health. /So I ask you: if the expanded work-week isn't healthy for someone in good physical condition, how can it possibly be acceptable for someone with a chronic illness? Quite simply, it's not.
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Rosalind Joffe (Women, Work, and Autoimmune Disease: Keep Working, Girlfriend!)
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Fear is the most socially accepted sin in the Church. Fear is a serial killer, the prime suspect in the death of more people on the planet than all other diseases combined. Fear in every form has been linked to heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, mental illness and many other sicknesses. Fear is the welcome mat to demonic activity in our lives.
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Kris Vallotton (Spirit Wars: Winning the Invisible Battle Against Sin and the Enemy)
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Medical communities believe multiple sclerosis is an autoimmune disease resulting from your immune system somehow confusing areas of your nerve sheath with invaders and attacking them. As I say in other chapters, this is a philosophy that will hold back the truth in medical research for decades. The human body does not attack itself. Pathogens are to blame.
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Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
“
Someday, we'll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we're not there yet.
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Esmé Weijun Wang (The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays)
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Having an ACE score of two or more doubles someone’s likelihood of developing an autoimmune disease.
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Nadine Burke Harris (The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity)
“
Dr. Balice-Gordon believes that a percentage, albeit a small one, of those diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia might in fact have an autoimmune disease.
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Susannah Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness)
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You have an autoimmune disease, and it’s not pretty, but you can rebuild your life in a new way.
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Jennifer Esposito (Jennifer's Way: My Journey with Celiac Disease--What Doctors Don't Tell You and How You Can Learn to Live Again)
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Foreign Invaders: An Autoimmune Disease Journey through Monsanto’s World of Genetically Modified Food Dara Jones
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Dara Jones (Foreign Invaders: An Autoimmune Disease Journey through Monsanto’s World of Genetically Modified (GM) Food)
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If we are a body, then we are one that is afflicted with an autoimmune disease.
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Christena Cleveland (Disunity in Christ: Uncovering the Hidden Forces that Keep Us Apart)
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The growing “epidemic” of stress, lifestyle diseases, and autoimmune diseases has no root cause according to mainstream medicine, yet that root cause seems simple to us: it’s really an epidemic of not loving the self.
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Louise L. Hay (Loving Yourself to Great Health: Thoughts & Food--The Ultimate Diet)
“
The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
”
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future)
“
Dear Lord, I submit my body to You, the health of every cell, organ and tissue. I acknowledge You alone as my wonderful, divine Creator. Only You have the divine wisdom to bring my body back to health and wholeness. I place myself in Your hands, and I choose now to trust in Your unfailing love. I receive Your healing power. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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Don Colbert (The Bible Cure for Autoimmune Diseases: Ancient Truths, Natural Remedies and the Latest Findings for Your Health Today (New Bible Cure (Siloam)))
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Women retain their dependence needs long past the developmental point at which those needs are normal and healthy. Unbeknownst to others - and worse, unbeknownst to ourselves - we carry dependency within us like some autoimmune disease. We carry it with us from kindergarten through college and graduate school, into our careers, and into the convenient "arrangement" of our marriages. (...) Much of the time - for many of us, all of the time - our unwillingness to stand on our own two feet goes unnoticed because it's expected. Women are relational creatures. They nurture and need. This, we have been told for many, many years, is nature.
And although it cripples us, we have to let it go unquestioned.
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Colette Dowling (The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence)
“
Some of us fall through the unseen cracks in the world of health on a bright summer’s day through a run-in with machine or microbe, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Some of us were born this way. And some find out that our genes have hidden within them a ticking time bomb. Waiting. Silently.
However we got here, we are now inhabitants of the state of sickness. Our papers for the world of health have been rescinded without notice. Our body-world has been colonised by patriarchs, and we, the natives, should know our place: small folded patient, compliant, silent, not defiant.
They seem to believe that our bodies are just an errant version of theirs. That our souls are not woman-shaped on the inside. That it’s not our place to take our space and insist on our inner difference.
Their gospel is scribbled down on prescription pads in spider scrawl. They are not to be questioned, especially not with our own heresy.
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Lucy H. Pearce (Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing)
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Science and experience tell us that many vaccines can cause injuries like cancers, autoimmune diseases, allergies, fertility problems, and neurological illnesses with long-term diagnostic horizons or long incubation periods. A six-month study will hide these harms.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Autoimmunity is internalized by patients as an opportunity for the ultimate self-management project. But in fact it is a manifestation of a flawed collective project. If it is an indictment of anything, it is an indictment not of our personhood but of our impulse to see social problems as being about our personhood, instead of a consequence of our collective shortcomings as co-citizens of this place and time.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
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Gluten is extremely good at breaching the intestinal barrier, causing a leaky gut in the process, and then directly activating the immune system. If you have an autoimmune disease and eat gluten, I urge you to ban gluten from your diet for the rest of your life. Your body will thank you.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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I am, you are, a cell in a bigger living organism. We have been taught to forget this. But our bodies are remembering.
We are not the only ones who are suffering. We are not the only ones who are sick.
But we are the ones with the power to make a change.
The time has come to take back our power to heal from this sickness.
This is the time to heal. It is time to purge the toxic masculine from our bodies and beings. And to choose life.
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Lucy H. Pearce (Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing)
“
Dr. Najjar, for one, is taking the link between autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses one step further: through his cutting-edge research, he posits that some forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression are actually caused by inflammatory conditions in the brain. Dr.
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Susannah Cahalan (Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness)
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Borrelia. Borrelia are spirochete bacteria typically transmitted by lice and ticks. (Lyme disease is caused by borrelia.) Rheumatoid arthritis, sarcoidosis, schizophrenia (suspected to be an autoimmune disease), and dementia (also suspected to be an autoimmune disease) are all associated with Borrelia infections.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
“
When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
”
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
We are learning that before the body can become a temple, it first must become our home.
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Lucy H. Pearce (Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing)
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Doctors give drugs of which they know little, into bodies, of which they know less, for diseases of which they know nothing at all.” —VOLTAIRE
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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When it comes to the treatment of autoimmune conditions, conventional medicine has failed miserably.
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Amy Myers (The Autoimmune Solution: Prevent and Reverse the Full Spectrum of Inflammatory Symptoms and Diseases)
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A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book. ” —IRISH PROVERB
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
“
Doctors give drugs of which they know little, into bodies, of which they know less, for diseases of which they know nothing at all.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
“
The latest studies conducted on mice prove that this inflammatory response is also a major cause of aging. In 2018, researchers at the Yale School of Medicine correlated a microbe that was present in mice with a lupuslike autoimmune condition that crossed from the gut into the mice’s organs. The result was gut wall disintegration and immune cells (which you can think of in this case as mouse cops) in the same organs as the invading bacteria. Notably, the same bad bugs were found in liver biopsies of human patients with autoimmune diseases, but not in healthy control subjects.6 In other words, a leaky gut that allows bacteria to cross the border of the gut lining causes autoimmune disease in both mice and humans.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Longevity Paradox: How to Die Young at a Ripe Old Age (The Plant Paradox, #4))
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I am a person suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome and I am appalled that it has been given such a trivial name.
Here is a disease that totally disables most of its victims; a disease that causes balance disorders, resulting in some of us requiring wheelchairs, cognitive disorders that leave us unable to perform formerly simple mental tasks, and immune disorders that lay us open to multiple infections and to autoimmune problems.
And all the medical profession can come up with to define this syndrome to the general population is "fatigue!
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Jane Cuozzo
“
For more information or guidance, check out Why Stomach Acid Is Good for You: Natural Relief from Heartburn, Indigestion, Reflux, and GERD, by Jonathan V. Wright, MD, and Lane Lenard, PhD.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Furthermore, eating a diet rich in fats—especially quality animal fats, fats from fish, and fats from coconut, avocado, and olives—will not only not make you fat, but will help you achieve a healthier weight.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Anyone can prove whatever they want. It's easy. I could "prove," via those mechanisms that carbs are the devil, fat is the devil, protein is the devil, grains destroy your digestive tract, grains are the ultimate food for digestive health, fruit is the devil, fruit is the salvation of mankind, dairy is the perfect food, dairy is atherogenic, dairy causes autoimmune disease, dairy cures autoimmune disease, fat makes you fat, fat makes you thin...
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Matt Stone (Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food (Diet Recovery #1))
“
The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, "I don't know what's wrong with you." And so we stood together in a tiny antiseptic room, the doctor and patient, a world apart.
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
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Colin had just accomplished the impossible. He had broken down the walls around my heart. The walls I had been building far before my illnesses but had grown even sturdier since my diagnosis. And for the first time, it felt like I'd been set free.
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Brooke Gilbert (The Paris Soulmate (International Soulmates))
“
When assigning responsibilities to employees in a startup, you could start by treating it as a simple optimization problem to efficiently match talents with tasks. But even if you could somehow get this perfectly right, any given solution would quickly break down. Partly that’s because startups have to move fast, so individual roles can’t remain static for long. But it’s also because job assignments aren’t just about the relationships between workers and tasks; they’re also about relationships between employees. The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee’s one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism. More than that, internal peace is what enables a startup to survive at all. When a startup fails, we often imagine it succumbing to predatory rivals in a competitive ecosystem. But every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease: the technical cause of death may be pneumonia, but the real cause remains hidden from plain view.
”
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
When we clean obsessively we do indeed get rid of everything, both bad and good. This can not be a good kind of cleanliness. As it happens the higher the hygiene standards in a country the higher that nations incidents of allergies and autoimmune diseases. The more sterile a household is the more its members will suffer from allergies and autoimmune diseases. Thirty years ago about 1 person in 10 had an allergy. Today that figure is 1 in 3. At the same time, the number of infections has not fallen significantly. This is not smart hygiene.
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Giulia Enders (Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ)
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Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people?
Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural selection as it inexorably shaped out bodies to maximize the transmission of our genes. In such paradoxical benefits, some may find a gentle satisfaction, even a bit of meaning-at least the sort of meaning Dobzhansky recognized. After all, nothing in medicine makes sense except in the light of evolution.
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Randolph M. Nesse (Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine)
“
Labelling a woman as a hypochondriac is the modern day way of labelling a woman hysterical – the insinuation is that it is all in her mind, she is unstable (mentally and perhaps physically) her opinion and feelings are not to be trusted. Her pain and her concerns are not real.
But what if the hypochondriac, the highly sensitive woman, is picking up perfectly on the signs that something is wrong, she is registering the imbalance, that something is wrong, but she mistakes the issue as being in her own body, rather than the body of the world beyond her. She is told to quiet down, that nothing is wrong. But there is, she knows there is. This is why the constant reassurance does little to help her. She is feeling, deep in her bones, in her nerves, in her pulse that something is seriously wrong. Because it is. Her biological system may or may not have gotten sick from it yet, but the signs of a sick world are quickening within her.
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Lucy H. Pearce (Medicine Woman: Reclaiming the Soul of Healing)
“
Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori). H. pylori is frequently accused of contributing to the development and progression of autoimmune disease (and is also one of the best-understood persistent infections). As mentioned in the previous section, H. pylori is a bacterium found in the upper gastrointestinal tract of approximately 50 percent of the population and is known to cause stomach ulcers in susceptible individuals. It also modulates the adaptive immune system through a very complex interaction. In fact, the interaction is so complex that acquiring H. pylori early in life prevents immune and autoimmune diseases. By contrast, acquiring H. pylori as an adult (which is more common in Western countries) increases the risk of immune dysfunction.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
“
Did you know that in 90% of cases, hypothyroidism is an autoimmune disease? Did you know that autoimmune thyroid disease is linked to a gluten intolerance? Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease are most likely caused by a gluten intolerance. What happens is that the molecular structure of gliadin (the protein in gluten) resembles the thyroid gland. If you don’t have a healthy intestinal lining, you can create holes; enter leaky gut syndrome. To review, leaky gut happens because food leaks into the bloodstream, and since your blood doesn’t know what the substances are, it puts your immune system into overdrive to kill the foreign substance (this is why I have my clients get a thyroid “antibody” test; it helps determine if there is a food allergy).
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Maria Emmerich (Keto-Adapted)
“
Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson suggests that scepticism initially looks appealing (despite its bleak consequences) because it is a good thing carried too far. The good thing is that we have a healthy critical ability to double-check individual things we believe by suspending judgement in them temporarily to see whether they really fit with the rest of what we know. But if this ability to suspend individual beliefs serves as a useful immune system to weed out inconsistent and ungrounded ideas, scepticism is like an autoimmune disease in which the protective mechanism goes too far and attacks the healthy parts of the organism. Once we have suspended too much—for example, once we have brought into doubt the reality of the whole outer world—we no longer have the resources to reconfirm or support any of the perfectly reasonable things we believe.
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Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
“
allopathic medicine is very good at managing trauma, acute bacterial infections, medical and surgical emergencies, and other crises. It is very bad at managing viral infections, chronic degenerative disease, allergy and autoimmunity, many of the serious kinds of cancer, mental illness, “functional” illness (disturbances of function in the absence of major physical or chemical changes), and all those conditions in which the mind plays an active role in creating susceptibility to disease.
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Andrew Weil (Natural Health, Natural Medicine)
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Six out of ten adults are living with a chronic illness. About 50 percent of Americans will deal with mental illness sometime in life. Seventy-four percent of adults are overweight or have obesity. Rates of cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, upper respiratory infections, and autoimmune conditions are all going up at the exact time we are spending more and more to treat them. In the face of these trends, American life expectancy has been declining for the most sustained period since 1860.
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Casey Means (Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health)
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To put the words / labels / diagnosis bluntly, in my own wording / description form: -'Narcolepsy with Cataplexy' is, becoming considered, an 'Auto-Immune Disease' which directly effects the Brain and the Neurological, Central Nervous and Immune Systems; aswell as involving also, the Endocrine System...- 'Narcolepsy' is the inability to get 'restorative sleep' which results in the inability to maintain wakefulness, throughout days and/or nights; so one with it does not sleep well, nor has energy, often. 'Cataplexy' is a symptom of Narcolepsy and is 'a minimal to complete, temporary muscle paralysis,
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Solomon Briggs (Expressions of my own 'Narcolepsy with Cataplexy')
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Depletion of Vitamin D Sunscreens prevent the absorption of vitamin D. But all the compounds discussed above, whether in sunscreens or other products, also lower your liver’s ability to convert this critical vitamin to its active form. This prevents the regeneration of new cells in your protective intestinal wall barrier, allowing more lectins and LPSs through, along with other foreign bodies. Men with prostate cancer have very low levels of vitamin D. Despite the fact that my practice is in Southern California, I have found that almost 80 percent of my patients have low levels of vitamin D in their blood. In fact, anyone in my practice with leaky gut or autoimmune diseases has low levels. Lacking sufficient vitamin D, and in the face of repeated assaults on the walls of the intestine and the lack of ongoing repair to keep out lectins and LPSs, the body constantly senses that it is at war. It’s not surprising, then, that most of my overweight and obese patients are also very deficient in vitamin D.20 Such a deficiency also impedes the generation of new bone, setting the stage for the development of osteoporosis. My thin female patients with osteopenia and osteoporosis also have low levels of this critical vitamin when they first come to see me.
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Steven R. Gundry (The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain)
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Under Dr. Fauci’s leadership, the allergic, autoimmune, and chronic illnesses which Congress specifically charged NIAID to investigate and prevent, have mushroomed to afflict 54 percent of children, up from 12.8 percent when he took over NIAID in 1984.59 Dr. Fauci has offered no explanation as to why allergic diseases like asthma, eczema, food allergies, allergic rhinitis, and anaphylaxis suddenly exploded beginning in 1989, five years after he came to power. On its website, NIAID boasts that autoimmune disease is one of the agency’s top priorities. Some 80 autoimmune diseases, including juvenile diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, Graves’ disease, and Crohn’s disease, which were practically unknown prior to 1984, suddenly became epidemic under his watch.60,61,62 Autism, which many scientists now consider an autoimmune disease,63,64,65 exploded from between 2/10,000 and 4/10,000 Americans66 when Tony Fauci joined NIAID, to one in thirty-four today. Neurological diseases like ADD/ADHD, speech and sleep disorders, narcolepsy, facial tics, and Tourette’s syndrome have become commonplace in American children.67 The human, health, and economic costs of chronic disease dwarf the costs of all infectious diseases in the United States. By this decade’s end, obesity, diabetes, and pre-diabetes are on track to debilitate 85 percent of America’s citizens.68 America is among the ten most over-weight countries on Earth. The health impacts of these epidemics—which fall mainly on the young—eclipse even the most exaggerated health impacts of COVID-19.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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Free radicals and antioxidants. One of the theories to explain the underlying cause of cancer and atherosclerosis is that tissues are damaged by free radicals. Free radicals are highly reactive molecules that have an unpaired electron. When a radical collides with another molecule, it becomes stable by removing or donating a single electron, but in the process it generates a new radical. Radicals can cause damage to DNA, leading to possible mutations and the development of cancer; and to fats, leading to the development of atherosclerosis; as well as to proteins, leading to the development of auto-immune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. The radicals that cause the most damage are oxygen radicals, and compounds that provide protection against radical damage are generally referred to as antioxidants.
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David Bender (Nutrition: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Interactions with the world program our physiological and psychological development. Emotional contact is as important as physical contact. The two are quite analogous, as we recognize when we speak of the emotional experience of feeling touched. Our sensory organs and brains provide the interface through which relationships shape our evolution from infancy to adulthood. Social-emotional interactions decisively influence the development of the
human brain. From the moment of birth, they regulate the tone, activity and development of the psychoneuroimmunoendocrine (PNI) super-system. Our characteristic modes of handling psychic and physical stress are set in our earliest years.
Neuroscientists at Harvard University studied the cortisol levels of orphans who were raised in the dreadfully neglected child-care institutions established in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. In these facilities the caregiver/child ratio was one to twenty. Except for the rudiments of care, the children were seldom physically picked up or touched. They displayed the self-hugging motions and depressed demeanour typical of abandoned young, human or primate. On saliva tests, their cortisol levels were abnormal, indicating that their hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axes were already impaired.
As we have seen, disruptions of the HPA axis have been noted in autoimmune disease, cancer and other conditions. It is intuitively easy to understand why abuse, trauma or extreme neglect in childhood would have negative consequences. But why do many people develop stress-related illness without having been abused or traumatized? These persons suffer not because something negative was inflicted on them but because something positive was withheld.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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Milk thistle (Silybum marianum) has been studied in the treatment of liver disease. The active component, silymarin, is found in the entire plant but is concentrated in the fruit and seeds. Silymarin is a potent antioxidant and acts as a toxin blockade by inhibiting toxins from binding to membrane receptors on the surface of liver cells (called hepatocytes). Silymarin can protect the liver from being injured by, for example, different toxins, radiation, and iron overload. It has been successfully used to treat alcoholic liver disease, acute and chronic viral hepatitis, and toxin-induced liver diseases. (There are also some studies showing no effect of silymarin and many studies showing that vitamin C is just as good.) While seeds are generally avoided on the Paleo Approach, milk thistle seed extract may be a beneficial supplement (unless the very small amount of alcohol in the supplement is not tolerated; see here). Milk thistle tea is also a good option.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Autoimmune Disease—the “Leak” in Your Gut Autoimmune diseases are a disaster and there are no good medicines available (steroids work, but the treatment is worse than the disease). They’ve been around for centuries, but there’s been a clear uptick in the last fifty years. Why? Two hypotheses have been proffered to explain it: the barrier hypothesis (our skin or lungs are letting in antigens) and the hygiene hypothesis (we don’t eat dirt and are too hygienic). But in fact, in the gut, they’re the same thing; because the gut is the dirtiest place in the world—one hundred trillion bacteria to have to fend off at all times—you don’t need an intestine, you need a fortress. We’ve known for a while that leaky gut is akin to chinks in the walls of that fortress. Antigens, like enemy soldiers, escape through those chinks into the bloodstream, where T cells and antibodies react against them. But in a case of mistaken identity, these immune cells then accidentally identify parts of your body as foreign invaders and generate an immune response to kill them off, a process termed molecular mimicry. Then there are two new twists. First, it appears that one autoimmune disease, called ankylosing spondylitis, produces antibodies to a gut bacterium called Klebsiella pneumoniae. Conversely, a different autoimmune disease called rheumatoid arthritis produces antibodies to a second gut bacterium called Proteus mirabilis. Now, this might not seem that earth-shattering, but recent work has shown that the refined carbohydrates in processed food feed those two bacteria in particular, and that carbohydrate restriction improves both of these diseases. Indeed, a low-sugar, high-fiber Mediterranean diet has been shown to be efficacious at prevention and treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Furthermore, introduction of fiber to the diet appears to improve asthma (frequently an autoimmune disease), likely by improving gut function and reducing inflammation.
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Robert H. Lustig (Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine)
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Huperzia serrata Native to India and Southeast Asia, the Huperzia serrata is also called firmoss. It is used in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine as medicinal plants to treat different types of maladies. In recent studies, researchers have found out that it contains neuro-protective properties. Benefits Unlike other medicinal herbs in Asia, Huperzia serrata is not as common in Western folk medicine. This particular herb contains the compound called huperzine A which is an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor and NMDA receptor antagonist. Below are the benefits of using this medicinal herb. It is used to improve the brain and cognitive function. It can also help prevent the occurrence of autoimmune neuromuscular diseases that can lead to muscle weakness and disability. It has the potential of treating patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. How to Use This particular medicinal herb is prepared as tea or infusion. However, there are also dietary supplements available from the market that you can take.
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Jeff Robson (Medicinal Herbs: The Ultimate Guide to Medical Herbs that Heal)
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Homologous recombination occurs naturally to create genetic diversity in our offspring and is also conveniently harnessed by scientists to introduce experimental DNA into cells or animals. We do not yet know if this occurs with the contaminating human DNA found in some of our vaccines, and if so, to what extent. Imagine the potential consequences of human DNA from a vaccine, a vaccine that is given to children at an average age of 15 months, being incorporated into a child’s developing brain. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this potential has to be studied. In addition to the potential for homologous recombination, DNA is known to be a powerful immune stimulant. Diseases like graft versus host, juvenile (type I) diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus and some forms of arthritis are what are called auto-immune diseases. These are diseases driven by immune attack from our own immune system on our own organs, a system normally responsible to attack invading bacteria and pathogens. Targeted self-destruction, if you will.
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Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
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Flagyl was clearly effective in the treatment of Lyme disease. But how did it work? As early as 1967 The British Journal of Venereal Diseases had published a study showing Flagyl to be effective in certain cases of syphilis, and that it had an effect on bacterial DNA and RNA irrespective of bacterial replication. Could this be the mechanism of Flagyl’s action against Burrelia burgdorferi? The key to Flagyl’s effectiveness on Lyme, however, was not reported until several months after my study was presented. Dr. O. Brorson, a Norwegian researcher, published a paper on Flagyl and its effect on the cystic forms of Lyme disease six months after I presented my research. The cystic form of Lyme disease, it turns out, is one mechanism that Borrelia burgdorferi utilizes to persist in the body. Dr. Brorson reported that Flagyl would cause Borrelia cysts to rupture, and he went on to publish that he could see under the microscope the cell wall forms of Borrelia burgdorferi (helical/spiral–shaped organisms) transform into cystic forms, and under proper conditions convert back into mobile spirochetes. A review of the medical literature revealed that these cystic forms had, in fact, been reported in syphilis. No one had clearly made the link between Borrelia and a cystic form of the organism that could persist for long periods of time in a dormant state. It was a highly evolved survival mechanism that would allow the organism to reemerge when conditions were optimal. My patient, Mary, had been treated initially with Plaquenil, which according to Dr. Brorson’s research also affects the cystic forms, yet it appeared that it was not powerful enough to destroy the dormant forms and prevent a relapse, or to prevent her from passing it on to her fetus. She had also been treated with drugs that addressed the cell wall and intracellular forms of Lyme. Although Plaquenil has some effect on cystic forms, it is often primarily used in antibiotic regimens with Lyme disease to alkalize the intracellular compartment, modulate autoimmune reactions, and affect essential enzymes necessary for bacterial replication. Clearly, however, it is not powerful enough to destroy enough of the
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Richard I. Horowitz (Why Can't I Get Better?: Solving the Mystery of Lyme & Chronic Disease)
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It worked. I cut out what others had identified as trigger foods, and within a year I was back to normal. Actually, I was better than normal. Along with eliminating my MS symptoms, I also lost a ton of weight and transformed my body from inflamed to supple. The change was profound. I couldn’t shut up about it! I needed to shout it from the rooftops because it almost didn’t happen. I almost let my chance to heal slip away simply because I couldn’t imagine not eating bread.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Whole-grain products have a profound impact on blood glucose: for example, two slices of multigrain bread increase blood glucose as much as six spoonfuls of sugar.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Interestingly, there is even less diversity of gut bacteria in obese people than in lean people: more food does not equal more nutrition, and the worse your diet, the more your gut microflora suffers.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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A number of clinical trials have shown benefits (though sometimes modest) of dietary supplementation with omega-3 fatty acids in several inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, and migraine headaches. In fact, in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, supplementation with fish oil led to substantial improvements in joint swelling, pain, and morning stiffness and enabled them to reduce their use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Supplementation is beneficial because it helps correct the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acid intake. The Paleo Approach goes one very important step further because it focuses not only on increasing omega-3 fatty acids (from whole-food sources such as fish, shellfish, and pasture-raised meats) but also on decreasing omega-6 fatty acids (by avoiding processed vegetable oils, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds). Achieving the proper ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids will contribute substantially to the management of autoimmune disease and to overall health.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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It is not an exaggeration to say that gut health is everything. The health of your gut has a profound effect on your overall health.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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This means that even though milk, plain yogurt, cheese, and the like do not contain enough sugar to cause hyperglycemia and the resulting postprandial inflammation, they do prompt the release of insulin. In fact, they cause more insulin to be released than white bread does.
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Stellah Mupanduki (Healing For Terminal Illness: Golgotha Hallelujah)
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Secondary Osteoporosis When bone loss occurs from another disease process or is due to a medication, it’s called secondary osteoporosis. There are many genetic, endocrine, autoimmune, neurological, and allergic disorders that cause bone loss, as well as many medications.
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R. Keith Mccormick (The Whole-Body Approach to Osteoporosis: How to Improve Bone Strength and Reduce Your Fracture Risk (The New Harbinger Whole-Body Healing Series))
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Gluten is associated with cancers of the mouth and throat, esophagus, small intestines, and lymph nodes. It is also associated with type 1 diabetes as well as thyroid disorders, such as Hashimoto’s, the most commonly diagnosed thyroid dysfunction in America. Many patients achieve normalization of their thyroid function only after adopting a gluten-free diet. Gluten sensitivity is also associated with other autoimmune diseases, such as Sjörgens syndrome and dermatitis herpetiformis. Hair loss, or autoimmune alopecia, is another presentation. It is also associated with depression, migraines, arthritis, fatigue, osteoporosis, and anemia, to name a few.
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Alejandro Junger (Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health)
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The severity of gut dysfunction varies for four reasons: The toxic organisms present may be beyond what the Clean Gut program is designed to remove. These include severe yeast overgrowth, parasites, viruses, and certain bad bacteria, such as salmonella, Escherichia coli (E. coli), or Clostridium difficile (C. difficile). Other influences may cause a severe leaky gut, such as heavy-metal toxicity or full-blown autoimmune-induced inflammation, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, which impair the regeneration of the cells of the intestinal wall. Mechanical obstructions may interfere, such as constrictions, scarring, or an impacted, dilated colon. Diverticulitis may be present, with pockets of infection. Of these four reasons, only the final two require immediate medical attention and surgery.
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Alejandro Junger (Clean Gut: The Breakthrough Plan for Eliminating the Root Cause of Disease and Revolutionizing Your Health)
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autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology.
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Scott Carney (What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength)
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Despite all of our technology, our bodies are just not ready for a world so completely tamed by our desire for comfort. Without stimulation, the responses that were designed to fight environmental challenges don’t always lie dormant. Sometimes they turn inward and wreak havoc on our insides. An entire field of medical research on autoimmune diseases suggests they originate from fundamental disconnect between the outside world and an understimulated biology.
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Scott Carney (What Doesn't Kill Us: How Freezing Water, Extreme Altitude, and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Our Lost Evolutionary Strength)
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Total T4/Total thyroxine = the amount of T4 bound to a carrier protein and the amount of unbound T4 in the blood. T4 is one-fifth to 1/10 as active as T3. T4 is converted into the more active T3 in the liver and kidneys. Total T3/Total triiodothyronine = the amount of T3 bound to a carrier protein and the amount of unbound T3 in the blood. FREE T3 = the amount of unbound T3 in blood. Low levels could mean an underactive thyroid. FREE T4 = the amount of unbound T4 in blood. Low levels could mean an underactive thyroid. Anti-TPO = anti-thyroid peroxidase (TPO). TPO is an enzyme needed to produce thyroid hormone. High levels of this antibody are an indication of an autoimmune disorder like Hashimoto’s or Graves disease.
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Kate Deering (How to Heal Your Metabolism: Stop blaming aging for your slowing metabolism)
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Gluten, a major component of wheat, barley, and rye, is a composite of two different proteins, gliadin and glutelin. Gluten is what gives bread its stretchiness and elasticity, qualities most folks enjoy. But gluten also makes some people seriously ill. It is estimated that about 1 percent of the population is gluten intolerant, though most are unaware of it. If gluten-intolerant individuals eat gluten grains, they develop what’s known as celiac disease. Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition in which the gliadin protein in gluten grains generates an antibody-mediated immune-system attack against the intestines, leading to chronic diarrhea, fatigue, stunting of growth, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, anemia, nerve damage, and osteoporosis. Furthermore, those with celiac disease have higher rates of cancer, schizophrenia, and a whole host of autoimmune illnesses (Jackson et al. 2012; Rubio-Tapia and Murray 2010), suggesting that the body’s response to gluten affects more than just the intestines. And, on the flip side, almost every chronic autoimmune disease we know of is associated with a significantly increased risk of celiac disease (Cosnes et al. 2008; Rousset 2004; Rodrigo et al. 2011; Song and Choi 2004).
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Josh Turknett (The Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free, Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good)
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Autoimmune illnesses, which include well-known ailments like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, hypothyroidism, and type 1 diabetes, occur when our immune system mistakenly mounts an attack against our own bodily tissues.
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Josh Turknett (The Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free, Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good)
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Humans have eaten eggs for thousands of years. They were once an amazing survival food for us to eat in areas of the planet where there were no other food options at certain times of year. That changed with the turn of the 20th century, though—when the autoimmune, viral, bacterial, and cancer epidemics began. The average person eats over 350 eggs a year. That includes whole eggs and also all the foods with hidden egg ingredients. If you’re struggling with any illness, such as Lyme disease, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, or fibromyalgia, avoiding eggs can give your body the support it needs to get better. The biggest issue with eggs is that they’re a prime food for cancer and other cysts, fibroids, tumors, and nodules. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), breast cancer, or other cysts and tumors should avoid eggs altogether. Also, if you’re trying to prevent cancer, fight an existing cancer, or avoid a cancer relapse, steer clear. Removing eggs from your diet completely will give you a powerful fighting chance to reverse disease and heal.
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Anthony William (Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal)
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symptoms. A friend of mine has an often debilitating suite of symptoms that come from chronic fatigue syndrome and rheumatoid arthritis, two probably related autoimmune diseases. She has been told by medical professionals, “Well, none of us feel that great first thing in the morning”; “It sounds to me like you need to get out of the house more and get more physical exercise”; and the always helpful “This could just be in your head, but either way, lying around won’t help.
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Nathan H. Lents (Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes)
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Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously.
Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health.
“The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease.
For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life.
“Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of.
A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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The art of medicine consists of amusingthe patient while nature cures the disease.” —VOLTAIRE
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognizeas food. There
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Inflammation is the body’s natural response to invaders. I already discussed this problem and how “leaky gut” will lead to weight gain. It may be more important to note that “leaky gut” will lead to major health issues because it causes chronic inflammation. Cancer, asthma, headaches, allergies, arthritis, auto-immune disorders, heart disease, diabetes, depression, Alzheimer’s, and osteoporosis are all caused by chronic inflammation.
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James Adler (PALEO: Paleo Diet For Weight Loss and Health: Get Back to your Paleolithic Roots, Lose Massive Weight and Become a Sexy Paleo Caveman/ Cavewoman! (Paleo, Paleo Recipes, Clean Eating Book 1))
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Cancer and the autoimmune diseases of various sorts are, by and large, diseases of civilization. While industrialized society organized along the capitalist model has solved many problems for many of its members — such as housing, food supply and sanitation — it has also created numerous new pressures even for those who do not need to struggle for the basics of existence. We have come to take these stresses for granted as inevitable consequences of human life, as if human life existed in an abstract form separable from the human beings who live it.
When we look at people who only recently have come to experience urban civilization, we can see more clearly that the benefits of “progress” exact hidden costs in terms of physiological balance, to say nothing of emotional and spiritual satisfaction. Hans Selye wrote, “Apparently in a Zulu population, the stress of urbanization increased the incidence of hypertension, predisposing people to heart accidents. In Bedouins and other nomadic Arabs, ulcerative colitis has been noted after settlement in Kuwait City, presumably as a consequence of urbanization.”
The main effect of recent trends on the family under the prevailing socioeconomic system, accelerated by the current drive to “globalization,” has been to undermine the family structure and to tear asunder the connections that used to provide human beings with a sense of meaning and belonging. Children spend less time around nurturing adults than ever before during the course of human evolution. The nexus previously based in extended family, village, community and neighbourhood has been replaced by institutions such as daycare and school, where children are more oriented to their peers than to reliable parents or parent substitutes.
Even the nuclear family, supposedly the basic unit of the social structure, is under intolerable pressure. In many families now, both parents are having to work to assure the basic necessities one salary could secure a few decades ago. “[The] separation of infants from their mothers and all other types of relocation which leave few possibilities for interpersonal contact are very common forms of sensory deprivation; they may become major factors in disease,” wrote the prescient Hans Selye.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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consumption of grains is probably responsible for most, if not all, of the noncommunicable diseases we face as a civilization today, we
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Sarah Ballantyne (The Paleo Approach: Reverse Autoimmune Disease, Heal Your Body)
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Of course, pregnant women are no less in need of safe, effective medical treatments than anyone else. Each year, over 400,000 women in the United States battle significant illnesses while pregnant. And many women have chronic conditions, from hypertension to autoimmune diseases to depression, that they must manage with medications. As bioethicist Francoise Baylis wrote in a 2010 Nature article, 'Pregnant women get sick, and sick women get pregnant.' Indeed, 90 percent of women take some medication during pregnancy, and about 70 percent take a prescription drug, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The average woman receives 1.3 prescriptions per obstetric visit, and nearly two-thirds of women use four to five medications during pregnancy and labor.
But with little actual research to go on, doctors are simply guessing at how drugs will affect a pregnant body, and their best predictions can be disastrously off.
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Maya Dusenbery (Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick)
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autoimmune diseases are one third genetic and two thirds environmental
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Meghan O'Rourke (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness)
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Anxiety is often present in people with respiratory disease, particularly asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Fear and worry impact breathing, making these illnesses all the more distressing. The stress reaction due to anxiety is also linked with migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, hyperthyroidism, diabetes, and autoimmune illnesses.
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Jill P. Weber (Be Calm: Proven Techniques to Stop Anxiety Now)