Mark Hyman, MD
3 MISTAKES People Make Trying To HEAL AUTOIMMUNE Disease | Mark Hyman
This video explores how **autoimmune disease** is incredibly common and how food can impact these conditions. Learn about common mistakes people make when trying to address the root cause of their illness and how functional medicine can help. Discover nutrition tips and healthy foods that may support the immune system and gut health.
What if your autoimmune disease isn't a random life sentence? Functional medicine has identified 5 hidden triggers that are often completely missed by conventional doctors. In this video, Dr. Mark Hyman reveals what they are and, more importantly, how you can address them to reclaim your health.
Dr. Hyman breaks down the five primary root causes of most autoimmune diseases: your food (especially modern gluten), hidden environmental toxins (like heavy metals and pesticides), allergens, microbes (including gut imbalances and latent infections), and chronic stress. He explains exactly how each of these factors can confuse your immune system, causing it to attack your own body's tissues.
The key isn't just suppressing your immune system with powerful drugs—it's removing the triggers and healing the damage. Dr. Hyman shares the functional medicine toolkit for addressing autoimmunity, including targeted elimination diets, gut repair protocols, and advanced testing to pinpoint your specific triggers. He shares the incredible story of Isabelle, a 10-year-old girl who went from needing chemotherapy for a severe autoimmune condition to being completely healthy by fixing these exact root causes.
0:00 – Why Autoimmune Disease is on the Rise
3:38 – The 5 Hidden Triggers Revealed
6:07 – Trigger 1: How Modern Food Can Be a Cause & a Cure
13:30 – Trigger 2, 3 & 4: Toxins, Microbes & Leaky Gut
21:00 – Trigger 5: The Overlooked Role of Chronic Stress
25:34 – How to Find & Fix Your Triggers (Advanced Testing)
29:48 – Isabelle's Story: Reversing “Incurable” Autoimmune Disease
#autoimmunedisease #functionalmedicine #rootcause #drmarkhyman
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when you add all the autoimmune conditions together it's the number one disease in america food can be the cause it also can be the cure so mark you made a list of three things three things that are common mistakes that people make when trying to get to the root of their autoimmune disease whatever that might be hashimoto's grave disease whatever in that category rheumatoid arthritis so what are the three things big picture and then let's talk about why autoimmune is so on the rise you know what's challenging about our current medical system is it particularly on autoimmune disease is there's a belief that there's no often cause that can be identified and so what we have to do is shut off the immune system with powerful medication chemotherapy drugs like methotrexate or cyclosporine immunosuppressive drugs using transplant cases with biological we call biologics which are powerful suppressors of immune function that block tnf alpha and other mechanisms and these drugs cost 30 to 50 000 a year and they increase risk of cancer increase the risk of infection so relying on medication as the only solution compiling more and more medications is usually what happens to people and the disease can sometimes be kept in check but it's not cured and that leads to the second mistake which is thinking that autoimmune disease is incurable and that's what i certainly learned that once you got it you got it you got ms you got rheumatoid arthritis you got lupus you got hashimoto's you got whatever and there's a bazillion autoimmune diseases that affect over 80 million people more women than men for different reasons but the basic belief is it it's a one-way street and i've even talked dermatologists about this and said gee you know you they said we never rechecked auto antibodies because the way we often diagnose it in addition to symptoms is looking at the antibodies your body produces against itself so autoimmune disease essentially is where your immune system turns on you you start attacking your own tissues you're stuck attacking your brain your nerves your heart your muscles there's all these different organs and systems in your body that can be the targets of your immune system so it's almost like you know it's kind of like uh things gone crazy in your body because you're all of a sudden don't recognize self you know why don't you attack yourself because your body knows it's you right if you get a blood transfusion from someone who's not a type you'll get a transfusion reaction if you get a kidney transplant from someone who's not your type you get a transplant reaction because your body's like that's not me that's foreign but all of a sudden your body's confusing goes this this joint or this brain or this liver or this kidney whatever is foreign so i'm going to start attacking it to protect myself the problem is that doctors never check the antibodies after they diagnose the disease because they say oh well they never go down and the answer is yes they never go down if you don't know what to do in other words if you don't know how to reverse it if you don't know how to actually correct the autoimmune disease and deal with the root cause then obviously you don't want to check them so there's a sense that it's irreversible and that leads to the third issue which is the reason people think it's irreversible is that in medicine we haven't been very effective at looking at the root causes of autoimmune disease which are food toxins allergens microbes including the microbiome which is a huge part of it and stress so in the absence of looking for the triggers of immune dysregulation we just pour on more and more drugs to shut off the immune system so mark even let's take even a further step back than that what are the underlining conditions that are contributing to an explosion of autoimmune that's going on in the world that the world has never seen before yeah it's incredible i mean do i remember seeing a graph uh years ago in a medical journal i think it was english medicine it showed the declining rates of infectious disease you know polio tuberculosis you know all that stuff and measles and then at the same time the graph was like all the autoimmune diseases ms rheumatoid arthritis lupus hashimoto's and lots more all on the rise so this it's not like we mutated our genome in the last hundred years what happened there's a fundamental change in our environment one we stopped having to deal with infections so so here's an interesting example in sardinia in the beautiful there's a beautiful book called the epidemic of absence which is the absence of healthy gut flora and the absence of the microbes in our gut that keep us healthy but also the absence of things that we had to deal with before so historically you know we were like you know cavemen and then we were hunter-gatherers and you know not exactly the most hygienic things there wasn't hand sanitizer at every counter like there is now and not our modern version of hygienic yeah so there's this whole concept of this hygiene hypothesis where we've over sanitized our life and in sardinia they they had a particular adaptation to malaria which allowed them to not suffer the consequences of malaria but it turned out that that protective mechanism against malaria also left them predisposed to ms so they have high rates of ms even sickle cell sickle cell trait is a trait that if you have one copy of the sickle cell gene you are very resistant to malaria but if you have two copies you're kind of in bad shape but but but sickle cell protected you also against malaria so there were adaptations that we had to deal with all these infections parasites worms we lived in all this stuff and all of a sudden the immune system's like oh i don't know you know i don't know what to do i'm going to go find something else to attack right that's part of that so the hygiene hypothesis is really essential to this so what wants to happen is one our diet's radically changed so when our diet changes it's way more inflammatory it's highly processed sugar drives inflammation but also the quality of the food that we're eating has changed so you know i was in sardinia last summer and they had this grano capelli which is this ancient form of wheat now we eat mostly dwarf wheat which is hybridized wheat that has high levels of glyden protein super starch and and glyphosate which destroys your microbiome so you're getting like a triple whammy you're feeding tons of sugar into your gut you're getting glyphosate which destroys your microbiome and you're getting all these additional glidin or gluten proteins that are more likely to cause inflammatory responses so you've got the quality decreasing in our diet you've got processing increasing you've got increasing antigens in our diet that are from like i said from for example the the wheat that we're eating which is highly antigenic with these extra gliding antibodies and then and then on top of that we've flooded our society with antibiotics we there's about 37 or 38 million pounds of antibiotics used every year in america 29 million are used for animals not for treating infection but to prevent disease because of overcrowding and bad conditions and so forth so and that leads to any you know over exposure to antibiotics which destroys our microbiome and then of course breastfeeding has been an issue and so we end up with lots of of problems with a decrease in breastfeeding and that that is important in regulating and developing the immune system of the baby and then we have this flood of c-sections up to third of all births are now c-sections which prevents you from going through the birth canal and colonizing your gut and on top of that even if you did colonize your gut the mother's probably taking antibiotics which kills off a keystone species that we've talked about in the podcast called bifidobacterium infantis and this particular bacteria is critical for regulating and developing the immune system in babies so even when a baby is being born vaginally which is good because it imbibes the vaginal flora which colonizes their gut and helps them stay healthy and helps them develop their immune system the mothers most likely had antibiotics in her life and there probably aren't too many americans and humans on the planet left who have not had antibiotics at some point in their life and antibiotics are particularly toxic to a particular bacteria this keystone species called bifidobacterium infantis and what's fascinating this is really amazing to me is that breast milk 25 of the calories in breast milk are not available to the baby so why would nature slash god last goddess the divine or whatever put 25 percent of energy in breast milk that the baby can't even use it's to feed this particular bacteria to the bacteria called oligosaccharides they're undigestible starches that are so big the body can't break them down but the bugs love them and so i encourage you know women to when they're uh having babies to actually take the this bifidobacterium infantis and also for them for the babies once they're born to start taking it because even even the mothers are likely to have had killed off their species because of all the antibiotics so we've got and then we've got increasing stress which it's just because our society is just so connected stressful you know you could be living a little village somewhere in the town and never know what's going on in the world and everything's good now every second you know what's happening everywhere and it's kind of stressful like the war that's going on now in ukraine it's it's it's it's our bodies just register that and it's not good and stress causes an immune breakdown and then lastly there's been 80 000 new toxins that have chemicals that have been you know introduced into our environment since the 1900s and many of them are toxic and so there's a whole there's a whole phenomena of research going on about what we call autogins we talked about obesogens toxic chemicals that make you gain weight these are autogens these are autoimmune triggering toxins so i i just tell you a quick case of a patient i had years ago at canyon ranch who had ulcerative colitis and he was like wasting away his stomach was just a mess he tried everything i did all my functional medicine tricks on him nothing worked and i'm like what is going on i'm like you know so go back to basic principles what could be a trigger what's what it could be pissing off his system so i did a heavy metal test on him and he had extremely high levels of mercury we chelated all the mercury and boom his gut got better and he was better so i think i think we often miss the obvious things we can do and there's there's many many books written about the role of toxins so there's a lot of things we can do to identify what's going on even when you have a microbiome problem in the gut that leads to increased allergens which also can be inflammatory and lead to autoimmune disease so we we are from a functional medicine perspective we are so good at this and i just tell you a little anecdote about what's not an excellent it's a published study from the cleveland clinic where we had uh our rheumatologists who were collaborating with the top this is i think the number two rheumatology department in the world these are the top top doctors compared to our functional medicine doctors which are good and and so we compared our autoimmune patients with their autoimmune patients we match them and we saw who did better and you think you know these guys are the world's experts but and they're great and they're my good friends and what they do is amazing and and they know a lot more than i do about most autoimmune diseases but we focused on cleaning up their diet and dealing with these the microbiome and optimizing their health the outcomes were amazing and our patients did better on all the objective rheumatology metrics that are standardized metrics that dermatologists use to determine the effectiveness of a treatment so it's like and the thing is we didn't actually do the study we gave them our data so they they did it the rheumatology department analyzed the data and wrote up the study and i you know i obviously helped edit it and published it but it was like wow okay and and so then i think it starts to get their attention and they said they start to realize that oh there's something more we can do for our patients i remember uh i had a uh one one patient was dealing with a lot of inflammatory stuff and we thought maybe autoimmune and she saw this rheumatologist at in california at cedars-sinai and you know she's like would you mind talking to my doctor and i get these requests i'm like sure of course i'll talk to your doctor in the back of my mind i'm going oh this is going to be a conversation it's not going to be fun and they're going to be resistant to what i'm saying and they're gonna you know be a little bit standoffish and blah blah blah so i get on the phone with this guy it's like dr hyman i've been using all your anti-inflammatory diet with my rheumatology patients and you know what the results are amazing i'm like oh god thank god someone gets it you know so i think things are changing you know you're talking about toxins and saying we have to look at the obvious things but the thing about mercury in that instance is that that's not obvious to a lot of people so just help them understand not that everybody who has autoimmune is dealing with uh toxins is the primary driver right there are people in fact terry wells in the walls protocol she's been on your podcast before and says that a big contributor of her autoimmune condition ms she feels was being living on a farm as a young kid and like basically bathing in pesticides on a regular basis so how is it that something like mercury or toxins can encourage autoimmune to take place in the body yeah i mean yeah i'm going to explain that in a minute but i want to just back up for a little bit because the fundamental principle of functional medicine is is this just because you know the name of your disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you you have ms you've ruined arthritis you have psoriatic arthritis it doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you because you could have 10 people with psoriatic arthritis or ms or rheumatoid arthritis which have 10 different causes and need 10 different treatments so even though the end result is the same one might be caused by excessive toxins one might be caused by gluten one might be caused by leaky gut and microbiome problems one might be caused by some in latent infection it confuses the immune system to attack itself so there there is really important sort of framework of like what i'm saying about you know this particular case or this patient doesn't necessarily apply to all patients right with with autoimmune disease it's very specific so we'll talk about toxins here's the problem you know we're all loaded with toxins i'm on the board of the environmental group working group and they did a number of studies they did the 10 baby study where they looked at the umbilical cord blood of newborn babies before they even took their first breath and they were 287 known toxins in there 210 of which were neurotoxic including phthalates pcbs heavy metals flame retardants dioxins ddt stuff that's been banned for 50 years you know still float around and are in in us and there's another study where they did fat biopsy where they look you know if you get a tummy tuck or you get a breast reduction or you get something and then liposuction and then they'll send that off to the lab and they did a study where they found that every one of us is basically a cesspool of toxins and dioxin again things like ddt pcbs phthalates and and so uh all of us have a background level of these toxins the challenge comes when they sort of overwhelm our system and and so i'm always focused every day on how do i continually activate my detox system through the foods i eat i upgrade my diet through broccoli and the collard cake cabbage kale the brassica family onions and garlic a lot of herbs and spices i use uh things like high fibers and follicle fibers help bind toxins in my gut sauna therapy hot and cold therapy operate glutathione with supplements like n-acetyl cysteine so i do a lot of things to actually constantly help my body eliminate this stuff but it's it's just there so so it's important to think okay well if if i have an autoimmune disease it's one of the things i have to check for and and there are ways to check uh we look at heavy metal testing and again most doctors will not check heavy metals or if they do they'll just take whole blood which can helpful if you're constantly eating something like tuna but if you haven't eaten tuna for six months and but you ate tuna for the 10 years before every day it wouldn't show up because your body clears it and it stores it in your tissues and your organs in your brain and so you have to do a challenge test there are also tests you can look at before toxins the urinary markers so we do often for people come in who have high risk diseases that are toxin related like autoimmune or like like for example um parkinson's disease i'll look at urinary levels of pesticides and phthalates and bpa and and various toxins you can also actually look for other toxins in the urine that are excreted that are that are metabolic toxins that you can tell that are that are occurring and then you also can look at actually your immune response to toxins so we do a whole panel of tests in our clinic that looks at antibodies to a whole slew of toxins metals pesticides chemicals all the stuff we're exposed to and we can see if somebody's immune system is starting to get really pissed off about these things so there's a lot of tests we can do to look at these things that help determine whether they're playing a role or not and and you don't always know like if i see some of the high level of mercury or whatever compound i'll get rid of it assuming that it's going to help but until we get rid of it we don't actually know if it's going to help or not because it may be three other things and often there's three or four or five things that are going wrong you have to all deal with one of the things that functional medicine is really good at is kind of like catching autoimmune like behavior in the body before it really has the full-blown diagnosis of autoimmunity and maybe that might be lupus or hashimoto's or that what are some of the tests or methods that you've practiced or the doctors of the ultra wanna center cleveland clinic other functional medicine doctors that are out there that if somebody's sorting they're starting to like quack like a duck they're starting to walk like a duck yeah but they're in that sub clinical range where they don't have a diagnosis yet but they're on their way how do you detect that early autoimmune activity in the body yeah you know it's interesting we talk about pre-diabetes and pre-hypertension i mean now we talk about pre-autoimmune disease but it's all nonsense there's a continuum of disease from super optimal health all the way to full-blown end-stage disease most doctors will not take care of someone until they're actually have crossed that line to a full-blown diagnosable disease which is like you're finally bad enough i can do something with you yeah like well doctor my a a or this antibody is high what do i do oh nothing it's just come back if you're sick you know and when i see those things and my radar goes off i'm like this person is heading for trouble and before you ask you know what what you know what what are the conditions that have changed that allow people to kind of end up with autoimmune disease and i can tell you it's not universal but the stories i hear with people who get out of music is so common usually they happen like 30s and 40s but you know what what i often see is a story of c-section not breastfed early antibiotics maybe colic maybe eczema maybe allergies irritable bowel syndrome and then boom autoimmune disease so it's a lead up of decades of dysfunction with the gut microbiome and with food and with all kinds of stuff that leads to a full-blown autoimmune disease it's not like a lot of them were like healthy one day and like everything was going great and then they woke up one morning and snapped there's an autoimmune condition now sometimes that can happen for example if you get lyme if you get lyme disease you know they're these are these are things that can show up as autoimmune if you just google you know on pubmed the national library so autoimmune disease or lyme disease and autoimmune disease you'll come up with a whole slew of articles that connect the dots but you know how many rheumatologists are actually looking for that i mean they should and many good ones do but how many rheumatologists actually check your poop i would i would probably say close to none but it's probably the most important thing to look at they might check gluten antibodies if they're think thoughtful but often not and the truth is if you if and this was a paper written i don't know 15 years ago or something in the new england medicine that i read where they looked at celiac disease and all the conditions it caused there was like 50 different diseases that it causes so you could have rheumatoid arthritis you could have lupus you could have ms you could have all these labels but in actual fact you're celiac and getting rid of the gluten will fix all these downstream problems going back to your opening you said women are more likely to get autoimmune conditions than men what are some of the factors that play into that honestly drew i don't think we really know it could be hormonal it could be um some genetic factor on x chromosomes i i don't think we really know i think there's some theories about it but i don't think you really know there's a couple prominent uh functional medicine uh practitioners uh both women dr amy myers as well as dr isabella wentz who's a farm pharmacist and a functional medicine practitioner and both of them extensively write and have both suffered from different autoimmune conditions uh isabella once had hashimoto's name miners i believe had graves disease with the autoimmune condition that she had and one of the things that i've heard them talk about and speculate is that um we know that the modern day stressors that we go through societal structures the fast-paced life working out all the time in a very intense way like a crossfit type way but the modern stressors that we go through today that women biologically right women tend to seem to be more impacted by those things and it infecting their hormones not that men are not as you know impacted or other things but there does seem to be a different way that maybe some people and of course there's differences with even you know uh you know they're gonna be some men that are more susceptible to you know stress there's gonna be some women that are better at handling stress so there's a lot of unknown that's there but i think it's a good thing to highlight because if we don't start having an honest conversation about it we may not think about the things that need to be done on a societal level to protect for example in this case women from suffering from a lot of the autoimmune conditions that's for sure drew you know i just i think that's really important point and i think we're there's more and more investigation about the differences between men and women i mean i mean the government finally mandated that that scientists who were doing basic science features have to use female rats or female mice too not just male which is kind of amazing that you know until bernadine healey uh who was the head of a national institute of health for a while back in i think the 80s said hey you know there's no research on women we need to start research on women she started the women's health initiative which is a billion dollar study to actually see how women are different and what so now there's changing research to incorporate women and just rolling back a little bit about this pre-autoimmune disease i actually had prior immune diseases talk about it yeah i had chronic fatigue syndrome and i had mercury poisoning and when i did my lab work i found an elevated a a which is anti-nuclear antibodies an antibody against your own nucleus of your cells and i and now i don't because i fixed it all and i also developed another autoimmune disease as a result of of a complication from a dental procedure where i had an antibiotic that led to me taking something called clindamycin which causes c difficile colitis and i never this is c difficile i clear out the c diff but then it resulted in this full-blown colitis so i had inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis for five months until i figured it out and then i cured it and now i don't have any problems and my gut's fine i just did a poop test and it's perfect so i think oh a nice boop so i think i think we really know how in the 21st century using the filter of functional medicine and the framework of understanding the body as a system to understand where things go awry and how to regulate inflammation and how to deal with the root causes so it's really really important and i think you know people can go well i'm on an autoimmune paleo diet i'm not getting better i'm like yeah okay some people it works like that i had a guy come up to me at cleveland clinic he said dr hyman i did the 10-day detox for 10 days and my rheumatoid arthritis went away is that possible i'm like yeah if it was something you were eating if it was gluten for example sure absolutely another person was like i'm not better well yeah maybe you have lyme disease maybe you have mold exposure maybe you're mercury toxic maybe you have parasites maybe i mean we know that rheumatoid arthritis for example can be caused by parasites because we've seen the literature on it there's a thing new q4 which is a particular gene that makes you susceptible to this and it can be caused by entamoeba histolytica which is immibiosis so we know this in the literature there's a phenomenon of of of of inflammatory infectious spinal marropathy so this isn't something really new to medicine we understand that there are triggers it's just that we're not very good at looking for them we're not very good at treating them and so as a doctor as a functional medicine doctor i'm an inflammologist i'm a toxicologist i'm a microbiomologist you know that's what i'm i'm a nutritionist i'm i'm a stress expert because those are the things that actually matter when you're trying to unravel this puzzle of chronic disease can you talk about some of the tests that you might run that a typical doctor may not run or may not even know of necessarily when it comes to seeing if somebody has autoimmune factors that are going on in their body for sure so there's layers right the first tier the second year testing third tier so we can get really deep but the first year almost everybody who comes in with autoimmune autonomous gets food sensitivity testing so i'll do a lab i use like cyrex i like a lot we'll look at all like 20 different antigens for gluten because the regular gluten test you might not pick stuff up i'll look for cross reactions dairy and other things other grains i look for leaky gut markers so there's a whole panel i look for leaky gut because if they have a leaky gut that's the target and one question on those you know people often ask like what's the test that'll tell me the exact foods that i can eat there isn't one there's there isn't one there isn't one so you're still running those tests but explain why what are you looking for well i'm looking for when you're looking for how pissed off is your immune system to food because if it's really pissed off to a lot of different foods it means you have a leaky gut a leaky gut is a core pathology that happens and drives so much autoimmune disease and what that means is the barrier between you and the outside world is broken i mean basically you think of your intestinal tract it's a it's a tube that's outside of you from your mouth your anus it's like a closed tube and you put pounds of foreign stuff in there every day and your body has to go what do i do with it and they will break it down and i'll absorb the good stuff and i'll poop out the bad stuff so there's there's no foreign molecules that should be absorbed into your body no bacterial toxins no food proteins i mean why when you eat a piece of chicken you don't become a chicken right because your body takes the chicken-ness out of it it breaks it down into all its component parts through digestive enzymes and the whole process of digestion and you get amino acids and you get sugars and you get you know free fatty acids and you get really different basic raw materials so it's like it's like it's like a recycling plant basically you take all the stuff you deconstruct it and then you can you can take a plastic bottle and turn it into a patagonia sweater right so fine but like how do you get back so their body does that but when the gut is damaged and gluten is the biggest damager toxins are damaging infections can damage its stress stress itself can cause a leaky gut i mean they they've studied for example forced marched young soldiers who were 18 20 years old were healthy guys put them on a forced march overnight you know and in the morning i'll have leaky gut you know uh and their thyroid's suppressed their testosterone suppressed and all these other things are happening so stress can also be a factor um so i really look at food sensitivities i'll look at celiac panel testing aggressively i will always check vitamin d because that plays a role and then i and i always check poop i always do a stool analysis and i want to look at a whole cast of things in there i look at inflammation digestion what the balance of flora is whether there's parasite i just look at the whole thing uh another test i often do is a heavy metal challenge test like a urine toxic element chest i'll give people a key later dmsa and then check the urine for six hours and see what's going on so between looking at their sort of nutritional status their poop status their toxic load food sensitivities leaky gut that that for me is the basic starting point then i might start to go down deeper and do a mold analysis if i look mold antibodies looking at mycotoxins in the urine i might look at infections maybe i'll look at pick-borne illnesses viruses start to sort of dig a little deeper might even go looking at urinary toxic loads people have so i'll look at look at a lot of different things depending on their story you know if they say well i never ate fish in my entire life and i don't have fillings i probably won't check their mercury i don't want to check their lead like oh i grew up in a house an old house and you know i ate paint chips because they were yummy i don't know so i think i mean god i had a woman the other day i i just never seen such a high lead level in my entire life and and she had autoimmune disease and she was really sick and so we've been working on getting rid of that now there are other three other four things going on with her as well but that can be a precipitating factor so i start to sort of dig into all that and of course there's the normal test you look at your autoimmune antibody test like you took look at antibodies for ms or anybody from arthritis or lupus or this or that disease there's a whole cascade of antibodies we can check but all that tells you is yeah you have an autoimmune disease it doesn't tell you why just like okay great thanks thanks for telling me now what you know it's so true and you know i i i just tell you another story can i just just do another story please please uh so there was a little girl that came to see me years ago who was uh named isabelle it was a t years 10 years old she was from texas and she had that just cutest texas twang and accent and she loved riding horses and she was suffering from something called mixed connective tissue disease which is like an autoimmune disease from hell so not only does it affect a particular organ or joint it affects everything so it affected her muscles her muscles were inflamed her liver was inflamed her blood vessels were inflamed her joints were inflamed her skin was on fire she everything was just like crazy and she when i took her history she ate a lot of sugar and dairy and she also ate a lot of tuna she liked sushi so she a lot of tuna and so i said okay well let's start looking and she was getting treated with chemotherapy drugs she was treated with pregnant uh something called sodium medrol which is like prednisone intravenously every three weeks which was enough to kill a horse i mean this is a massive massive doses she was swollen because of the steroids she took drugs to stop the effects on her blood vessels like the rain note syndrome that she got like methenipine which helps out blood vessels she took blood thinners because her blood was inflamed and clotting she was anemic because it was affecting her blood everything was was bad and i found that she had high levels of gluten antibodies i found that she had tons of she had tons of antibiotics in her life and tons of sugar lots of overgrowth of yeast in her gut and she had high mercury so i got rid of the mercury the yeast fixed her microbiome and got rid of the gluten and two months later she came back and she was symptomatically better and we were getting her off for medications after a year she got off all her medications and was completely healthy and what was remarkable was that she had every single auto antibody you could just go down the list i'm not going to name them because they're a little technical but she had probably six or seven extremely high levels of various auto antibodies and all of them went back to normal except for one which stayed a little bit elevated and she was fine and i literally haven't talked to her in years and i recently checked in with her i was like how are you doing you say oh i've been in college everything's great i'm healthy no problem all good and then this is a woman like i mean a woman who would have been really suffering her whole life from this problem i just talked another patient who had um by the way i think you made a video with her and it's like on youtube you can share it we can share it yeah we'll have the link in the show notes yeah there's a there's an action article i wrote about her article it's uh called isabelle overcomes autoimmune diseases so there's a link to that in the show yeah and i just had another patient in their day was suffered from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis her whole life and she's you know 30 years old and was struggling with arthritis and she she we treated her and she was completely better so i i see over and over again if you figure out what the root cause is if you use the strategy we use in functional medicine you can help people to reclaim their health in a powerful way and to me you know autoimmune disease is one of those grand slam superpowers of functional medicine and if you have an autoimmune disease i encourage you to seek out a functional medicine doctor go to ifm.org go find a practitioner put in your zip code look who's certified everybody has different skills and different interests some people are more focused on one thing or the other but most of them are equipped to actually deal with this so i would encourage you to do that and even ask them for a consultation call like how would you approach this have you treated other people that have gone through this pathway um because again like you mentioned there's different degrees of education that are there so dig in a little bit it's not always easy there's not a ton of functional medicine doctors that are out there but there's a decent amount and maybe we can link to a few of them all right mark this is great information on autoimmunity we have a couple questions from our community that we're going to go into and then we'll go into a little bit of a recap of some things that people can do starting today uh to help them get them on the right path and track to getting to the root cause of their autoimmunity um that they're dealing with all right first question my daughter-in-law has scleradoma and keeps trying different diets but she believes she is dying from it are there actual diets to help slow this down can people live longer with this condition yeah so scleroderma drugs is a common autoimmune condition that's based on the hardening and stiffening of connective tissue so basically your skin gets tight your esophagus gets tight and everything starts to stiffen and you're like the stiff man and it's inflamed and it's basically the same exact approach that we take to all autoimmune diseases is look for the root cause get rid of the root cause and and do a lot of things to help the immune system to reset and rebalance and and there's a lot of options out there for people it's essentially starting with an autoimmune anti-inflammatory diet which could be the 10-day detox diet or it could be a more aggressive version which is called autoimmune paleo autoimmune paleo is essentially getting rid of all the potential inflammatory foods that are not necessarily bad foods but they can potentially trigger problems like lectins so essentially it's protein and vegetables you get rid of nuts which is you think is healthy eggs which i think is often healthy but just to be a trigger obviously dairy gluten grains beans so it's basically paleo plus it's paleo but no nuts and and no eggs and and that can be and also no nightshades which can be very inflammatory so tomatoes peppers eggplant so forth potatoes that's a good place to start then working on your gut is really important probiotics anti-inflammatory foods getting omega-3 fats in making sure your levels of nutrients are at the optimal level dealing with stress exercise all those things help and i had a patient who was a doctor who had really bad scleroderma and she came to see me and a lot of my patients are doctors by the way and and she really did the program and got so much better and her scleroderma halted and even reversed so yes the answer is yes if you if you understand what's underneath all these diseases you can really fix them yeah and one thing i'll add to that uh you've had dr terry walls on on your show and she also talks about how she used the principles of functional medicine to take some of the autoimmune paleo stuff and go even a step deeper and two things that she shared and i really recommend everybody go watch that episode we have a couple episodes with her we'll link to it in the show notes she recommended that she was doing pretty good she saw a pretty strong reduction in her her symptoms but she really kind of hit a floor where she wasn't getting any better and she started bringing in two things that was a game changer for her organ meats it was oregon meats was number one and then it was making sure that every day she ramped up slowly uh to having about nine cups of vegetables yeah and it's not only what you don't eat it's what you actually eat right because sometimes people go on a paleo diet right and they end up restricting so many things and they're limited because they react to a lot of stuff no but slowly ramping up which should take some time you don't want to start off right away and she's got a whole process of going into it yeah so that's where you know these layers of how people combine things and share their experiences is very unique because they can be the missing ingredient it's true and and so just as food can be the cause it also can be the cure and within plant foods are these phytochemicals there's 25 000 of them and many of them are anti-inflammatory medicinal reparative fix the gut the microbiome prebiotics probiotics it's amazing what you can eat so for her she really breaks down the food into a number of categories right brassica family which is all the collard kale cabbage the garlic and onions family really important components with sulfur detoxifying compounds quercetin and other anti-inflammatory compounds mushrooms which are full of these immune modulating polysaccharides that are anti-cancer but also have the immune system and also pre and probiotic foods to help the microbiome like sauerkraut and various kinds of prebiotic foods like artichokes or juice and artichokes or asparagus or plantains and other foods so there's there's a way to actually use food as pharmacology it's not just oh yeah food is medicine it's kind of cool if you eat healthy food you'll be healthy no no no there are specific components in different foods that regulate different biological pathways and you can optimize those by choosing to eat those foods and that's what i do when i go to a grocery store i'm thinking in my head okay where am i going to get my drugs you know i'm like oh artichokes okay that has prebiotic fibers this is a microbiome but also has these special compounds that are detoxifying from my liver or oh gee i'm going to have these shiitake mushrooms because they have the polysaccharides that are helping my immune system and cancer and oh my taki that's really good for cancer too i'm going to have that so i kind of go through oh my i'm going to get this really good ole high oleic uh olive oil which is got oleic acid and also these these olive polyphenols which are extremely anti-inflammatory and help my heart so i'm constantly like looking at the grocery store like a drugstore and that's i think that's why i called the podcast at doctor's pharmacy with an f all right mark here's the next question from our audience uh member they're asking they have a history of hashi motos in their family and thyroid issues but their doctor isn't running their thyroid antibodies and they want to know what i'm assuming from this question is what really should be the complete test and how much do you pay attention to things like thyroid antibodies yes so typically as doctors we're trained all you do to track thyroid disease is check tsh which is the thyroid stimulating hormone if it's low it means you're hyper if it's high it means you're hypo and if those show up then you go further to the next level testing which is looking at antibodies but here's the trick a lot of people walk around with subclinical hypothyroidism where it's very kind of minor but has real significant clinical effects and large data sets have shown that it increases your risk of death and heart attacks and subclinical hypothyroidism isn't really subclinical it just means it's not severe but you can still have depression fatigue weight gain cholesterol issues skin problems hair loss constipation fluid retention i mean all the hypothyroid symptoms so and we also know that even if your tsh is quote normal and by the way the range used to be 0.5 to 5. and so doctors wouldn't even start thinking about looking at anything until it was over five well the american and college of endocrinology came out with a new guideline saying no it should be three or three and a half right but but what is optimal is three optimal no it's probably one or maybe around between one and two or maybe a little less so i always check antibodies along with free t3 and free t4 thyroid peroxidase and antithyroglobulin antibodies because many many times i've seen quote normal thyroid tests like normal tsh normal t3d4 and very high antibodies and these people are having clinical symptoms if you pay enough attention and even in you know looking at how we're doing things now you know one in ten men and one in five women have thyroid problems are hypothyroid and half of them are not diagnosed and the ones who are diagnosed are not adequately treated because they just give them t4 which is the preformed is the precursor for the actual important thyroid hormone which is t3 they give them t4 like synthroid that's not okay so i wrote a book years ago as a ebook called the ultra thyroid solution we'll link to it and i go through everything in there what causes hypothyroidism what tests you should do what nutrients you need what foods you should eat the supplements to take and how to get to the root cause of it because it's often missed and it's tragic because it's like a miracle it's like one of my favorite magic tricks when someone comes in and they have this now oh just take a look at this thyroid and like boom it's like light goes on they feel great um so we've also done a lot of really good episodes with uh practitioners who've had autoimmune diseases themselves yes doctors themselves yes they went on really long journeys yeah we'll link to those as uh as well for sure all right mark next question from our community member what is on the cutting edge when it comes to getting to the root of autoimmune issues and are there any emerging technologies that you're super excited about yeah so much drew it's it's so exciting to be a doctor right now i mean i'm i'm you know got almost 40 years in since i started medical school god can i say that 40 years geez anyway but biologically i'm 43 so it's okay the the truth is that there's so many exciting advances in our understanding of how to modulate immune function and autoimmune disease i would say though that it's really important to always deal with the foundational basics food toxins allergens microbes stress diet really really really important and all the things we talked about our first step then there's a bunch of technologies that are emerging that can be really helpful for people who are stuck or have challenges and and one of them is really exciting which is peptides peptides are small molecular weight strings of amino acids that aren't long enough to be a protein but they're like mini proteins they're called peptides and there are signaling molecules that the body normally makes so for example thymus and alpha one is a really important one that regulates immunity as we age our thymus shrinks if it's a baby you've got a big thymus and that's the immune organ and it shrinks as we get older we can actually grow it so the thymus in alpha one can be really helpful in modulating the immune function helping immune system work better so the whole class of peptides that can be effective second is ozone therapy now ozone it sounds wacky and crazy in the ozone layer and well it does ozone is dangerous if you google ozone the fda is going to tell you it's going to kill you uh well yes it will actually if you breathe it but so will water it's called drowning so it doesn't mean it's bad it just means you have to put in the right hole and so ozone ozone actually is what we call hormetic therapy which is a stress it's an oxidative stress so it creates ozone is o3 and you inject the gas directly or you can do it rectally or you can give it in a mix it with blood and then put it back in and essentially it creates this this bounce back effect in the body where it's like danger danger and then all of a sudden the body kicks in its own repair mechanism so it decreases the nlp i know our p3 flammasm which is a whole inflammatory cascade that happens it inhibits nf kappa b which is another inflammatory gene transcription factor it it it upregulates your antioxidant enzymes which help control inflammation like catalase and glutathione peroxidase and superoxide dismutase lots of big words i know i'm just trying to explain to you how powerful this stuff is and and it also kills stuff so if you have lyme disease viral causes other things it can be extremely effective in helping to reduce the burden of those infections sometimes we don't get rid of them completely but it's just a matter of like you know are they taking over like for example all of us have yeast in our gut but if it grows too much you get all these problems right so it helps to keep the infections down and helps to re reset your immune system so it's very powerful it was really effective for me and then and then there's another a few other things that are being explored which i think are really exciting which is exosomes exosomes are little packets of healing compounds that are in stem cells that the stem cells use to do their magic so rather than having to take the stem cells which means sucking your bone marrow sucking your fat tissue and spending a bizillion dollars you can spend half a bazillion dollars it's still expensive but it's like probably a tenth the price of stem cells and and actually get these grown in a lab purified and extracted and you can take billions of these and inject them into your vein or into different areas your body and they help to reset the immune system they can be very very effective so exosomes really helped to modulate my immune system and and i got dramatically better from the ulcerative colitis symptoms and i was doing other things too but it was part of the solution and and of course people are using stem cells so often there's stem cell treatments for autoimmune disease so there's a lot of stuff coming on the pike it's very exciting and and lastly there's an uh procedure that we've been doing a long time in medicine called plasmapheresis so there's really fascinating advances in understanding how there's compounds floating around their blood that actually cause inflammation that make us age that we can actually do something about so plasmophoresis is this technology that is being used now for for this purpose for autoimmune disease inflammatory issues it hasn't been in the past like it is something we do but it's it's it's coming up as a new treatment for autoimmune disease and it kind of reminded me of this story uh that's being emerged emerging story around actually longevity where they've sewn together the circulation of young mouse with an old mouse and the old mouse gets the young mouse's blood and it rejuvenates them and they act like young mouse like a young mouse so it's kind of cool so that means there's these components in the blood that are degrading or inflammatory as we age and we can actually clean them up so i i've had plasma freeze i'm trying all these things on myself so i'm just seeing how it feels i'm trying this and that maybe that's why i'm 43 biologically i don't know but i'm the plasmaphrasis i've done exosomes i'm peptides experimenting yeah and a lot of these things are experimental but we need people to go and try them and we need to popularize them and the hope is that one day that more people have access to what really needs billions of dollars of research to go into showing how these strategies that are not um what i think are medieval practices um are continued so right now you know we're basically treating autoimmune disease except for a few little tricks like biologics pretty much have we've done for the last 100 years like steroids prednisone i mean they would grind up the adrenal glands from animals and that was where they get the cortisol and then they'd give it to patients you know back in the 50s as a treatment for autoimmune disease so like we haven't come that far from that and it's unfortunate but i just had a patient who was diagnosed with this sort of terrible autoimmune syndrome with massive muscle pain all over and joint pain and aching and fatigue and his doctors were giving me huge doses of steroids and it kind of helped but i sent him to get treatment with plasmaphresis and exosomes and ozone and it just was like it was like a miracle he dramatically got better yeah so i think i think we have to kind of look at you know what are the first steps we can do the things that i just mentioned are you know what's down the road what's coming what's available right now unfortunately they're very expensive but i think this all will get sorted out as we begin to figure this out because think about it you know if you can take a treatment for ten thousand dollars and get rid of your autoimmune disease or you have to take a drug that costs fifty thousand dollars a year for the next 50 years like what do you think we should be paying for right right now we pay for the drug for 20 30 40 50 years but we don't pay for these other things which are short term a little expensive but actually in the long term save a ton of money right and as they continue to get more attention maybe even a little bit of research they're spreading awareness who knows what becomes available to folks so mark i think it's a great opportunity to do a little bit of a recap of some of the top things that you think people can be thinking about you know we covered a lot of different stuff but you had three things at the beginning of the podcast that you shared uh when it comes to the top three mistakes people make when trying to heal their autoimmune disease so let's do a little bit of a recap on those three things well the first is thinking that drugs your only solution that immune suppressant steroids biologics chemo drugs are the answer they're not they're they're a stop gap if you need them they can save your life if it's really bad i'm not opposed to using them in the right circumstance but it ain't the answer the second is believing that once you got it it's a lifelong sentence it's not and third it's complete missing of the root cause analysis for autoimmune disease and that's what functional medicine is it's a system of thinking about how to navigate the landscape of disease by addressing the root causes and getting rid of them and identifying the ingredients for optimizing health and immune function that we're missing and adding those in so when you do that it sounds pretty simple and it is quite simple in in concept it's actually remarkable what happens and this is when i started practicing functional medicine drew i i i didn't believe what i was hearing like i like my patients i was like try this thing that i heard about do this elimination diet or take this thing and fix your tummy and see what happens and then people come back like i'm better and i'm like wow really you are from that okay it was like theory that you were learning about but you were actually getting a chance to see and put it into youtube i'm talking about 30 years ago and i was like geez this stuff works and it works way better than anything i ever learned in medical school because i remember first hearing about i'm like this stuff is just quackery and nonsense or it's genius and i gotta figure it out and so i said well it seems pretty low risk to tell people to change their diet and do a few simple supplements and take this and that let's try it and i would say to my patients look you've got this horrible thing and and yeah the medications may manage it but it's not going away and you feel like crap so why don't we try this it's a little experimental but you know give me a sample of your poop let's do your food allergies let's look for heavy metals let's try these things let's take you you know down this course and see what happens and time after time after time and when i get stuck it's usually because i'm missing something and i'm like oh maybe you have you know like a latent infection or a tic infection or you have some toxin i didn't find or there's some something that i missed but usually if i i'm persistent i'm like a bulldog and i i don't let go and i i kind of keep digging and i usually find stuff yeah and i think that's the really the key is if try to find a doctor you know you're not really taking on new patients right now so uh don't throw enough flood over here but try to really look for a doctor that can continue to dig with you because sometimes it does take some time you know people are what i hear from a lot of functional medicine doctors including your colleagues at the ultra wellness center liz baum dr liz baum and dr todd lapine and dr george they say that the patients on average that are coming to them right now are so much more complicated than even five years ago they're just so many layers so really find a doctor who can sit with you talk with you and continue to dig because there does seem to be a higher burden of things that are contributing to a lot of the diseases that people are suffering with including autoimmune it's true i think you know we're living in an increasingly complex world with increasingly uh challenging inputs uh that we're dealing with whether it's you know screen time or disruptions of circadian rhythms or sleep deprivation or chronic stress from the divisive society the burdens of loneliness and covid not to mention the total toxicity of our diet the overload of environmental toxins i mean just the list goes on and on and on so you know we're living we're living in the best and worst of times i mean it's a great time to be alive but it's also a challenging time to be alive because we're having to deal with things we never had to deal with i mean people say oh dr hyman do i need vitamins and supplements like no you don't you don't need nobody should ever take vitamins and supplements but only if you meet certain conditions one you hunt and gather own your own wild food two you drink pure clean water three you sleep nine hours a night and wake up in the sun and go to bed with the sun before you're exposed to no environmental toxins and have no chronic stress and if that describes you you do not need any vitamins but everybody else yeah if you loved that last video you're gonna love the next one check it out here fructose is a very toxic compound when it's free and unattached to fruit right fructose comes in fruit but if it's just free in the product you're eating which is in sodas and all kinds of sugary drinks and it's in everything it's in bread it's in
#MISTAKES #People #HEAL #AUTOIMMUNE #Disease #Mark #Hyman
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you know just go carnivore. They keep talking making things becoming very complex while people with autoimmune disease are suffering. Just try 1-3 month carnivore and see if it works . Whole theory might help but can overcomplicate things while people with autoimmune disease suffers for 10 – 20 years
Tell us what we can check ourself. We cant ask doctor to check my poop ?..can I ??
My cause was herpes even though i have no visibke heroes outbreaks.
Why are a lot of auto immune conditions triggered by puberty?
Has any one checked women that birthed a baby / babies with a RH factor. I had my RH positive baby just in the nick of time to not have big problems . I'm RH negative. I have had 3 different autoimmune skin diseases
I have sjogrens. I'm positive on the ssb and not on the ssa. No rheumatologist wants me. I was in the hospital 2 days ago, and sjogrens attacked my lungs. I have a dry mouth I have thrush constantly, I can't eat, my teeth are rotting my eyes are dry, I can hear that it's draining fluid in my ears and my face has dry patches with acne. I'm 67. I don't have acne. I'm pissed that I'm not taken seriously
I don't ✋️ stop. I will fight. I've decided to heal myself with diet and supplements.
Giloy Capsules from Planet Ayurveda helped me deal with inflammation and tiredness caused by my autoimmune disorder. My health feels more balanced now. Planet Ayurveda has given me hope.
How do I get rid of mercury ?
What the problem is our insurance won't pay for the test you are taking about
Women, in general endure more stress. This is why they have higher incidences of autoimmune diseases. Stress puts us in a defensive mode of resistance which triggers the immune system. As societies begin to treat women as equal to men, I believe we will see a more equal rate of autoimmune diseases between both male and female people.
I need a video on interstitial cystitis. No one talks about this.
What about viruses as the cause ? Eppstein Barr, Herpes Simplex, ??
Does taking immune boosting foods increase autoimmunity, I mean the immunity is already in over-drive.
You left out that pharmaceuticals are a CAUSE of autoimmunity, so why would doctors want to look at the cause. If you are very poor and on Medi-caid, you can't afford health care such as functional medicine, independent lab tests, supplements, etc.
As someone who deals with more than one autoimmune condition… It's just interesting that some people would just say it's only stress and psychological. Not true…like every other disease it's multifaceted.😊
Dr. Hyman is the GOAT.
Has anyone read books by Gabor Mate? He has some very interesting material and research on pts with autoimmune diseases triggered by early childhood trauma.
I guess… the bottom line is, “you are what you eat. “Garbage in garbage out. Healthy in healthy out.
I way working in a scope room in the hospital surounded by paracitic acid, gluteraldehyde
, disinfectants for 7 years. Air exchanges apparently according to the News said the air exchange needed to be fixed. I now have a Liver auto immune disease.
People need to exercise much much more.
Errr errrr Noooo way am I taking any freaking chemotherapy drugs. NO WAY.
Today's doctor's no longer practice healthcare. They only practice sickcare. They should be ashamed of themselves.its a disgrace.
Stay away from all seed oils, high fructose corn syrup and processed foods and no gluten, no sugar. Take 30,000 i.u. of the proper type of vitamin D3 and k2 and magnesium and zinc. Eat meats that are high in healthy fats.
Treat your food as medicine otherwise medicine will become your food.
I'm not stressed about the war in Ukraine or anywhere in the world for that matter. I don't believe the majority of Americans are stressed about it.
If you were a woman, you’d see how breastfeeding for some women can be the most challenging feat in the entire world
What about EMF exposure
Please tell me theres hope for someone in the throws of Sojgrens Syndrome to heal
i just ditched meat, sugar, dairy, gluten and ultra processed foods and my PsA improves
It has caused me incredible pain, a wide range of vision problems. I had a heart attack. Im short of breath and slow, but I walk with impaired balance. I walked 2 miles with a book cart the other day for groceries, and I'm sore for two days. I dont drive because i could probably crash. My thumb hurts to type. I think it's environmental poisons.
REALLY… I Was BORN And Raised In A Farm But I Don't Recall 2Many Toxins 40 Years Ago, We Didn't Work Them But Lots Of Other Bugs That Is Supposed To Make U Strong And Immune, I Remember That And Practiced It, Still To This Day. Dirt And Hard Work Does Make You Strong But I Can CA Very Real Relationship Between Poisons And Reactions.
Say Homie, I'm Not TrynaB Rude And I Do Hope U Read But I'm Fixing To Go See A Prolly Old School Okla RA Doc And I'm A Liability To Myself And Them When I Leave My Bed… is It Worth It, Not Scheduling My Appt Until I Get A Reply. Thank You So Much For Your Attention To This Matter.
I Eat Really Healthy And Once A Day, Prenatal Pills For Supplements. I Do Have To Take Anti Psychotics… Quietpi…, Clonid .., Bus…, Can I F Them Off Too?? The Pain Is What Makes Me .. People/Doctors Don't Understand.