There’s More than One Way to Crack a Nut… and to Think About Health

 I felt like a deer in headlights. 

I had felt totally fine walking into this appointment, and now I was walking out - a sick person. I had a disease; an autoimmune disease that was eating my body from the inside out.

Cool.

In the days and weeks that followed, I began to very much feel as sick as I was. I wasn't just pushing away the symptoms anymore; I was seeing them for what they really were. My body collapsed into the disease process when I removed the scaffolding of 'work harder - push farther - keep going''.

Having earned a BS in Biology and spent my entire career in clinical rehabilitation settings, I was very familiar with autoimmunity from the Western medicine, or allopathic, lens.

In the allopathic lens, autoimmunity is understood as being when the immune system goes haywire and the body’s natural defenses start attacking its own tissues, mistaking them for foreign invaders. No definitive cause is known, and treatment is simple — medication to stop symptoms and try and prevent damage to your tissues. Since the idea is that there is no fixing the immune system, you patch it up with bandaids for the rest of your life. 

But we’ve all seen the cartoons, and this was my concern — a leak is sprung, you patch the leak. Pressure builds and a new leak appears — you patch that one. Soon, you have countless patches and the whole thing is about to blow. It is commonly accepted in the allopathic view that one autoimmune disorder often leads to another, and sometimes another, and another, and another…

I had decided to believe that this disease was a gift, and if it was a gift, it I had to believe it would be something beneficial to my life. There had to be another way to look at this.

Armed with this outlook, I spent countless hours researching, and discovered that indeed, there are other ways to look at what is happening in autoimmunity, and even in overall health as well. I am sure there are even more viewpoints than these; here is what I discovered of the most prevalent ones:

Functional medicine — Functional medicine considers that there are three factors that must all be present for the body to respond with an autoimmune reaction: a genetic predisposition, a leaky gut, and a trigger. This framework sees the body as an interconnected whole, and believes that there is a root cause to autoimmunity that can manifest in any of the body systems, resulting in the myriad types of autoimmunity diagnoses.

Functional medicine addresses autoimmunity by working on the gut health to reduce leaky gut and by using medical tests to determine your specific trigger. Some of the main systems that they look at are gut sensitivity and function, chronic infections, nutritional imbalances or deficiencies, environmental triggers including pesticide or heavy metal toxicity, hormonal levels, or neurotransmitter levels.

(Side note — one theory about unexplained chronic symptoms is that this could be autoimmunity for which there is no current medical test. The number of body cells that autoimmunity can affect is enormous (all of them!), and the number of tissues there are tests for? A piddly percentage.

Side side note - currently, a genetic predisposition is seen as a requirement for developing autoimmunity symptoms, making many people assume they are safe, including me at one point. My body had always shown great strength and adaptability, and I felt sure was too strong to be susceptible to chronic illness, especially in my 30's. But according to all the research, autoimmunity is on an exponential rise. The genetic predisposition is multifaceted and complex, and I have come to believe that we are all along a continuum of being predisposed. As we continue to be surrounded by environmental chemicals, food that is not adding health and vitality to our bodies, chronic stress and increasing bombardment on our mental load, etc....... I believe more of us will become 'genetically predisposed'. There is even research that is showing that our susceptibility to many medical conditions, especially chronic inflammatory ones, may be a factor of epigentic changes that come from environmental pollutants our grandparents were exposed to, and that the genome is much less important a factor in disease progression than the epigenome. DDT in the 60's, anyone?)

Functional medicine is ultimately what I chose for the physical aspect of my autoimmunity. I liked the fusion of modern medical practice (testing and ways of understanding body systems that I was familiar with), and it found my trigger — a nasty mold infection raging in my gut. As it turned out, this was not the end of the story for me, but it was a huge piece of the puzzle.

Naturopathic Medicine — Surprisingly, naturopathic treatment did not come up in my personal search for answers. I did have consults with a few naturopathic doctors, but nothing stuck. Naturopathic treatment is often the first thing most people ask me when we discuss this topic, and I have nothing more to offer than a big, dumb stare. Many people have found incredible success with naturopathic treatment, and according to Dr. Google, it is focused on supporting the body’s innate healing ability and also addressing the root cause, though I am not sure if they see the root cause in the same light as functional medicine. Treatment from a naturopathic perspective may include things like nutritional interventions, herbal medicine, lifestyle changes, reducing stress, and similar. All of these things turned out to be crucial in my own whole-body healing, so looking back, my lack of research into naturopathic medicine was obviously a miss, but goes to show that there is more than one way to crack a nut - or to think about your health.

Traditional Healing Systems: Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Herbalism — Each of these systems is a complex healing modality in its own right and it does not do any of them justice to be grouped all together. However, the basic premise of each is similar — that autoimmunity is an indication of a loss of balance in some part of the system, and treatment is aimed to increase energy, vitality, and balance to the entire system. Each has unique methods and tools to restore this balance, and many people have found significant improvement in health in each of these individual systems.

Energy Medicine — Often viewed as esoteric, energy medicine is an eclectic collection of theories and modalities. In general, autoimmunity is seen through this lens as a disruption in energy flow that is ultimately caused by a disconnection from one’s spiritual essence. Treatment varies significantly, depending on the practitioner and specific healing field, but can include meditation and visualization, mindfulness, reiki, acupuncture, pranic healing, biofield work, energy medicine routines, and more. Some have found complete physical healing by addressing only the energetic body through these types of practices.

For me personally, in the end, I ended up needing a combination of all of these healing practices. Functional medicine was crucial for me in finding the physical stability I needed, but my body was still susceptible to illness until I addressed the residual effects of the disease. My main healing journey started once my autoimmunity was healed in my body — and to help others in this way, 5 Petals Wholeness was born.