The Immune System Recovery Plan: A Doctor's 4-Step Plan To: Achieve Optimal Health and Feel Your Best, Strengthen Your Immune System, Treat Autoimmune Disease, and See Immediate Results - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Susan Blum, MD, MPH, is the founder of the Blum Center for Health in Rye Brook, New York, an advisor to the Institute for Functional Medicine, and serves on the Medical Advisory Board for The Dr. Oz Show. An assistant clinical professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, she has been treating and preventing chronic disease for more than a decade. She lives in Armonk, New York, with her husband and three sons.

Michele Bender is an award-winning freelance writer who has coauthored bestselling books such as Believe Me with Yolanda Hadid, The Immune System Recovery Plan with Dr. Susan Blum and Curly Girl: The Handbook. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, Real Simple, and Family Circle, among other national publications.
 

Mark Hyman, MD, is the editor in chief of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the most prestigious journal in the field of integrative medicine. After ten years as co-medical director at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires, he is now in private practice in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Ultraprevention. His websites are DrHyman.com and Ultrametabolism.com.

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The Immune System Recovery Plan

CHAPTER 1

Autoimmune Disease Basics

A HEALTHY IMMUNE SYSTEM

Your immune system includes a group of cells in your body that protect you against infections and illness. This is why the immune system is often referred to as an “army” of cells. Every day when you’re exposed to things that could cause infection and illness—such as viruses, bacteria, mold, parasites, and foreign proteins in food—your immune system takes action. To do so, it calls upon many different kinds of soldiers, but to understand autoimmune disease, we will focus on one battalion in particular, called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that is responsible for protecting you from harmful foreigners like infections. However, if they aren’t working right, lymphocytes are the cells that cause autoimmune diseases. There are two kinds of “soldiers” that make up the lymphocyte battalion. The first is killer T cells, which directly attack anything they don’t recognize and which they perceive as an invader. I think of this direct attack as cell-to-cell combat. The other kind of soldier is called a B cell. These cells produce antibodies, which are molecules that grab on to anything that your immune system thinks is foreign and dangerous. After these molecules get hold of the foreigner, your immune system initiates a bigger response that causes an inflammatory reaction. When this happens, new compounds are released that attack the foreigner in order to kill it and clear it out of your body. You can think of antibodies as bullets released from the B cells to kill the invader. Both kinds of soldiers of the immune system, antibody-producing B cells and killer T cells, start a process that results in inflammation throughout the body. Though the process may begin somewhat differently, the end result you feel is the same for the most part. The first definition of a competent and healthy immune system is one in which the killer T cells and the antibody-producing B cells are in balance so that the immune response is balanced, too.

Depending on the invader, sometimes you actually feel something is happening when your immune system takes action and sometimes you don’t. Examples of these foreign invaders include bacteria and viruses. If you get a sinus or ear infection, which is caused by bacteria, you may experience your immune system taking action by having a stuffed nose and pain in your ear or sinus area. If you get the flu, which is from a virus, you might have a high fever. These symptoms are the result of your immune system trying to fight the bacteria or virus. You might have a strong reaction and the inflammation might be felt in your muscles or in your joints, like arthritis. All of these are signs that the immune system is working to fend off the infection. If your immune system is strong, this war within you should stop after a week or two at the most. Once its job is done, the immune system will relax and go back to its normal state of watching and waiting for the next offender, and the inflammation goes away. In someone with a healthy immune system, this is a good, normal process, and we need these killer T cells and antibodies to keep us healthy.

There is more than one type of T cell. The killer T and B cells are told what to do by the T helpers and the T regulators, which either turn on or turn off the immune response. The different types of T cells need to be in balance for the immune system to turn off properly after it is activated and the job is done. This balance is the second definition of a healthy immune system.

While your immune system needs to be vigilant in order to guard against infections and toxins, it also has to be very careful not to hurt your own tissues by mistaking your own cells for the invader. During their earliest development, your immune cells have to learn the difference between something that is a natural part of your body, or “self,” and a foreign substance, or “not self.” Being able to make this distinction is called tolerance. The third definition of a healthy immune system is one that attacks only invaders and not itself.

Three things that define a healthy immune system:

1. Balance between killer T cells and antibody-producing B cells

2. Balance between T helpers and T regulators to turn on and off the immune system

3. The immune system’s ability to differentiate foreign invaders (such as viruses or bacteria) from natural parts of your body (such as cells and tissues)

AN IMMUNE SYSTEM GONE AWRY

An autoimmune problem develops when the immune system fails at all three of these definitions of health. The body begins to make too many killer T cells or too many antibodies (this varies depending on the autoimmune disease and will be discussed in depth later) and then fails to turn off, so the immune reaction doesn’t stop. (These first two problems can also be seen in people with asthma and allergies, because they have an overactive immune response to substances called allergens. Symptoms such as wheezing and sniffling, and even life-threatening tongue swelling and throat tightness, are caused by the immune response, not the allergen itself.) But most important for those of you with autoimmune diseases, the immune cells are attacking your body’s own tissues when they should only be attacking outside invaders. Put all three problems together and the result is inflammation and damage to your cells and organs.

WHAT ARE AUTOIMMUNE DISEASES?

“Autoimmune” represents a category of at least one hundred diseases, not one specific illness. This can be confusing and is probably why many people aren’t familiar with autoimmune diseases or are unsure which illnesses fall into this category. Furthermore, the names of these conditions, which include Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren’s syndrome, celiac disease, and multiple sclerosis, among others, don’t have the word “autoimmune” in them. This is unlike diseases such as the various forms of cancer, where their names contain the word “cancer” and the area where the malignant tumor(s) are found. For example, breast cancer is a tumor in the breast, colon cancer a tumor in the colon, and skin cancer a tumor on the skin. Without the word “autoimmune” as part of their names, autoimmune conditions sound like they are distinctly different diseases. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

What can also be confusing is that the names of autoimmune conditions don’t tell you where the disease is located in the body. Some autoimmune conditions are systemic, meaning that the attack spreads throughout the body to all tissues, as in lupus. Others are organ specific, where the attack occurs in a specific area or organ, like Hashimoto’s, which occurs in the thyroid. In either case, the name isn’t a helpful indicator of where the problem actually exists. For example, Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease are in the thyroid, multiple sclerosis is in the brain and spinal cord, vitiligo is in the skin, and pernicious anemia is in the blood cells. Although the affected areas are different, we now know that the underlying problems in all of these diseases are very similar. In fact, the focus of recent research has switched from looking at the specific organ affected by the disease to determining the underlying mechanisms for how these diseases begin. This idea—that all of these conditions have similar...