Addressing Autoimmune Disease
Autoimmune disease affects 23.5 million Americans, causing poor health in many. In this episode, Bob Gilpatrick and Rollie Culp discuss the what's and whys of autoimmune disorders and identify some of the most prevalent autoimmune diseases.
They explain what happens to the body when the immune system makes mistakes and share some helpful techniques that can help realign your immune system and alleviate the symptoms of autoimmune disease. It's time to sit back, relax and get ready to live forever young.
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Addressing Autoimmune Disease
Why And When They Occur
Did you know that there are over 80 different autoimmune disorders that affect up to 23.5 million Americans? In this episode, Bob and Rollie discuss the what and whys of autoimmune disorders and identify some of the most prevalent autoimmune diseases.
They explain what happens to the body when the immune system makes mistakes share some helpful techniques that can help realign your immune system and alleviate the symptoms of autoimmune disease. Sit back, relax and get ready to live forever young.
I'm here with Rollie. Welcome. How are you? I'm doing good. I'm back in the saddle. I wasn't feeling good for a couple of days but I'm feeling good now and that's all that matters. Rollie, we are going to talk about autoimmune diseases. It's something that affects a lot of people. You don't realize it.
Many millions of people around the world and there are over 80 different types of autoimmune diseases. An autoimmune disease is when your immune system, which normally is supposed to be on your side and watching for things to attack that are invading, instead mistakenly identifies a part of your body as a pathogen or an allergen and begins attacking it.
In the case of people that get multiple sclerosis, it's a disorder of the nervous system where your immune system starts attacking the myelin sheath that's covering your nerves or like in the case of somebody that has arthritis. You have seen people with their knuckles swollen and maybe their hands are crippled. It can become very severe. My own sister has almost every joint in her body replaced with metal joints for that reason.
How does that work when she goes through metal detectors? She probably has a card, don't they? She does and it did affect her career. She's a physician. With her hands not working as well as they could, she ended up later in her career becoming more of an administrative doctor's supervisor, not so much working with her hands.
I had a piano teacher. Probably his arthritis was from years of banging on the piano but either way, it looks crazy. His fingers would zigzag. It looked literally like his fingers were Zs. That was probably natural from banging on the piano for years but I have seen people that have had autoimmune arthritis.
It's when your immune system starts attacking the joints. You also have issues that are related to your thyroid. You can have an issue where it results in, either low thyroid function or very high thyroid function. Hashimoto’s disease is when it affects and gives you low thyroid and Graves’ disease when you end up with a very high thyroid.
Also, Type 1 diabetes can be an autoimmune disease where the cells in your pancreas that are producing insulin get mistaken for a pathogen and your immune system will destroy them. You need to take insulin shots.
My dad has Type 1 diabetes. I believe it's because of the autoimmune disorder. It started later on in life. I would think that would be part of that group. You can imagine why this is an issue, why we want to discuss it and offer some things to do in a little bit here because it can be very debilitating or in the case of certain diseases, it can be fatal. People do die at a very young age, quite often. If they have multiple sclerosis and certainly, you wouldn't survive for long at all with Type 1 diabetes without constant treatment.
People with Type 1 diabetes tend to not live as long as people that don't have it. They have a lot more inflammation and get problems with their eyes, periphery and kidneys. This is why it's so important to know what it is and also what it is that we can do about it.
There are a lot of causes that you can look at that people think might be causing these autoimmune disorders. Some of them are what we have had a couple of episodes before we had an episode called What's What With Leaky Gut. One of the causes was leaky gut. We talk about it a lot as the abundance of toxins that are in our environment.
On top of that, you always have inflammation. Inflammation is one of the big things we talk about and the presence of multiple things, excluding all the toxins and inflammation, is the main cause of this. There's some other stuff like environmental things.
Also, heavy metals that you are exposed to and foods. We talked in the last episode about processed foods and how they can create inflammation. In this particular case, also lectins, which are a cause of leaky gut. Lectins are in the seeds, skin of tomatoes, and in certain nuts like cashews and peanuts.
I talked to a lot of people and they say they have some stomach issues. I asked them sometimes what they eat and they tell me, “I love eating peanuts and things like that. A lot of the time I like to eat raw vegetables like cucumber, tomato and things that have seeds in them all the time.” They don't realize that that can be the cause of a lot of those gut issues because of the lectins themselves. They attack that intestinal wall.
Another well-known one is vitamin D deficiency. Exposure to molds is a big cause of this, viruses, and also issues related to hormone imbalances. If you are under a lot of stress and secreting a lot of cortisol, you are going to be low in DHEA. It is needed for the proper functioning of your thymus, which is one of the ways your immune system gets coated. That's where the immune cells will mature. If your thymus isn't functioning properly, whether it's from lack of DHEA or stress, then that's going to cause those mistakes to be made.
It even goes as far as to affect the hormonal balance of a person. When you think about all the things that you have going on in your body, it only takes one of these things to get messed up and throw it off. That’s what's happening. It's a mistaken attack by the body's immune system. You’ve got to figure out what it is, where that happened, where the mistake occurred and try to fix it. That leads us to what we can do to combat these things.
One of the main things to do is take care of your gut, microbiome and the health of your intestinal system. We did an episode called Breaking Down Digestion where we talked a lot about the importance of proper bacteria and flora. 
Autoimmune Disease: People with type 1 diabetes tend to not live as long as people that don't have it. They have a lot more inflammation and they get problems with their eyes, their periphery and problems with their kidneys.
It starts in your mouth. People might not think of this but if you have the wrong balance of bacteria in your mouth, it leads to all kinds of problems with the whole rest of your body. You want to start by making sure you don't have an overgrowth of bad bacteria in your mouth.
For the rest of your alimentary canal, you want to make sure you have enough good bacteria so that it can suppress the bad bacteria and also the good bacteria interfaces with stimulants that come into your body, polyphenols, vitamins and will create a genetic expression from those bacteria, which in turn creates metabolites and vitamins that act on the genetic expression of the human genome.
This all relates to your immune system, whether or not it's going to be balanced and not mistakenly attack something that you don't want it to attack.
There's a key to lots of things in the balance in there. Some of the things that you can do daily are some of the other things like tapping. They have tapping that you can do for the immune system. We have talked about EFT. If you haven't read that, we have an episode on how to do the tapping. Check that out.
As you learned to do tapping right, there's a playlist that has tapping videos and one of them is tapping for the immune system and part of it is mitigating autoimmune issues.
That's why we are here. We are talking about other ways to handle it, too. I have talked to some people and they asked me, “What's the type of nutrition that I should focus on if this is something that I'm worried about or I'm dealing with?”
It's important to remember that the balance of hormones is of extreme importance in the health of your thymus. You want to make sure that you have enough substrates to be able to make your different hormones. For example, in the thyroid, you have a thyroid-stimulating hormone that initiates a cascade that converts to T4 and T3. One of those conversions requires eight different nutrients and in the second conversion, twelve different nutrients.
These are vitamins, minerals and Amino acids. You want to make sure that you have a comprehensive nutrition product that contains all of those compounds. When you look at a label of a nutrition bottle and say, “We have a multivitamin multimineral,” you want to know many things yourself like what are the compounds that are needed for the conversion ultimately to T3? You want to be able to see if it's in that product. It would better be in there if I'm going to try to fix it.
You have to have enough energy to make all of your cells function properly, including the cells in your thyroid and thymus. For those cells to be able to produce energy, you need different substrates that are part of the Krebs cycle where you are producing your energy. You want to know that, too. You want to be able to look at a product like Boomer Boost. You want to be able to see, “This product has 70 nutrients in it. It's got everything we need for the thyroid and the Krebs cycle.”
This is how the best nutrition products in the world are formulated. Not just we are going to throw a bunch of stuff in there. It's based on the metabolic pathways and the needs that the body has for producing the various proteins and hormones that make us into fully functioning humans. That comprehensive nutrition is important but also with an emphasis on Glutamine, Glutathione and Omega-3 fatty acids in the case of autoimmune disease are very important. You can take extra of those if you are having an issue.
A lot of the time, there's foundational nutrition. That's what we all need to function properly and make sure we are at our optimal health level but if you have a specific health need or a health goal, you sometimes have to personalize what you are doing.
That would be the addition of something like extra Omega-3s, things like extra Glutamine or Glutathione because of their specific ability to help with these types of issues. We can't forget D3. For some reason, they forget it. They don't even test for it anymore. You have to make sure you ask the doctor, even though it's probably the best marker of overall optimal health. That's okay. We are going to figure that out.
What we are here to do is share the information. Apart from that, inflammation is getting that down. Having high antioxidants, foods with good antioxidants, supplements with high antioxidants. We talked about superoxide dismutase, the master antioxidant, all the time. We have it in a stabilized form in our barley product that we have, the Heirloom and Gladiator Barley.
That's important because the root of many chronic diseases, including one of the causes of autoimmune is inflammation. By increasing the number of antioxidants, whether it be from food or supplement, you are only going to help yourself to beat that burn and slow your rate of aging so you can age gracefully.
We did a whole episode on antioxidants and free radicals. It was one of our first five. I believe it's something like Inflammation And Your Health. The good thing that people can know is that a lot of what we are talking about, whether it's reducing your inflammation, having comprehensive nutrition, having nutrition that addresses the metabolic pathways of energy and thyroid hormone creation, that if people use a total health system from Boomers Forever Young, each of those issues is addressed in that total health system.
That's a good thing to know. The other thing, Rollie, I want to remember to say is we did another whole episode on inner balance. The inner balance is referring to an overall strategy of staying balanced but also to a specific device called inner balance, which clips on your ear and helps you to modulate the communication in your brain with your heart muscle and all that.
People can get one of those from the HeartMath Institute but that will help to keep your cortisol low, which will keep your inflammation low. It will also be a friend to your thymus because your thymus is helping to encode the immune cells. It needs support from hormones and nutrition. If you are under stress, you are going to have too much of one hormone and not enough of another.
That's enough to make your thymus upset and malfunction. The other thing about the thymus is it's very susceptible to trauma, whether it is a divorce, a death in the family, illness, accident, things like that. Your thymus makes mistakes after a trauma. It's almost like it's a sensitive little child that has a set of instructions but if it's traumatized, it will not function properly.
Lastly, there's a technique of therapy that was designed for helping your thymus after trauma if you have an autoimmune disease. It's called craniosacral therapy for the immune system. Craniosacral therapy was created many years ago by Dr. Upledger. It's good for a lot of different things, for people that have had trauma or a stroke, especially babies, when they are first born, depending on how they came out of the birth canal.
These therapists can work with the skull bones and with your cerebral spinal fluid. The advanced therapist study how to work with the immune system. On Upledger’s website, Upledger.com, there’s a phone number there. You can call their phone number and say, “Who do you have in my area who has studied craniosacral therapy for the immune system?”
Quite often, that type of therapy can help to reset your thymus from the trauma and get it going back to the way that it was before like a chiropractic adjustment. If your back gets thrown out, the chiropractor can help realign your spine. A craniosacral therapist that's trained on how to work with the immune system can reset your thymus, get it back online, and performing the way it was prior to the trauma.
You don't hear a lot about craniosacral therapy. The actual word itself probably hasn't been heard a lot but I can tell you, from working with people here at Boomers, this is real. A lot of the time people are affected by it in different ways that they don't realize. They can't sleep, had a hard time eating or doing some other necessary function to perform at an optimal level. They have tried every supplement, this and that but we have more than one occasion that has suggested people seek out this type of therapy.
Autoimmune Disease: If you have a specific health need or a health goal, you sometimes have to personalize what you're doing. That would be the addition of something like an extra omega-3s, things like extra glutamine or glutathione.
We have gotten more than one call back that says, “That is what I needed to reset that in this specific autoimmune disorder.” I mentioned sleeping but there are lots of people who once have trauma like a car accident, a death in the family, the separation of the family in some way or anything that would make someone curl up and cry for days, the thymus doesn't forget that unless you reset it.
Craniosacral therapy is one of the ways that I have seen in real life that has been able to help. Check it out at Upledger.com. Rollie, that's about it for this episode. It was a lot of information in a short time. Free to reread it. That's one of the best things.
Thank you, everybody, for reading this episode.
Rollie, thanks for joining us.
We will see everybody in the next episode.
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