Forever & A Day: Why the topic of immunity will always matter, beyond this global moment.
Inflammation & Immunity Series
We are currently fighting to survive a pandemic, and we find ourselves unprepared — not just as a nation. Many of us, on a personal level, are too vulnerable to the short-term and long-term effects of a coronavirus. And too many of us haven't been able to survive it, at all.
Other viruses and illnesses have caught our attention in the recent past — Ebola, AIDS, influenza, increasing rates of cancer, and autoimmune disease — but nothing seems to have grabbed our collective body and shaken the life out of it quite like COVID-19. Since early on in the pandemic, people with compromised immune systems have been identified as the ones with an increased risk of getting sick and becoming sicker. But do we understand why an immune system is compromised, in the first place, and the ways in which this foundational component of human health can be made strong, again?
Who has the time? you might ask.
A compromised immune system increases our risk of developing multiple illnesses and diseases. This is not new with COVID-19. While genetic predisposition does contribute to risk, the compromises — for most of us — develop over time and are frequently overlooked by conventional medicine. If grasped and treated at the outset, a full-blown health crisis can often be reduced or averted, altogether.
Too often, we hear the name of a disease and it has a ring of finality to it, like a gavel coming down or a door closing. Increasingly, these chronic diseases are gut-related and categorized as autoimmune — defined by the poor function or dysfunction of our immune systems. At the moment I'm writing this, there are over eighty of them, and the vast majority of people who suffer from them are women.
I see many women in the clinic diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, terrified (rightly so) about their health, after being told by a conventional medical practitioner they will have the autoimmune disease forever, and there is nothing they can do about it other than taking medication.
Just this week I saw a woman in the clinic diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 17. She is 19 years old and feels horrible — her joints ache, she has extreme fatigue, and her frequent bouts of diarrhea often keep her house-bound. No one — and I mean no one — has explained to her the correlation between Type 1 diabetes and celiac disease (both well-documented autoimmune diseases) and the possibility that gluten may be the cause, if not part of the cause, of what is making her feel so poorly. No one has empowered her to act in a way that could reverse the course of her suffering.
About 25 percent of people with one autoimmune disease have a tendency to develop additional autoimmune diseases. This is defined as multiple autoimmune syndrome (MAS). I am never surprised when a woman comes to the clinic diagnosed with multiple autoimmune diseases, often on a different medication for each one. I rather expect it. Once an immune system has gone haywire, the physiologic process has to be stopped for health to be maintained or restored. It may not be possible to stop the process entirely, but it’s often possible to slow it enough to experience some resumption of health. In order to do that, we need to do more than soften the symptoms. We need to discover the cause, which can be the true correlation between multiple diseases. A shared, foundational issue that developed at the gut level.
That is what this series is about: the immune response, as it begins in the gut and enables or cripples the body’s many systems. It’s both timely and timeless. Whether it’s COVID, Hashimoto’s, Lyme, or cancer, we can profoundly benefit from understanding how the immune system works, how we can restore it and build it back, supporting the whole body, now and for the rest of our lives.
About the Inflammation & Immunity Series
This series of “doable” weekly installments, focused on gut health and immunity, is designed to help you understand the ways in which your defenses might be down and your overall health degraded. It’s meant to empower you to act in measurable and realistic ways. In the middle of a global crisis, you can take it upon yourself to get stronger. I want to help you understand your vulnerabilities and suggest ways you can realistically improve your health. Chances are, these are changes your body has been asking you to make for a while now.