Inflammation and Autoimmune

Most people do not know how to listen to their bodies. Did you know that our body has a spectacular system that can heal itself? That is why symptoms like inflammation and those caused by autoimmunity are critical.

Medical Insider talks about the significance of understanding inflammation and autoimmunity. Why? Knowing what they are for will help you assimilate what your body really needs. Be healthy. Stay healthy!

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Transcript

Intro
Welcome to "The Medical Insider" podcast, where we highlight real-life solutions to your health challenges, encorporate new technology and proven solutions from the past with a healthy dose of common sense while resisting the pitfalls of idiopathic classifications and economically-based medical doctrine. This is your host, Dr. Thomas Santucci. Let's get started.

Dr. Thomas
Welcome to this version of "The Medical Insider". We're going to continue on with our deep dive into functional medicine. A basic precept of functional medicine is that genetics exist. Your DNA code set you up and has preconditions. It does your eye color. It gives the quality of your skin. It may even determine some parts of IQ. But from a functional point of view, we are epigenetic. So epigenetic means that the DNA code is there. It's like piano keys, but the washer reality is the thing that determines what song you play. So we don't believe in predestination. There's very little evidence that that actually exists all by itself. So when a person comes in and says, you know, my mother was diabetic, my father is diabetic and I'm diabetic. We are going to look at how all of those people are eating. So a lot of times these chronic acute diseases are looking the same in groups when they could actually break the cycle. So we're going to look at that. Two of the biggest influencers and how your system is essentially running its DNA are inflammation and autoimmunity. Autoimmunity, we've touched on a little bit. Inflammation will touch on now. Inflammation keeps being trotted out there as, you know, the precondition that's behind all the diseases that really affect modern man. So cardiac starts off with inflammation. Cancer may start off with inflammation. Certainly, the arthritis is grounded as inflammation. So there's some very good work in the early stages of functional medicine that attempted to describe the balance of health, which we called homeostasis or homeodynamics. They kept changing the adjectives so that it would be more and more active. The idea is that while these important body processes are necessary for life, too much or too little results in disease processes. A lot of the body is the Goldilocks thing, you know, the just-right level. The goal is to dwell in this middle range where your inflammation is reacting to trauma without causing damage on its own. And the immune system is keeping things microbe-free without attacking your own tissue. You can see how too much inflammation causes a lot of these inflammatory conditions. But the thing most people don't know is if you didn't have inflammatory reactions, if you hit your hand on a desk or a wall or, you know, a tree, you would bleed to death without inflammation. So inflammation is a healing process. Over time and evolution, we've become the progeny, the children of the people that heal too well. So our species doesn't bleed to death in general because the inflammatory pathways shut down those blood vessels. What we've become is people that go into an overexcited inflammatory reaction when it's inappropriate. So lots of medicine, you know, is concerning itself with decreasing levels of inflammation. And again, we want that happy medium. The autoimmune reaction is the same. If you don't have an autoimmune reaction to a disease, the disease basically takes over the system. If you have too much and let's just deal with that. So let's suppose you have an inflammatory, autoimmune reaction to food. Well, your white blood cells, your antibodies are going to mark that, and your natural killer cells are going to try to kill that piece of bread. That piece of bread is already dead. Those things are set up to kill until they don't. And so they will go after--if you're a female, your thyroid. If it's a male, it's probably going after the frontal lobe. So a lot of these neurodegenerative diseases are actually having to do with inflammatory setups with antibody markers that are from food or substances in our environment. So inflammation, again, is a key vascular function in the healing process. It's initiated by any stimulus resulting in cell damage. This includes physical and chemical irritants, pathogens, and trauma. When we injure any tissue, we set up an inflammatory cascade. While crucial to healing, inflammation can contribute to the onset of disease. And there are all these great charts of, you know, the inflammatory cascade contributing to obviously, diabetes, chronic inflammatory states like IBD, COPD, rheumatoid arthritis, bone changes, cancer, metabolic diseases like fatty liver, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all the dementias, and obviously cardiovascular disease, which is inherently inflammatory. When we're looking at cardiovascular disease, we come in so late in the game and try to deal with the body's reaction to the inflammation rather than the primary inflammation. Cholesterol, platelets, and the things that cause arteriosclerosis are manifestations of the body's healing process. It's the bandaid. So we have all these things set up to not go after the bandaid and not go after the root cause. And that kind of gets us to a key distinction here. We always want to go after the underlying cause. When we first did this work about 25 years ago, we didn't have words for it. You know, we were saying there are one or two or three dimensions to what's actually going on and the truth is, in the third dimension. Now it's called root cause medicine. That's good and it's bad because now every health practitioner that's taken a weekend course in functional medicine thinks that they're a root-caused doctor and they're just doing the exact same stuff they always did. And root caused medicine and the subspecialties, it means that they're going to have to consider many, many more factors and lifestyle considerations on a real level, not just write a prescription or not just do a surgery. So when we look at the anti-inflammatory diseases of our time, we understand that we can get inflammatory markers. But then what we now need to do is to say that this is the primary condition that's actually causing the disease. This begins to get us into models that really go a little bit beyond what we're saying is normal medicine. So the nutritional chemical support is one level of intervention. Structural support is another intervention. Just a word on that. If every problem probably has aspects of--or the big divisions, our physical, biochemical, neural, and energetic. The physical interventions in this country are really inadequate. The amount of time that we actually go to somebody that's good at fixing physical things, it's usually reserved athletes or very, very, you know, physical people. Chiropractors really own that world. Physical therapists are getting into that world. You know, there's an intervention there. Again, if it's a knee problem, you should probably address it at the joint and the physical level. You shouldn't address it at the drug level. Nutritional, chemical support, again, more and more and more there's kind of a broad level of sophistication that's going out there. But I would say that that's everyone's responsibility, you know, in terms of actives of daily living and going in there. When we're talking about electromagnetic support, you know, there are people who view traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture more like energetic. But energetic support is not nonsense. We used to sort of think, you know, we couldn't define it. So it really depended on the practitioner. To some degree, it is an art and a science, but those worlds are proving to have major contributions in the non-drug, non-surgery interventions that are really working. And then lastly, I would say we all have to look at mental and emotional support. Again, that cortisol to pregnant alone, to sex hormones, to, you know, basically how your life is run cascade is important for everyone. And what happens, and it looks like a factor of aging, but it's not. It's a factor of running out of reserves where we're basically taking those chemical systems, depleting them, and then creating a person that's got mental, emotional, and cognitive problems. So going into kind of a deeper dive on the immune side, we don't want too much immunity. So increased immune response is going to change and make us susceptible to autoimmune diseases. And again, there's not very good attention being paid to these things. Thyroid disease is traditionally understated because the functional ranges for thyroid are not respected. So in conventional medicine, you know, we can have an acceptable range for thyroid-stimulating hormone anywhere between .5 and five and a half. When we look at the functional repercussions of that, we see that healthy people are really just in the two to three-level. So one of the things that are happening is there is not good updating of conventional ranges in blood chemistry to what the new science is saying. And, you know, this is something that hasn't improved in the last 20 years. When we were first doing this work where we were establishing the scientific ranges for healthy people, it was amazing because what the lab reports are the average of the people that went to that lab. By definition, this is a super skewed sample. So the people who went to that lab are generally sick. We don't do annual physicals on people anymore. So basically, people who get lab work are going to be distorted toward, you know, the sicker ends of the spectrum. So one of the things that we really need to do and should have been done already is that we need to use the functional ranges for lab tests. So another area where that's pretty egregious is when we're testing antibodies, you know, we have labs going, you know, out of the account of antibodies for, you know, thyroid peroxidase antibodies or SH antibodies. And the lab is saying, you know, anything less than 20 is okay. And if you sort of pull a common sense, double-check on that, you need to go, how many of your own cells did you want attacking your brain? And it doesn't take me very long to say that number should be zero, but as long as it's under 20 and in some cases 40, then it's okay with the lab test. The trouble is that most practitioners just read the lab test the way it was written, don't actually understand, and need to do one, what are the functional levels? And then two, what are the correlations between things. If we look at other things like that, staying on lab testing for a second, if we look at glucose levels, so glucose, you know, your blood sugar, you know, it should be around 95, something like that. It's looking like that. So a more sophisticated test is the Hemoglobin A1C, which is really the sugar coating on the red blood cells that happens over, you know, about 12 weeks. And it gives you a more-- a longer-term kind of an answer. And then next is triglycerides. Well, a lot of men actually are converting their blood sugar to blood fat, which is the triglyceride. So their triglycerides, which should be about 100, are really 200, but their blood sugar, their blood glucose is normal because the body kind of in its wisdom, shifted the blood fat over to this-- or I'm saying, the blood sugar over to a blood fat. If you just look at glucose, you'll get the wrong answer on that system. So all of these things are systems that have to be looked at. And, you know, I'm going to say the word complexity, but it's not that complex. You know, that's how that system works. And yet that's regularly missed. So that too much immune reaction is classified into a subclassification of a word that I just cannot stand. And that is idiopathic. So idiopathic means we don't know what it is. And parenthetically, it also means we're not going to do anything about it. So especially in the world of Neuroendocrinology, half those arthritis, a lot of the organ related diseases are considered idiopathic and we just blithely say we don't know where they come from and we're going to deal with the symptoms. I suggest, and functional medicine has spent the last 30 years actively intervening in those areas and really being very, very effective. So it's really time for conventional medicine just to pick up on the stuff that the other groups know how to do better. When we're looking at an immune function in general, there are some things that have been picked up on. So if we're looking at vitamin D. So vitamin D3. And vitamin D is an interesting vitamin because, you know, what are vitamins? Vitamins are things that cause chemical reactions to happen in a little better way. But vitamin D is almost a hormone. So vitamin D, we understand helps with bones. You know, they stuck it in milk. You saw that when you were a kid but it also can balance out the immune system. So there are two parts, the cell-mediated immunity and then the humoral immunity. So basically, the natural immunity of this white blood cells and then the antibodies is the other part and that's called the Th1, Th2 immune response. Vitamin D basically, balances out those two sides of immunity and you want them to be balanced so you don't want your alert system to be better than your, you know, clean up the pathogen system. You want them to both work in concert, you want them to both be healthy and you want the differentiation to really be clear. It's an interesting thing because the research shows that stem cells actually significantly increase the Th1, Th2 autoimmune regulatory system and it's another one of the benefits that we see, you know when we're working in and doing really big interventions on very, very sick people that stem cells can provide kind of a background of, you know, cellular capability and regeneration. So the next time we're going to go and we're going to do a deeper dive into some specific conditions and really talk about how to remedy chronic diseases that you may have, your neighbor may have, or a friend of yours may have.

Outro
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