Understanding Autoimmunity
A normal, healthy immune system recognizes the difference between itself and what is not itself. But sometimes, it see its own healthy cells as foreign invaders and responds by making antibodies to attack these cells by mistake. When the body attacks itself, we have what is commonly known as an autoimmune disease. Autoimmune means "immunity against the self."
Autoimmune diseases can affect almost any part of the body, including the heart, brain, nerves, muscles, skin, eyes, joints, lungs, kidneys, glands, the digestive tract, and blood vessels. Many autoimmune diseases do not restrict themselves to one part of the body. For example, lupus can affect the skin, joints, kidneys, heart, nerves, and blood vessels. Type-1 diabetes can affect the eyes, kidneys, muscles, and more.
List of autoimmune disorders...
How Common Are Autoimmune Diseases
With the advent of food industrialization and The Dirty Dozen, chronic and autoimmune diseases are now so common that they have become a leading cause of death and disability. There are more than 80 different autoimmune diseases affecting more than 23.5 million Americans each year. Some autoimmune diseases are rare, while others such as rheumatoid arthritis and Hashimoto's disease becoming much more common.
Women are twice as likely to have an autoimmune disease, which usually begin to appear during childbearing years.
What's wrong with the standard American diet...
What Causes Autoimmunity
We may not be able to pinpoint the exact cause for the development of an autoimmune disorder, but we do know two things for certain:
- Autoimmune diseases and other chronic conditions did not exist in traditional cultures. Their skyrocketing rates in the western world today correlates with the chemicalization of our food chain, which brought us:
- Autoimmune diseases tend to thrive in the industrialized countries, northern climates, and countries that have high rates of heart disease and cancer.
Healing From Autoimmune Conditions
The natural approach to healing any health condition, whether it be chronic or autoimmune, is always to:
- Provide our body with the tools it needs to heal itself, and
- Remove the things that contribute to damaging our health
Pain and inflammation from many chronic and autoimmune conditions often disappear when we eliminate stress, unhealthy eating, and lifestyle habits, while at the same time eating a diet of fresh, whole foods. The things that damage our body do so by lower our vibrational frequency. A healthy body thrives at a frequency of 62-78 Mhz. When we consistently eat foods that are low vibrational in nature, we lower the vibrational state of our body and open the door to sicknesses that also resonate at these lower frequencies (everything on this earth has a resonant frequency, be it a specific food type or a disease).
Check out The Body Healer Protocol to learn more about how we get sick, how we heal, and how vibrational frequency is the key to understanding how to achieve true health and vitality... for good!
Diagnosing Autoimmunity
Because many chronic and autoimmune conditions have similar symptoms, it can be difficult for doctors to diagnosis if the disease is autoimmune or not, and if so, which one it is. The classic sign of an autoimmune disease is inflammation, which can cause redness, heat, pain, and swelling. But because these symptoms are so common, getting a diagnosis can be frustrating and stressful, as well as very time consuming.
Learn more about what causes chronic inflammation, and what you can do to reduce and eliminate it now.
Symptoms of Autoimmune Conditions
Although each autoimmune condition is unique, many share common symptoms, such as fatigue and pain. They may also cause dizziness and low-grade fever. How an autoimmune disease affects you depends on what part of the body it targets. If the disease affects the joints, as with rheumatoid arthritis, you might have joint pain, stiffness, and loss of function. If it affects the thyroid, as with Graves’ disease and Hashimoto's disease, it might cause tiredness, weight gain, and muscle aches. If it attacks the skin, as with scleroderma/systemic sclerosis, vitiligo, and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), it can cause rashes, blisters, and skin color changes.
Symptoms can come and go, be mild sometimes and severe at other times, and can seem to disappear entirely (known as remission). A "flare-up" is a sudden and severe return of symptoms.
Even though they may have symptoms in common with other autoimmune conditions, neither chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) nor fibromyalgia are considered autoimmune conditions.
List of autoimmune disorders...
Are You Taking Immunosuppresant Drugs?
Learn about the dangers of taking immunosuppressant medications for autoimmune conditions, and what you can do to best support and protect yourself if you need to take them. ...read more
- Learn about your immune system & how it works
- Understanding autoimmunity
- Inflammation: What it is & what causes it
- Anti-inflammatory & immune suppressing drugs
- Autoimmune conditions