Autoimmune Quotes

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.

As with many life-altering events, an autoimmune illness is almost guaranteed to cause you to re-evaluate your priorities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society.

In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion. While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. It’s a bad system. Dr. Bailey is not the exception to the rule. He is the rule.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Do you want to awaken? To stop being a false, artificial, self-benighted being? Then developing and sharpening this sense—the ability to detect fear and the source and emanations of fear—amounts to nothing more than disengaging your own autoimmune system; the subsystem of ego that keeps this poison from making you sick. Yes, to get it out you must let it in, breathe it deep, and allow yourself to become sickened by it. The way out is through, and there can be no rebirth without first a death.

I wanted to relay a first hand experience to an audience possibly struggling to understand just what living with an autoimmune condition means,” Connery says. “It's a difficult journey and very much misunderstood by our friends and family – I hope this book can help to change that.

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.

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.

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.

Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity. ” —HIPPOCRATES

a person with an ACE score of two or more had twice the odds of hospitalization for autoimmune disease as someone with zero ACEs.

Someday, we'll be able to trace all mental illnesses to autoimmune disorders. But we're not there yet.

Experimental research, however, clearly shows that aluminum adjuvants have a potential to induce serious immunological disorders in humans. In particular, aluminum in adjuvant form carries a risk for autoimmunity, long-term brain inflammation and associated neurological complications […].”[109]

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.

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...

Things are wrong and people misbehave, causing our hatred and suffering to arise. But however painful our experiences may be, they are just painful experiences until we add the response of aversion or hatred. Only then does suffering arise. If we react with hatred and aversion, these qualities become habitual. Like a distorted autoimmune response, our misguided reaction of hatred does not protect us; rather, it becomes the cause of our continued unhappiness.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation, and a self-healing process takes place, mental and physical." He called art "a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process.

I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me.” “Well, sure she would! You’re her own kind, right?” “I am her kind?” Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, “I mean you’re in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?” he asked. “No normal person could understand you people.” “What exactly do you find difficult to understand?” Dr. Battista asked him. “Oh, you know, all that science jargon; I can’t offhand—” “I am researching autoimmune disorders,” Dr. Battista said. “It’s true that ‘autoimmune’ has four syllables, but perhaps if I broke the word down for you…

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.

A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book. ” —IRISH PROVERB

Foreign Invaders: An Autoimmune Disease Journey through Monsanto’s World of Genetically Modified Food Dara Jones

No food is a more powerful trigger of neurological issues and autoimmunity than gluten, the protein found in wheat.

When it comes to the treatment of autoimmune conditions, conventional medicine has failed miserably.

If we are a body, then we are one that is afflicted with an autoimmune disease.

They had contracted a kind of autoimmune disorder, deploying against themselves the very furies they so feared.

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.

You have an autoimmune disease, and it’s not pretty, but you can rebuild your life in a new way.

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!

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.

A vitamin deficiency can trigger an autoimmune disease, particularly vitamin D. But gluten tends to be kind of that central core hub that’s always present.” —DR. PETER OSBORNE, gluten-sensitivity expert

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.

We cannot outrun our past trauma. We can’t bury it and think that we will be fine. We cannot skip the essential stage of processing, accepting, and doing the hard, yet necessary trauma recovery work. There’s a body-mind connection. Trauma can manifest itself into chronic physical pain, cancer, inflammation, auto-immune conditions, depression, anxiety, PTSD, Complex PTSD, addictions, and ongoing medical conditions.

Perhaps we ought not to welcome small catastrophes in case they increase our vigilance to the point of making us prevent the medium-scale catastrophes that would have been needed to make us take the strong precautions necessary to prevent existential catastrophes? (And of course, just as with biological immune systems, we also need to be concerned with over-reactions, analogous to allergies and autoimmune disorders.)

the healthier our heart rhythm is, the healthier our body is. Studies have shown that a coherent or harmonious heart, which is produced when we center on positive emotion and spiritual truths, can prevent infection, improve arrhythmia, and help heal mitral-valve prolapse, congestive heart failure, asthma, diabetes, fatigue, autoimmune disorders, anxiety, depression, AIDS, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).[12]

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.

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.

Food isn’t just generic energy—it’s molecular information. In addition to fueling the mitochondrial powerhouses, food tells our cells what to do and serves as building blocks for hormones, brain chemicals, and cell membranes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

registered dieticians, and other health professionals. Justin’s talk was the highlight of the event for me. It conveyed the excitement of discoveries about the human microbiome and suggested answers to puzzling questions I had about health conditions that are on the rise. Asthma, allergies, and autoimmunity have all increased in North America and other developed areas of the world. Why is the incidence of peanut allergy so much greater today than it was when I grew up in the 1950s? And what is the explanation for the spectacular increase in gluten sensitivity? That last question had bothered me greatly. Granted that gluten

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.

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.

Doctors give drugs of which they know little, into bodies, of which they know less, for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

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

Just as the triggers for depression are correct and present every day, so are triggers for joy.

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.

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.

Auto-immune problems (such as allergies) cause inflammation because the body thinks it needs to attack something that need not be attacked. It’s like punching yourself in the face, but inside your body.

The importance of eating enough prebiotic fiber is one of the reasons you hear the bad advice to eat plenty of grains, legumes, and beans. These foods do contain prebiotic fiber, which does great things for your metabolism. Unfortunately, as I highlighted in The Bulletproof Diet, they also contain plant defense compounds called lectins, which damage your gut lining and cause inflammation and autoimmune conditions.

It’s telling that the more we open our eyes to what we don’t know, the more excitement builds in the research community. Emerging studies exploring the link between the immune system and the brain—as is the case for autoimmune encephalitis—have galvanized the quest to understand how thoroughly the body itself influences and alters behavior, spurring studies of immune-suppressing drugs on people with serious mental illnesses.

As we are aware, the effect of the vagus nerve is to slow the level of inflammation and keep it in check. If we are sending repeated messages of inflammation over a long time, we are essentially training the vagus nerve to stop having its positive anti-inflammatory effect. This is why it is most common for people to begin experiencing and receiving diagnoses of these autoimmune conditions in their 30s and 40s. After 30+ years of inflammatory signals, the vagus nerve has been trained to stop functioning as an anti-inflammatory intervention. Between the ages of 35 and 40, the vagus tone has decreased significantly and the anti-inflammatory signals stop being sent out. These conditions often arise following the stress of pregnancy, having children, and lacking sleep during the first years of a child’s life—all of which are stressors that decrease vagus nerve function.

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.

I have seen mood stabilization, reduced or eliminated depression, reduced or eliminated anxiety, improved cognitive functioning, greatly enhanced and evened-out energy levels, cessation of seizures, improved overall neurological stability, cessation of migraines, improved sleep, improvement in autistic symptoms, improvements with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), improved gastrointestinal functioning, healthy weight loss, cancer remissions and tumor shrinkage, much better management of underlying previous health issues, improved symptoms and quality of life in those struggling with various forms of autoimmunity (including many with type 1 and 1.5 diabetes), fewer colds and flus, total reversal of chronic fatigue, improved memory, sharpened cognitive functioning, and significantly stabilized temperament. And there is quality evidence to support the beneficial impact of a fat-based ketogenic approach in all these types of issues. – Nora Gedgaudas

It is important to note that gluten and other prolamins from grains are also likely to cause the production of autoantibodies because there are many amino acid sequences in prolamins that are very similar to those of proteins in the human body.

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.

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.

It turns out that alpha-MSH is a broad-spectrum anti-inflammatory hormone, and people with autoimmune conditions and those who have been exposed to toxic mold (like me!) tend to have lower than normal levels.23 After my lab tests confirmed I was low in alpha-MSH, I bought myself some and injected a little once or twice a week. This is not without risk. There is some evidence that very high doses may increase the likelihood of melanoma, but there is also evidence that it can help prevent cancer.

Some latent infections (parasites in particular) appear to stymie many people in the management of their autoimmune disease, even after fully adopting the recommendations in The Paleo Approach. This means that these infections cannot be outwitted by diet and lifestyle modifications alone. While this is addressed more in chapter 8, it is important to mention now that diet and lifestyle modifications will need to be implemented in conjunction with treatment for infections in order to see substantial results.

As patient narrative, research, and history will illustrate, gender remains an incredibly important variable in the chronic illness experience. Partly, this is because more females than males manifest chronic and autoimmune conditions. However, throughout history, deeply ingrained ideas about women as unreliable narrators of their pain and symptoms, as weaker than men, and as histrionic or otherwise “emotional” have had a profound impact on their ability to receive accurate diagnoses and appropriate care. On

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.

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.

But those of us hoping to have long careers as professional writers have to develop an autoimmune system of our own that can resist the dangerous (in some cases lethal) toxin that resides within. Do this, and we can more efficiently dispose of even stronger toxins. In other words, we can create even more powerful narratives to deal with these. But you need a great deal of energy to create an immune system and maintain it over a long period. You have to find that energy somewhere, and where else to find it but in our own basic physical being?

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.

A friend visited and did not like to see the tears in my eyes, the tiredness. I am a river of sadness,’ I sighed. ‘Well you can’t be,’ he said, sternly. ‘There’s no such thing. Rivers move and change and take things away with them and pick things up, like flowers and happiness. Write me a happy poem!

While a definitive causal link between diet and autoimmune disease in general has yet to be made, more and more autoimmune diseases (and many nonautoimmune diseases) are being linked to gluten sensitivity. While further research is required, some doctors and researchers are even beginning to believe that gluten sensitivity may be a factor in every autoimmune disease. Furthermore, increased intestinal permeability (also known as leaky gut, which we’ll talk about in more detail shortly) is present in every single autoimmune disease in which it has been tested: gluten increases intestinal permeability.

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.

our digestive enzymes are not very good at breaking apart the bond between two prolamins. The result is twofold: first, gluten is known to cross the intestinal barrier, either intact or partly digested; second, gluten (and other prolamins) can disproportionally feed the bacteria in the gut, leading to gut dysbiosis

It is also worth mentioning that several ailments are known to occur very frequently in conjunction with autoimmune disorders. They are: Cholangitis Chronic fatigue syndrome Eczema Fibromyalgia Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS); this occurs frequently in conjunction with autoimmune thyroid diseases These are not autoimmune diseases themselves (or at least have not been confirmed as such), but because of their association with autoimmune disease, they may indicate that an autoimmune disease is present. If you suffer from one of these conditions, it is a sign that it’s time to make diet and lifestyle changes to keep autoimmunity at bay.

If I mention my father is blind, the response is rarely one of immediate concern or pity.…. The audience in receipt of this bare fact seems always to be in need of comfort. I cannot provide comfort. He cannot see light. My life with lupus often provokes a similar response in others: the desire to be comforted. By me. The sufferer.

The human body has a hard time digesting prolamins: our digestive enzymes are not very good at breaking apart the bond between two prolamins. The result is twofold: first, gluten is known to cross the intestinal barrier, either intact or partly digested; second, gluten (and other prolamins) can disproportionally feed the bacteria in the gut, leading to gut dysbiosis

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.

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.

Take a deep breath in through your nose for five to seven seconds, allowing only your belly to rise (feeling only your left hand rising). 5. Hold that breath for two to three seconds. 6. Exhale through your mouth for six to eight seconds, allowing your belly to fall (feeling only your left hand falling). 7. Hold your breath, without any air entering your lungs, for two to three seconds. 8. Repeat steps 4 through 7 as many times as you feel comfortable or for a set period of time.

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.

Sadhana The body responds the moment it is in touch with the earth. That is why spiritual people in India walked barefoot and always sat on the ground in a posture that allowed for maximum area of contact with the earth. In this way, the body is given a strong experiential reminder that it is just a part of this earth. Never is the body allowed to forget its origins. When it is allowed to forget, it often starts making fanciful demands; when it is constantly reminded, it knows its place. This contact with the earth is a vital reconnection of the body with its physical source. This restores stability to the system and enhances the human capacity for rejuvenation greatly. This explains why there are so many people who claim that their lives have been magically transformed just by taking up a simple outdoor activity like gardening. Today, the many artificial ways in which we distance ourselves from the earth—in the form of pavements and multi-storied structures, or even the widespread trend of wearing high heels—involves an alienation of the part from the whole and suffocates the fundamental life process. This alienation manifests in large-scale autoimmune disorders and chronic allergic conditions. If you tend to fall sick very easily, you could just try sleeping on the floor (or with minimal organic separation between yourself and the floor). You will see it will make a big difference. Also, try sitting closer to the ground. Additionally, if you can find a tree that looks lively to you, in terms of an abundance of fresh leaves or flowers, go spend some time around it. If possible, have your breakfast or lunch under that tree. As you sit under the tree, remind yourself: “This very earth is my body. I take this body from the earth and give it back to the earth. I consciously ask Mother Earth now to sustain me, hold me, keep me well.” You will find your body’s ability to recover is greatly enhanced. Or if you have turned all your trees into furniture, collect some fresh soil and cover your feet and hands with it. Stay that way for twenty to thirty minutes. This could help your recovery significantly.

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,

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.

Importantly, increased oxytocin levels lead to a decrease in activity in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis; see here) and enhanced immune function. Essentially, increasing oxytocin protects against stress. In fact, positive social interaction has been shown to have a direct impact on wound healing, attributable to increased levels of oxytocin. Oxytocin also modulates inflammation by decreasing some proinflammatory cytokines. Whether the effects of oxytocin are completely owing to direct interactions with the immune system or to effects on cortisol and the HPA axis remains unknown. Either way, the feeling of connection is important for general health and well-being.

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.

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.

It is not only through their complexity that the immune systems confuse their owners' longing for security; they cause even more perplexity through their immanent paradox, as their successes, if they become too thorough, are perverted to become their own kind of reasons for illness: the growing universe of auto-immune pathologies illustrates the dangerous tendency of the own to win itself to death in the battle against the other. It is no coincidence that recent interpretations of the immunity phenomenon exhibit a tendency to assign far greater significance to the presence of the foreign amidst the own than was intended in traditional identitary understandings of a monolithically closed organismic self - one could almost speak of a post-structuralist turn in biology. In the light of this, the patrol of antibodies in an organism seems less like a police force applying a rigid immigration policy than a theater troupe parodying its invaders and performing as their transvestites.

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.