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An Integrative & Functional Approach to Autoimmune Disease
If you've been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and you have tried many options with many doctors, and they have probably told you that there is no cure, it will continue to get worse, and the only treatment option is a powerful medication that suppresses your immune system (and has really bad side effects).
Do not feel resigned about your fate. You have treatment options with integrative & functional medicine approach that you can feel better.
Begin to heal your body in non-invasive and natural ways and embrace a new life that’s full of health, energy, and vitality. Get freedom from annoying symptoms, emotional entanglements and frustration.
Conventional medicine views autoimmunity as a genetic predisposition triggered by some unknown factor. This model does not give us many treatment options. We can't change your genetics and we can't do anything about a trigger that we don't know or understand. So that leaves us with only dealing with your immune system.
The standard treatment for most autoimmune disease is a medication that shuts down your immune system to stop it from attacking your body. And yes, it will stop it from attacking your body, but it also stops your immune system from defending your body against pathogens and even cancer.
At WELLBEEING, we are constantly looking for the deeper underlying reasons. We look at your whole health history to find the source of what’s causing your symptoms and what triggered your autoimmune condition in the first place. Our functional medicine doctors know what needs to be done for your body to heal safely, so you finally start feeling better.
Integrative medicine views autoimmunity as much more complex. We recognize genetics, epigenetics, lifestyle factors, immune imbalances, and known environmental triggers as playing a role in developing autoimmune disease. This model gives us a lot more treatment options and therefore, a greater chance of healing your body. A functional medicine doctor treats autoimmune disease differently than conventional medicine. Instead of only using medications to manipulate the immune system and mask the symptoms, we are focused on getting to the root cause and reversing the process of autoimmunity.
Genetics & Epigenetics
While you may have a genetic predisposition for a certain disease that does not mean that you will develop the disease. And that is because of epigenetics, how our genes are expressed. Our diet, lifestyle, and environment can impact what genes our body turns on and what genes are body turns off. Understanding this is most important for preventing an autoimmune disease, but we can still use epigenetics to impact how our immune system functions with an autoimmune disease. To do that, we need to explore the lifestyle factors and environmental triggers.
Lifestyle Factors
Nutrition, physical activity, stress, sleep, hydration, and lymphatic function all play a role in developing autoimmunity. These factors can create hormonal imbalances, neurotransmitter imbalances, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction that puts us at risk of developing an autoimmune disease. A lot of this is through epigenetics, but these factors can also directly impact our immune system.
Environmental Triggers
Toxins and infections can predispose, exacerbate, or trigger an autoimmune disease. Toxins include heavy metals & chemicals found in plastics, pesticides & herbicides, and other products. Infections may include chronic viral or bacterial infections or intestinal dysbiosis.
The toxins and infections may trigger autoimmunity in a few different ways. They may cause inflammation and cell damage that exposes the immune system to parts of the cell and body that the immune system falsely interrupts as foreign. Thus, triggering the immune attack on your body. The infections may trigger autoimmunity through molecular mimicry. Basically, a viral or bacterial protein looks like one of our own proteins. The pathogenic protein triggers our immune system to start attacking and our immune system ends up attacking our proteins that look similar.
The presence of these toxins and infections will continue to stimulate the autoimmune response. In an integrative approach to autoimmunity, it is important to identify and then removes these environmental triggers.
The immune system can be divided into 3 relative parts:
- The part that turn on immune reactions
- The part that attacks foreign invaders
- The part that shuts off immune reactions
An integartive & functional medicine addresses the five most common root causes of autoimmune disorders as follows
- A Leaky Gut or Intestinal Permeability
- Exposures to Toxins
- Chronic Infections
- Food Sensitivities
- Stress
Although medications may be a necessary and important part of your treatment plan, they’re not the only solution for helping you feel your best. Functional medicine is focused heavily on each individual’s food and lifestyle intervention needs. But it also places great emphasis on whole-person healing and addresses your spiritual and emotional health as well.
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2935336/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076021/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2670258
An Integrative Approach to Autoimmune Disease — BioAdaptive Medicine
Our 5 Stage approach towards your Health for Autoimmune Management
Step 1
Identify the problem (NCDs) and the stage or phase of the ailment.
Step 2
Our Health Advisors screen and counsel you on our approach and its benefits.
Step 3
Medical screening and assessment followed with consultations by integrated team of doctors.
Step 4
We evaluate the risk, medicine and its dosage, and other related issues for deriving a treatment plan.
Step 5
We recommend a treatment plan with a deatiled schedule based on the body type and stage of the disease.
Being an Integrative & Functional Medicine patient is all about YOU!
You likely will find our approach is NOT the medical care you have been receiving so far. Our approach is different entirely.
When starting the journey, it is important to understand your role as an Integrative & Functional medicine patient.
Allopathic medicine diagnosis and gives a medication or offers procedures to treat the symptoms or slow down progress of the disease. This only “covers” the symptoms while the progression of the disease continues. Sometimes the medication received may causes you another symptom and then another medication is given for that “side effect”. With this, healthcare starts to feel more like “sick care”. Because an individual continues to progress in the severity of the illness, with little being done to seek the root cause.
The diagnosis in the Integrative & Functional Medicine model is just the beginning! In this new vision of healthcare, we are a team, and the goal is about changing the path of your future health, and the progression of the disease. The underlying cause or the root cause of the disease is the focus, not just the symptom. Here the patient and the doctor work as partners. Your doctor is your guide or a coach.
Foundational to your success is changing your mind-set about how patients and physicians interact, making a commitment to the process, and willingness to see nutrition as “medicine”.
Preparation of your Mind-set
- Be aware that these issues (or the disease) that you have been developing over long periods of time, will take time to heal. There really is no “quick fix”. Feeling well after doing something for a week doesn’t mean that the underlying problem has resolved (or the root cause is addressed) and it may take weeks to months, or even years, for your health trajectory to change (which is reversing the disease or preventing the progression of the disease). Please note, healing is constructive not just maintenance.
Your commitment
- First you have to commit to yourself that your health is worth taking action and knowing your ‘why’ will help with that commitment.
- Make your visits and follow-ups priority, as these check-ins are key to your success. Your annual or 6 months once visit to doctor to check your reports or status of your symptoms are not how our approach model works.
- Share what’s working and what isn’t working as commitments can be adjusted.
- Sometimes you have to step back a bit before stepping forward again.
- Sometimes, you may feel worse before you feel better.
- Behavioural changing process will take some time, as habits die hard.
- Prepare to commit to yourself a minimum of 3 months to create good habits, break old ones and create lifelong success with any suggested lifestyle changes.
Nutrition is medicine
- A dietary plan is of upmost importance and is the core of improving your health.
- This is not something you will have to follow forever, but will be a key aspect in your initial health plan.
- These healthy habits are likely to rub off the longer you do follow them.
- Depending on your current level of nutrition, supplements are often suggested and the intention is that many are temporary and utilized for a few months during a protocol.
STEPS FOLLOWED
STEP I: Register online or call to schedule an appointment.
STEP II: Your first consultation might need 45-90 minutes to organize your history in great detail and you will be asked to complete a thorough health questionnaire. This is very important to determine the best route of your care moving forward.
STEP III: From this, we focus on the areas of greatest concern for you and where your body needs the most support. An initial plan will be developed at this time with some foundational suggestions to get started. For some, this may be all that is needed.
STEP IV: However, based on the initial discussion, lab tests may be recommended.
STEP V: Our treatment plan will include some or all of the following
1. Functional Medicine Practitioner’s advice on
- Therapeutic Diets
- Functional Nutrition
- Lifestyle Change
- Nutraceuticals
- Pharmaceuticals (if required)
2. Ayurvedic Doctor’s advice on
- Herbal Medication (if required)
- Ayurvedic Therapies (if required)
3. Naturopathic Doctor’s advice on
- Holistic Nutrition
- Yoga Therapy
4. Visualisation / Meditation / Emotional Freedom technique therapy sessions / Psychotherapy session
STEP VI: You will receive through the portal the prescription recommendations to continue for the next 4-weeks.
STEP VII: Depending on your program, you will have follow up sessions with Integrative & Functional Medicine Practitioners every week or once in 2 week.
Attend the first session from our Health Advisor to understand how this program will help you live a healthier and a happier life.
The treatment plan includes
Screening, Risk Analysis & Evaluation
Food & Diet
Therapy Yoga and Breathing Exercise
Emotional Health and Stress Management
Traditional Therapy
(optional)
The entire program is backed with Educational sessions, Consultation, Intermittent screening,
Evaluation of your parameters and Risk analysis through out the program.
100+ years of combined experience of Integrated team of doctors. Treated thousands of patients for Diabetes, Hypertension, Thyroid, Over-weight, Fertility issues, PCOD, Neurological and Mental Disorders, Autoimmune Disorders and Joint Problems through Integrative & Functional Medicine.
A Systematic Approach
Often the first step is to try to control your symptoms so that you have the energy to work on the underlying causes. Since inflammation is causing your symptoms, we first try to reduce your inflammation as much as possible using botanicals & nutrients. Sometimes, medicine interventions are needed to manage inflammation at this stage.
While we are managing your symptoms, we are also looking beyond your symptoms to identify your triggers and underlying imbalances. This is best accomplished through comprehensive laboratory testing to evaluate for toxins, intestinal dysbiosis, oxidative damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, hormonal & neurotransmitter imbalances, and food sensitivities.
Some estimate that up to 80% of your immune system lives in your gut. Basically, your gut is the front lines of your immune system. So if we want to modulate your immune system, this is the best place to start. Because this is also the place where your immune system was most likely first exposed to your autoimmune triggers.
We often find that people with autoimmune diseases have digestive dysfunctions, such as imbalances in gut bacteria (like SIBO) and leaky gut. We suspect that these dysfunctions were and still are huge contributing factors to the autoimmune state.
We correct these imbalances and heal the gut using targeted dietary therapies, antimicrobial therapies, nutrient & botanical therapy to heal gut cells, and probiotic therapy to restore normal flora. Specific therapies depend on the nature of the dysfunction.
If toxins are apart of your autoimmune picture, the next steps is to eliminate these toxins from your body. This involves identifying the sources and reducing or eliminating exposure and detoxification. Detoxification may involve chelation therapy, sauna therapy, therapeutic fasting and other protocols depending on your specific exposures. Optimizing lymphatic function is extremely important in this phase of treatment.
Once we have eliminated toxins causing cellular damage and mitochondrial dysfunction, we can repair the damage. This involves short term targeted nutrient therapy to reverse oxidative damage and replenish depleted nutrients.
We want to make sure that your nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and stress levels are promoting an environment for health in your body. This is important for not only healing your body, but also for preventing flares and recurrences. Healthy lifestyle factors will need to be maintained for the rest of your life.
If you have any of these symptoms on a regular basis, please don’t ignore them, hoping they’re nothing serious or that they’ll just go away on their own. When you treat your autoimmune disease with integrative & functional medicine, you can slow the progression of your condition and have fewer symptoms so your body can heal.
Common Autoimmune Symptoms: Anxiety, Brain fog, Attention deficit problems, Body rashes, Red bumps on facial skin and red flaking skin, Acne, Rosacea, Eczema, Psoriasis, Headache, Dermatitis, Allergies, Asthma, Dry mouth, Frequent colds, Thyroid issues that could point to Hashimoto’s disease (underactive thyroid) or Graves disease (overactive thyroid), Fatigue or hyperactivity, Weight gain or loss, Muscle pain and weakness, Stiffness and pain (could suggest rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia symptoms), Feeling “wired and tired”, Exhaustion, Digestive tract upset (may indicate irritable bowel disease or IBS), Stomach cramping, Gas, Bloated stomach, Diarrhea, Constipation.
Fill up the form with the details and submit for booking an appointment with our doctor or health consultant. Our health advisor will get back with an appointment with our doctor.
Fill up the form with the details and submit. Our Health advisor will provide you complimentary counseling on our ON-LINE program that may suit you, post which, will fix an appointment with our doctor for your first consultation to design your program.
Fill up the form with the details and submit. Our Health advisor will provide you complimentary counseling on our ON-LINE program that may suit you, post which, will fix an appointment with our doctor for your first consultation to design your program.
