Autoimmune
AUTOIMMUNE
Your immune system is attacking you. Something taught it to.
A diagnosis, a prescription to quiet the immune system, and no explanation for why it started. Autoimmune conditions do not appear out of nowhere. A leaky gut barrier, a hidden infection, or a toxic exposure can teach the immune system to mistake your own tissue for a threat. Find that trigger and the picture changes.
Start here
Start with how autoimmunity actually develops: an immune system that loses the ability to tell self from threat, usually after a trigger no one checked for. This is the root-cause view of a diagnosis most people are simply told to manage.
Autoimmune & Autoinflammatory Disease
Chronic health issues (autoimmune & autoinflammatory) are now the most common medical problems we deal with. How...
What autoimmunity actually is
Your immune system is built to tell self from non-self and to attack only what is dangerous. In autoimmunity that discernment breaks down and it begins attacking your own tissue: the thyroid in Hashimoto’s, the joints in rheumatoid arthritis, the gut lining in celiac. The label names the target.
It does not explain the cause.
Functional medicine looks upstream for what taught the immune system to misfire. Common triggers include a damaged gut barrier that lets particles into the bloodstream, molecular mimicry where a toxin or infection creates a protein that resembles your own tissue, and chronic exposures that keep the immune system switched on. Remove the trigger and calm the system, and many people see far more than symptom control.
Symptoms patients bring us
- Fatigue
- Joint pain or swelling
- Brain fog
- Rashes or skin changes
- Hair loss
- Digestive issues
- Weight or temperature changes
- Flares that come and go
1 in 12
people has an autoimmune disease and 1 in 5 has a positive autoantibody. Most are told to manage the diagnosis rather than to look for what set it off.
Everything else on autoimmune
Browse our library of articles on autoimmune conditions and everything connected to them.
Want to know how we look for the trigger?
The Foundations of Functional Medicine
The Foundations of Functional Medicine is a free micro course on the root-cause approach: the gut barrier, the chronic infections, the exposures, and the questions standard care skips.
