Healing from Autoimmunity Naturally Using the Power of Food as Medicine

I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Tom O’Bryan, author of “The Autoimmune Fix” and creator of “The Gluten Summit” and the documentary series “Betrayal”.

Dr. Tom is also an instructor for the Institute for Functional Medicine, one of the advanced clinical resources faculty members at the Institute of Nutritional Endocrinology (INE) and one of the most popular speakers at the INE annual SHINE Conference.

Watch the video, originally broadcasted on Facebook to learn more. 

Here are the biggest takeaways for me.

Stage 1 of Healing is Usually Symptom Relief …

Unfortunately, that’s often where western medicine stops.  I loved what Dr. Tom had to say about this.

“Symptom relief is critically important and you can’t play that down.

When you’ve got symptoms that are bad enough that you need to go to a doctor to get some help, it’s like you’ve fallen over a waterfall into the pond below. You swim up to the surface, spit out the water and try to stay afloat, but you’re swimming in this turbulent water of diabetes or recurrent miscarriages, or attention deficit for your son.

Whatever the Turbulent Water is of Your Symptoms, You Need a Life Jacket …

Get the safest life jacket you can, but don’t stop there. You, of course, have to get out of the water then you go back up the hill, beyond the waterfall, back up the river, back upstream to figure out what the heck fell in the river that caused you to go over the waterfall.

Is it mercury toxicity? Is it food sensitivity? Is it emotional trauma? Is it structural trauma? What is it? That’s the world of functional medicine!

Dr. Dale Bredesen, at Buck Institute at UCLA, has completely reversed Alzheimer’s.  In 2014, nine out of ten people reversed Alzheimer’s.  Now, three years later, he’s got over a hundred people and he’s teaching practitioners all over the world how to do The Bredesen Protocol which is applying the functional medicinal principles of going back upstream to see what fell into the river and fix the root causes.

It takes about five years to reverse Alzheimer’s because you build new cells every day. Some are very slow and some are faster.  But it’s true with rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, Lupus, and pretty much any autoimmune disease.  You can arrest the development of autoimmune when you educate the patient properly and the patient complies with your recommendations.

Getting to the root cause of Autoimmunity has a finite number of positive actions. What differs from one condition to the next is really just how you approach the band-aid care that’s offered to help with the symptoms while you’re working on the root cause.”

Make sure you listen to the part about molecular mimicry.

Enjoy the video and join us at SHINE to meet Dr. Tom in person.