Why would you choose a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? So I think it's a good question. I had a couple of new autoimmune patients in last week. One of them was very aware of functional medicine, but didn't know that I was around so close. And so once someone clued her in, came to the office, we had a great visit. The other patient really didn't know much about functional medicine at all, but a family member had said, please go talk to Dr. Krupka. So we did. So interesting between the two. One, very aware, one unaware. So what is a functional medicine approach to autoimmunity? Well, functional medicine is all about root causes and a lot of other doctors, nurses, people out there, they just say that anything outside of the standard medical approach is just bs. And it's all hype and snake oil and don't listen to it.

(00:56)
But hear me out, you didn't get your autoimmune disorder randomly. I know sometimes it feels like you did or your doctor told you it's just genetics. It was bound to happen. You were dealt a bad hand. Well, there is no way that the genetics of the human population in the United States has changed this dramatically. In the amount of time I've been practicing, I've been practicing for 25 years. The human genome doesn't change that quickly. If there are going to be major changes to the human genome, it happens over centuries and multiple, multiple generations. It doesn't happen in 20 years. So something else has happened and our environment has changed. Now, our environment includes what we eat, how we behave, what we breathe, and what we drink and what we're exposed to with EMFs and artificial lights and all of that. That's all our environment. And so what tends to happen is you have some genetics that might put you at increased risk compared to some other people, but your environment is what determines whether or not you're going to express those genes.

(02:09)
So genes may be involved or not, but your environment is by definition almost required to be involved in causing your autoimmunity or triggering your autoimmunity, setting it off, initiating that response, however you want to say it. So understanding that having someone like a rheumatologist who specializes in autoimmunity, their job is basically to take your immune system out of the fight in a way that disrupts the least about the other jobs your immune system has to do. Right? If you kept a pistol in the house so that if someone broke in, you could defend yourself, okay?

(03:00)
If we made you disassemble it into six different pieces and put it in six different safes with different combinations, and the ammunition had to be stored in the garage in a metal can, that you had to use a ladder to get to, that would be exceptionally safe for the children in your house. They would never be able to put all of that together and cause any kind of trouble. Even if they got to one piece of it, they're not going to get to all the rest. But it would render it absolutely useless for its intended purpose, which would be defending you if someone were to break into your house. So the goal of a rheumatologist would be to find a way to render that gun safe enough that nothing is going to happen except warding off an intruder. It just doesn't work that way. There's always a payoff.

(03:49)
So the more difficult it is for your body to make a mistake with that gun, the more difficult it is for your body to do the intended action with that gun, right? So it becomes very difficult in that sense from a functional medicine point of view. We are not trying to take the immune system offline at all. We want it to be fully able to do its job, but we want to stop triggering it to accidentally go after our own tissues. For example, there's something called molecular mimicry, which can happen in the intestines. I'm not going to go too deeply into it. We'll do a different video on that. But certain proteins can get through the intestinal lining into your bloodstream. Your body mounts an immune response against those and develops antibodies. Those antibodies are made to go after a particular sequence of amino acids that came in the undigested chunk from the food.

(04:46)
If that same sequence of amino acids also natively exists somewhere in you, you've inadvertently made antibodies that can also fit and destroy some of your own tissues. That's called molecular mimicry. You're reacting to something coming in through the digestive tract that isn't supposed to be there, but when you make a key to fit that lock, it also fits another lock somewhere in you. And now you have an autoimmune disorder, right? A little oversimplified, but you get my point. We aren't looking to take your immune system offline. We're looking to stop triggering those antibodies to be produced. Stop showing it the stuff that's leaking in from the digestive tract. It will stop making those antibodies and therefore lose its ability to attack your own tissue. Now, are you cured? No. Show it the protein again. You'll remake the antibodies and you're back to having another flareup, but you're in remission.

(05:48)
You're not actively attacking yourself. Now, that's one of the ways that we aim to diffuse the situation, to stop triggering it. So the goal of functional medicine would be to find your root cause, avoid that root cause, kind of give you a map to the minefield that you're trying to walk through, so to speak, right? Find the root cause, help you avoid the root cause, and therefore you're not triggering your immune system to go after you. And the hope would be you can make everything quiet but still have a fully functional immune system. And that's just because we take the time to try to dig through and uncover the root causes. Now, are you guaranteed to only have one root cause? No. You can have multiple root causes. So it's, people say in natural medicine, it's like peeling back layers of an onion. You go layer by layer.

(06:45)
Each time you find a root cause you figure out how to not present that root cause anymore to get that to calm down. If the autoimmunity gets better, but it's not gone, you keep looking for another root cause. And there's a whole list of things that can be root causes. I go through that in another set of videos. I have an entire course that you can take on autoimmunity and a functional medicine approach to it. It's called the functional, the functional autoimmune fix. But you can find that lots of videos for that out there. There are links to it on my website, call the office, we'll give you the information. But that being said, there are ways as a functional medicine practitioner that we can help you find those root causes. Once we understand what those are, we can help you navigate around those and avoid those.

(07:34)
And then over time, your immune system calms down because it's not constantly having to react to it. Look at gluten, for example, and I know the gluten thing is complicated because it's gluten plus the glyphosate, plus the folic acid that's sprayed on. I get it. I'm just going to call it gluten for right now. Okay, for simplicity, let's say you keep exposing yourself to gluten. It keeps stimulating your immune system, and along with attacking the gluten, it's attacking your thyroid or it's attacking your joint tissue, like lupus or something. Anyway, let's say that's happening. If we can stop showing it the gluten complex, right? Then over five or six months, because gluten takes a while longer than a lot of other things, but over five or six months, your body's like, look, I haven't seen that in so long. I'm going to go ahead and calm down my production of those antibodies and repurpose this energy somewhere else, right?

(08:29)
To something else I'm being exposed to. But I'm only going to have one or two little antibodies floating around to let me know if it shows up again, but I'm not going to have this major response. Well, when that happens, you also stop attacking your native tissues. You've gotten yourself in remission because you quit showing your immune system what it was responding to that was allowing it to accidentally go after your own tissues. So why would you go looking for a functional medicine approach or a root cause approach to your autoimmunity? Because you want to actually diffuse the situation. You want to untie the knot. You don't just want to blunt your immune system because there are side effects to that. Alright? There's no free lunch. What you want to do is stop instigating it and your immune system calms down and goes after something else instead, which is what you wanted it to do, right?

(09:30)
So anyway, that's why you would be looking for a functional medicine or a root cause approach to your autoimmunity. Alright? Now, you can go to functional autoimmune fix.com if you want to know more about the course, but otherwise, just understand that that's why you would look for a functional medicine approach. If you have a friend or a family member that has an autoimmune issue, they're struggling with it, they're not happy with the medical approach that's being taken, or they don't like the side effects of the biologics that they're on, send them this video, at least introduce the concept. They can find a functional medicine doctor near them. They can call our office. We do virtual visits one way or the other. Let's get them educated about taking a functional medicine approach, and maybe we'd be able to get 'em to the point where they don't need the pharmaceutical approach. Okay? Anyway, that's that for functional medicine approach to autoimmunity. I hope that helps clear that up. If not, leave me some notes underneath here. Ask me your questions. Call the office, email the office, whatever it takes, we will get you the answers you need. Have a great one. Bye.