Video: Dr. Minkoff on Autoimmune Disease

Hi, Dr. Minkoff, LifeWorks Wellness Center.

On this talk I want to address autoimmune disease.
What is it? How does it work? Why do people get it?

So as a basic introduction autoimmune means
that you’re immune to auto which means self.

So your immune system
is actually attacking you.

Now the whole purpose and
evolution of the immune system

is that it’s supposed to defend
you from foreign things.

So if you have friend versus foe, you’re supposed to be friend.

Foreign viruses, bacteria,
parasites are foreign things

and the immune system is supposed to
attack them, it’s supposed to identify them

and attack them
and what happens then,

where this immune system actually turns on
the person themselves, so it’s attacking them.

And here’s the way that I think it goes and this
seems to to work out in clinical practice.

Just as a sideline, if you
speak with regular practitioners

who practice rheumatology
or immunity type of medicine,

the reasons for autoimmunity
are very unclear

and almost all of the
treatments are directed

at blocking the immune system
so that it doesn’t attack the body.

Now while sometimes this might be
helpful in an extreme circumstance

it doesn’t ever solve the problem

of why did the person get
this in the first place

because usually when this occurs they’re
committed to a life long trial of steroids,

chemotherapy, immune
blocking agents and

and doesn’t really get them back to normal
health, so we’re taking a different look at it.

And our look at, it is why did
this happen in the first place?

And if we trace this back what we usually
find is that the person has an intestine

that is allowing proteins, foreign
proteins to leak into the body.

When the intestine is working properly
all of the proteins that one eats

whether it’s eggs or fish or meat or soybeans or nuts,

those proteins are supposed
to be digested down

into smaller pieces called amino acids and
those amino acids are supposed to be absorbed

and then our body can rebuild itself using those materials.

However sometimes the lining
of the intestine is injured.

It can be injured by food allergies, by
parasites or funguses or bacterial infections

that are in the intestine itself.

And when that occurs it may leak some
of these foreign proteins into the body.

Now as probably many
of you know about

sixty to eighty percent of the immune system is
actually based around the small intestine.

and it’s there to protect the body from
foreign proteins coming in.

So as soon as these foreign proteins start
coming in, that immune system reacts.

It reacts to the foreign proteins
to try to block them, take them out, kill them if they’re live organisms so that they don’t get into the rest of the body. Unfortunately those foreign proteins often
look very much like our own proteins.

If you have chicken soup with bones
and some cartilage and meat,

those proteins look a lot like our muscles
and our cartilage and our joints.

And the immune system may do
a calculation, a miscalculation

which is well if it’s coming in through there maybe it’s found other places,

it will see it in other places
and it will cause attack.

So autoimmune disease
could be, could include

joint pain, muscle pain, if it attacks
brain it could be trouble thinking,

brain fog, can’t sleep, depression,
could be thyroiditis.

So this whole scope of so-called autoimmune diseases

really are based on mostly
the same thing.

And that is foreign proteins getting into
the body and then the body trying to react.

Now sometimes also autoimmune disease can
be from things like heavy metal toxicity,

where people have mercury or arsenic or
cadmium that are, that is in the body

and it gets on the surface of cells
and makes our own cells look foreign.

That’s another way that the immune system
could look at your own tissue and attack it.

But most of it is this, so we have this figured
out and if you’ve got an autoimmune disease

where your doctor has said you’ve
got XYZ, Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis

or Crohn’s Disease or Multiple Sclerosis, the basis of all these diseases is the same.

And if you unwind this by correcting
the gut, handling heavy metals,

this disease can actually,
you can actually recover

so that your body doesn’t have
to make these immune particles

that attack you any longer
and you can get better.

And we have patients where six to nine
months later after they’ve had the treatment

where there ANA test goes negative
or the rheumatoid factor goes negative

and then you say well they don’t have that disease anymore.

And their joint pain and their fatigue and
their brain fog have long since gone away.

So we know how to handle this.
We’re really good at it.

Most people this really works on

and so if you have
a condition like this

or you have a friend or family
member who has a condition like this,

come see us because we can really help.