Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle

Summit Introduction and Teaching Format 0:00

Welcome to the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit series. This is 4.0, the fourth in this series. As I've said in every interview you're joining me for the autoimmune detox portion of the reverse Autoimmune Disease Summit series. I'm doctor because this time I thought in this series that I would put together each day a little webinar. I love to teach, so I thought I would do this as a kind of a classroom setting and we would each day approach each of what I call the four corners of the autoimmune puzzle and give you some information that you can take away right away for reversing autoimmune disease.

So I'm going to share my screen and get this slide presentation going. All right. So these are things that I teach to my health coaching students. The Academy for Integrative Medicine. And so as you listen to this and each one of these, at the end of them, I'm going to offer you a slot in that training program if you're interested, because I often get after the Summit Series emails that say, I really want to work with you, how do I do that? And there are I mean, you know, I have I work with people 1 to 1.

But sometimes you are the person because you're the empath and you're the one that's taking the reins and your family's health or your own. And people are asking you questions. And so sometimes it's the case that you're kind of the smartest one in the room already. And that's why you're watching summit. And so I always say that I designed the Academy for Integrative Medicine for my patients who, are so much more educated about some of these things and a lot of doctors that I go to conferences with.

So it's for the summit junkie. So I thought at the end of this, I would offer, a scholarship, if that's you son of a junkie who really wants to know how to individualize this to your own, health journey. So everything that I talk about in the next five days are are things that are gone into in a lot more depth in my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle, if you haven't read it yet, and in its companion book, The Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook. So those two books have a lot more information.

And when I can offer, you know, in, in 40, 45 minute webinars. But I just wanted to, you know, give you that as a resource

Personal Autoimmune Story and Diagnosis 2:51

in case you're interested in diving a little bit deeper. So if you don't know who I am, my doctor does not an M.D. it's a PhD and I'm a nurse practitioner with a specialty in integrative medicine. I'm board certified in functional medicine. And I your Vedic medicine, my PhD is in sexology. I'm a certified psychotherapist, trauma informed, five modalities for trauma informed therapies, certified energy worker, yoga meditation teacher, and Conscious Dying Delight, as well as a masters of Divinity student.

And I'm the founder of the Academy for Integrative Medicine, health coach certification program. And I want all of this says that I'm really curious. I have a very curious mind, and my mission is to really help people and their suffering. So my, my mantra, so to speak, is having the opportunity like Hippocrates said, healing is a matter of time, but it's also sometimes a matter of opportunity that what these summits offer for people is an opportunity to get a lot of amazing information that they can then individualize to their own stories.

So my story, if you haven't heard it before and my apologies if you already have, is that when I was of shortly into my 30s, you know, just newly into my 30s, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. And it happened as the my patients always describe it, it felt like it was all of a sudden, but it wasn't all of a sudden. It never is. It takes anywhere from 10 to 30 years to develop an autoimmune disease. So it definitely wasn't all of a sudden. But I had four little kids, I did things like run lots of marathons and drove myself pretty hard and it was a very high energy person and very driven.

And I always say there are four P's in autoimmune disease, perfectionism, and people pleasing, and the poison of past pain. And in the Vedic paradigm, there's a lot of pitta in a person that has a, autoimmunity and those four things were definitely present for me. So when I look back at this woman, I think, oh man, she just there's so much she didn't know and she was really driving herself into the ground, literally. So one day I woke up and it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny, which is what my friends used to call me, and I just flattened, and I had gained about 10 pounds of puffiness all over my joints, and I was in a lot of pain and just completely annihilated with I was exhausted, I woke up and I was just exhausted.

And so I got in. I knew there was something really bad happening and got in to see a physician, and I was asked if I had any family history of autoimmunity. And I said, yeah, I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis, which I've circled him in this photo. That's him. And I was telling the story earlier this year. I turned 56 in February, and I realized that this man, my grandfather, died at the age of 56 with RA, and he was wheelchair bound for a number of years with it. So, you know, the two things that we're going to be talking about all week in this Summit series, all the things I've always talked about, the things that we get to dive into and really, really absorb that stuff wasn't known to this generation of people on the screen.

So, you know, my, my grandfather didn't know any of the things we're about to talk about, which is why at 56, because I am healthier than I was back here a lot healthier physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. So, you know, and and he didn't have that opportunity to use RA as a call to action, as a way of saying, something I'm doing here is not working. What is it? Let's investigate. So what happened for me that day in the doctor's office is I was given two prescriptions, one for methotrexate and another one for a nonstarter to an anti-inflammatory drug.

And I was told, take these. And when you get worse, not if you get worse. Come back and we'll we'll change your meds. And that unfortunately, 25 years later, is still what's being said. And I went home thinking, you know, I'd ask this her. I said, is there anything else I can do? I'm really disciplined, you know, I'm, I mean, I run, I make my own food. And she said, no, I'm afraid that you have you know, I've drawn the short straw on genetics, my dear. So on my way home, I contemplated. I thought, yeah, it is genetic.

My grandfather did have this and he's already dead. And is there is there any way around that? And, you know, back in those days that wasn't, conversation that was being had a lot this thing called epi genetics, we didn't really understand a lot about that. And so I had decided I was going to do some extra research, and I found, an article in PubMed where we keep our medical research about the usefulness of yoga and autoimmunity. So I went to my first yoga class the next day, and that yoga teacher said something about this word, IRA Veda, which is the sister science of yoga, is 10,000 years old.

That's from India. And what this yoga teacher said as he was walking through each of us holding our postures, this was enough for me to go home and look it up again. And I discovered that either Vedic medicine, all those thousands of years ago thought about autoimmune disease and cancer as undigested anger.

Trauma, Nervous System, and Healing the Root Cause 8:36

And I remember thinking about the, the idea, just the concept of digesting emotions, digesting feelings and memories and experiences as needful. The same way that I would digest an apple. And I thought, oh, and it was so new and revolutionary. I was an ICU nurse in those days. We did not think this way. And so I thought, okay, so I, I started learning how to meditate and I eventually became a yoga teacher. And in that process of learning to become introspective and sort of driving myself like a crazy woman, I started thinking about the word autoimmune.

It was dancing in front of my third eye one day, and I thought, oh, that means I'm killing myself. Auto is me attacking me. Is there anything I can do about that? Because I really don't want to die. And then I thought, when's the first time I wanted to die? And that was really important, because then I started following this little golden breadcrumb trail backwards in my memory. During that meditation and asking that question, why was I killing myself? And when was the first time I wanted to die?

Because I realized I was really kind of committing suicide in a societally acceptable manner, and I didn't want to die. Well, in that process, I discovered this ten year old little girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice principal of her elementary school. And I just remember, like my my mind's eye dropping on her and seeing her and just going, oh, she wanted to die. She didn't. She was so confused. She didn't understand what was going on. She didn't have the right words, obviously, to tell people what was happening because nothing was helping.

My dad was out to sea. I was a Navy brat, and anyone that I was talking to about it, I wasn't saying the correct words to help them understand. I didn't know the word sex or molestation or abuse or any of those kinds of words at that age. And so it was a different era, and I was raised with no television. And so I don't think I even had the vocabulary to say what was going on. So when I saw her, I thought she did want to die. And this must have something to do with this current health crisis I'm having.

And it turns out science does tell us that that is true. And so through the next few webinars that I do for this series, I'll talk about ways of detoxifying, you know, the things that we think about automatically are chemicals, are viruses, are bacteria. You know, all all of the things we think about as toxicants. But then we're also going to talk a bit about some of these things, like where are the undigested parts of life that are causing toxicity in your your mental emotional and energetic bodies, which then keep you separate from your spiritual body?

And I'll show you a diagram of what I mean by that. And when I give talks to doctors and, you know, I work for the, I'm on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine, and I give a lot of, talks to teach doctors to do what I do. And, yeah, I always say this like, this is one of the primary reasons the people that are coming to see you aren't getting better is because every eight minutes in the United States, a child is assaulted. And that's the only the reported ones. And so these moments of whether it's capital T trauma, which is the kind of trauma we're talking about right this minute, sexual abuse, physical abuse, domestic violence, emotional, psychological, spiritual abuse, abandonment, neglect.

All of these are what you could think of as capital T traumas. And then the lowercase t traumas are the ones where we feel rejected or betrayed, and all of us have those every human in childhood has those experiences, those little T traumas, even if it's not capital T. And it turns out the science says that it doesn't matter if it's capital T or lowercase t, it makes changes in your nervous system reactivity pathways that impact everything. And I'm going to explain all of that as we go. But what I wanted to just start off with is, you know, this is a picture of me as a little one.

And I keep a picture, this very picture by my computer all the time, because if I do get triggered about something and some toxic response happens, I cortisol floods my system because I'm feeling unsafe or unwanted or invisible or, you know, not heard, not whatever it is, then I know it's not my 56 year old version feeling that it's this little one. And so I can connect to her and I can say, you know what? That's not accurate. And I'm listening to you. So there's there's a lot that we can do in attachment trauma issues.

And, you know, attachment theory tells us that depending on our developmental state, when things occur, then we have attachment problems and trauma. But hang on just a second. It's okay. Yeah. My alarm just went off. And so we can actually heal that. So that's over the years what I've been able to do and my rheumatoid arthritis was able to reverse within six months. I never took those medications because I dove in and really started working on this level immediately. And so oftentimes people will come to me who have tried, tried everything right, and they haven't been successful because this part hasn't been dealt with.

So we're going to talk in this particular webinar, this talk about autoimmune disease as today's big health care crisis. We want to create a bridge between hope and despair. We want to talk about the freedom framework, which is how I reverse my own autoimmunity and what I do with others now with the symptoms of autoimmunity are in case you don't know, if you have an autoimmune disease, the people that are listening to me 10 to 30 years to develop one and everyone's just like, you know, it's always said that everyone's working on developing cancer.

It's same with autoimmune disease, whether or not it blossoms fully or not. That's a, standard American model of medicine. We have to have this diagnosis. Right. But the way that I hear Vedic medicine things, that is, imbalances that are going deeper, deeper, deeper because we haven't figured out the root cause and fixed it. So that's what the freedom frameworks for. And then we'll talk about what types of illnesses are autoimmune and the role stress plays and illness and that nervous system that I was talking about.

So autoimmune of course means we're attacking ourselves. Like I figured out that day in my early 30s, thought I'd learn to meditate. I was like, oh, this is me attacking me. There's nothing to look for on the outside of me. It's me. And that was important because there are things on the outside of us, but it ultimately, if our bodies are attacking us, we have to really be cognizant of that and say, okay, I want to really look at this. So we know now that there are over 50 million Americans. And I know it's not just Americans watching this webinar.

So my apologies for that. But worldwide, we have autoimmunity on the rise. There are over 140 autoimmune illnesses now rather than just 100. And many of them are illnesses that we already have names for. But we didn't know they were autoimmune like we used to call type one diabetes the autoimmune version of diabetes. But now we know type two is two and type three. And so there's you know, people didn't realize that Rea nodes or restless leg syndrome or psoriasis or rosacea, eczema, all these skin issues.

Vitiligo excuse me, could actually be autoimmune. It turns out it is. Our body's attacking ourselves. Now. Women have 80% of the autoimmune diseases, 80%. That is huge. And then some. Autoimmunity is more common in women than men and more common in men than women. And so this gives you a chart that looks at that. And I found this fascinating when I was first diagnosed because I thought, well, why do women get so much more autoimmunity? And that's still is the question in the literature. I have some theories about that.

One is the way that I think our brains. That's how I think our brains are different than men's.

Autoimmune Disease as a Modern Health Crisis 17:28

We have a different size of corpus callosum and a different way of communicating between our left and right brains. And I think because in tribal days, we will responsible for keeping the toddlers out of the fire pit so they don't get burned up tanning the hides, grinding the corn, telling the stories, making sure we know what's poisonous in the perimeter. And so the medicine right where the saber tooth tiger den is so that the children don't get attacked like we have so much information we had to hold while the men were out hunting and gathering that we became multitaskers.

And in that, needing to remember where the dangers are. I think we have Velcro brains. We remember our hurts too. That's why I say one of the four piece of autoimmunity is holding on to the poison of past pain. Like if we're hurt by something, we say, ooh, I'm not going to forget that you know? But then I'll show you a way of tracking that. But that can that can actually hurt us even more. It's good to remember the stove is hot. Don't touch the stove. But we can we can take it a little for far further than just that.

And then the other piece around this is we also have more estrogen receptors than men. And we have so many as estrogen reproducing and mimicking chemicals in our environment these days. And so we have more fat tissue on us too. And that's where those lipophilic or fat happy toxins like to live in our fat, these wonderful breasts, that's all they are. Right. And so and then we wear these great bras. I don't wear a bra anymore, but you know that that cut off the lymphatic system that then make it so that fat tissue can't drain the toxins.

So then we have this beautiful place that we just contain all of our toxins. So there are several reasons that women tend to have more autoimmune diseases than men. We can actually do something about all of them too. So autoimmune diseases are the fourth largest cause of disability among women in the in the United States. It's the second most common chronic illness. Now, I think it's actually first now, because we have now started seeing that many heart disease has always been number one in the US for deaths and chronicity.

But the thing is that we're starting to say, oh, heart disease is autoimmune too. So that means autoimmune disease is the biggest health care crisis really in the world, in industrialized countries. So I don't immune illnesses are labeled and treated according to their target organ rather than the root cause. So in other words, if you have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, it's all about the thyroid in the way that the standard medical model that the industrialized conventional medical model thinks about it rheumatoid arthritis.

We're looking at joints, arms. We're looking at nervous system. So each rosacea, we're looking here lupus. We look for multi-system scleroderma the same. But we tend to think about the target tissue. And I think about that as well. If we're thinking about the target tissue and we're just running around in the forest moving this target so the arrow can't hit it, why are we going to the archer, which is the immune system? Who's firing the arrows and tap them on their shoulder and say, hey, can you stop firing arrows, please, at that target and have that as the conversation rather than just talking about the target tissue?

Now, I gave a Hashimoto's webinar. I give a webinar every month about some form of autoimmune issue, and I did one on Hashimoto's last month. And what I was talking about is the fact that if you go to an endocrinologist who happens to be comprehensive and holistic enough to actually do autoimmune markers with your thyroid check, and you find that it's an autoimmune issue rather than just a thyroid issue, they still will say to you, okay, well, let's just keep an eye on it until your thyroid is hypo functioning and then we'll give you thyroid meds.

That's it. That's all I have. And that's that's the way it is for all the autoimmune illnesses. You know for RA, it was the same thing for me. Rheumatoid arthritis, take these two medications. And when you get worse come back. We'll start talking about immunomodulators. That's not okay. That's why people are falling through the cracks. So we really want to build a bridge from this old way of thinking about the target tissue only into a new way of really saying, okay, this is actually about the immune system and what is aggravating it.

When I think about autoimmune disease nowadays, I think about, a bull in a Spanish arena and there's a matador there. He's waving his red cape and the bull is charging after it. You know that that angry bull who is actually getting things shoved in him to make him look more aggressive is your immune system when you're autoimmune, and we really want to make that bull as your immune system, like Ferdinand the bull in the flowers of the disease right under the tree, who's really peaceful. That's what we would like that has that strength to fight off an attacker.

If needed, but sees everybody as kind and compassionate and friendly until otherwise proven. That's what we would like. So when I talk about bridging, I'm talking about really looking at how we're perceiving, okay. So brain what that relay system is, which is hormones. What what does the brain tell the body what to do next. Because that's who's triggering your immune system. And then what are your ideas about yourself in your life. Those are your meanings that you make up. We have to look at those because those are the ones that are actually triggering your brain to say you're not safe.

And some of those messages from the brain that say that you, you know, that are the red cape in front of the ball as your immune system will be things that are dietary. Sometimes it's microbial in your gut, and sometimes it's about the way that you detox. And so we're looking at really bridging right. We want to make sure that we're bridging yourself from a being in a combative relationship with yourself. To be a collaborator with yourself, being in a collaborative relationship where you have compassionate curiosity with your body and you're asking, how can I support you?

What do I need to do? Instead of feeling like you've been betrayed, you're by your body and it's not working, and it needs to toe the line.

The Freedom Framework and the Four Corners of the Puzzle 24:18

And then we get frustrated and angry and that doesn't make anything better. So each person is a puzzle and there's no one right way of doing this. I always tell people there's no such thing as an autoimmune paleo protocol. It doesn't make any sense. Each person is different. So we if we're going to solve a puzzle, we want to dump all those pieces of the puzzle out on the table, turn them all over. And then the first thing we do is we look for the corner pieces, and we want to anchor that puzzle, and then we'll look for the edge pieces to make a frame, and then we'll fill in the middle.

But first we find the corners and the corners for your puzzle. It doesn't matter what is going on for you. We want to look at those same four corners, and we have to kind of do it at the same time, because one of them is your genetics. Yeah, I had RA in my genes for sure. One of that is environmental toxins, which the Summit Series is being devoted to. One of them is gut health and the other one is trauma. And how will you deal with your stress today and what those nervous system pathways do in their reactivity?

Now, all of those things influence how your genetics express themselves, which is why I was able to reverse my IRA in six months and not take meds is because I somehow knew that right away. When I was asking the question like, how come I'm doing this to myself and really got in there? People are always wanting to know what is the thing that caused their problem? What is the one smoking gun? And there's not any such thing as that. I call it critical mass. I will spend half time on San Juan Island, and I have to ride a ferry to get over to the island, and when they load the ferry up, they do so in a very methodical way.

There are ferry workers who have point to each car and say where it needs to go, because they want to load it with the understanding that it has to float. So if all the cars are on one side, then is going to tap. So that's actually how our bodies require us to work with them. Do so whenever we get triggered into an autoimmune flare. Know that there has been a lot of stuff that stacked up on that scale beforehand, and then that final thing tips it. It might be Epstein-Barr virus that flares because you had a crisis and you got to too tired.

It might be a childbirth, it might be a huge job stressor or the loss of a loved one. It can be traveling. It can be moving into a new house where there's a ton of mold. But know that if any of these things are true and you've got an autoimmune illness as a result of them, that it was because you were already primed for that, then that it was in your genetics, too, and that this one last thing capsized your boat. So when we say that, then that means we have to start looking at all of the things that were already on your scale and start taking them off because it doesn't you can't just remove the one thing that capsize you. You actually need to get a lot of lightness in this other side that got heavy.

So we think about genetics. We're talking about single nucleotide polymorphisms that have to do with a number of different things in your body, not just this gene equals RA or mass or diabetes. No. We're talking about the genetics responsible for your detoxification pathways for methylation, for your mood, for what kind of diet you're supposed to be eating that's actually in your genetics. We want to look at not just gut permeability, but also mental permeability because if you don't have good boundaries in your life, and I always say you have to start with good boundaries with yourself first, then with the others in your life, then you're going to have leaky gut too, which causes leaky brain and all the other things that occur as a result.

Environmental toxins don't just mean mold, Epstein-Barr, Lyme, herpes, Covid. It's not just those things, those chemicals. It's also your thoughts, your beliefs, the meanings that you you created when you were a child that create lack of self-worth, perfectionism, people pleasing, and all of that. You know, the trauma component can lead to a lack of self nourishment. So all of these things create part of that critical mass, and we put them on the freedom framework. So we're talking about solving your puzzle.

So after we get those four corner pieces in place where you understand that's what we're looking at, all of it kind of at the same time because they all are interdependent and interrelated. Then we start looking at the edge pieces of the freedom framework. So we want to uncover, I call these the forces. So I'm kind of slippery around the first seeds. Uncover the root causes, confront the data, connect the dots, and then create the life that you want with intention. And you can't do one of them without the others first.

So uncovering the root cause means that we're going to look at you that your physicality root causes. Right. We want to look at your mind. We will look at your heart, your spirit, and in your story about the places where you had, again, trauma. And then we want to confront the data. And so we do functional medicine laboratory testing. We look at your weight. We look at your energy level, your libido level, your quality of sleep. And what is the data that we get from that. And then we want to connect the dots between your lifestyle choices that you're making and that data.

So in other words, if your genetics say that you're really, really, really gluten intolerant, which I am in my genetics and I eat gluten anyway, then I'm going to connect the dots between, oh, here's why you have inflammation and pain and why your, your weight's not very good is because your diet's not matching your genetics. Connect those dots. Okay, same with beliefs and behaviors and mood. And within your relationships in my doctoral research, which we'll talk about another webinar, I actually discovered that the number one reason women have a low libido is from having unhealthy, unhappy, unsatisfying, unfulfilling relationships.

Romantic partnerships that they're unhappy in doesn't mean anything's wrong with the person they're coupled with. It might be because of their beliefs and behaviors and meanings they created, and now they have a so-called nourishment deficit in that relationship as their perceptions. And so then that actually creates all kinds of illness. So I have a Ted talk called Have You Heard from Your Libido Lately, where I talk a lot about that. So create your life with intention is the last one. So you know how you get to see all these books about, creating a different mindset and, and just, you know, think positive, the law of attraction and manifestation, that's all great.

But if those other pieces haven't been put into alignment with you first, then this stuff doesn't stick the the create your life with intention. So we really need to go in and, you know, look at what needs to be reflected on the mirror. We're clearing that trauma. Self confrontation is really important for giving and then reframing. And then you find that your happiness level goes up. So you don't do this first though you can't. And it's not even appropriate to you know, it's a stepwise process of digestion.

All right. So unfortunately, what I've discovered after 25 years in medicine

Stress, Hormones, and Immune System Reactivity 32:18

is that actually over 35, 35 years. Oh, wow. Yeah. 30 years. Sorry. I had to do my math really fast. That's a lot. I've discovered that a lot of times people have to feel fairly miserable to be motivated to make those shifts. They would really rather do a pill, even if it's a supplement. And so this work that I'm talking about is, is very much engaged and into creating work. It's not passive, you know, it's not something you just shift your mind and then it's all better. So I always say, you know, it doesn't matter what the autoimmune illness is because I'll get emails that say, do you have any, any experience with helping people with myasthenia gravis or do you have any experience helping somebody with graves or rosacea or pandas?

You know, all of it is autoimmune. And so the answer is always yes, because we're talking about a target rather than what's going on at the root, which is the same, okay. Depending on your genetics is where the target goes. And so symptoms of autoimmunity are really can be anything. Right. Because it depends on the target tissue that some of the the more common ones fatigue is right up there. And brain fog and hair loss and digestive problems. And you know low libido. And it means the vitality is sinking for you.

So you're going to feel all these things. Your weight might be off. You could have joint pain, rashes, muscle weakness, menstrual cycle changes. If you're a female, the most common organs affected by autoimmunity are the skin, the joints, the hormonal systems, red blood cells and blood vessels, connective tissue and muscles. And it causes stress sometimes. You know, when people say, well, I don't have any other stress in my life except for what's happening in my body right now. And that's that's accurate.

It's very stressful to have your body not functioning the way that we want it to. And so when you think about it, we are wired to be like the zebra where where we run from the lioness. If there's a lioness on our tail and then either one of our herd gets taken down and then the pride comes and eats them, and then the lion, the, the zebra herd will just with even sometimes within eyesight or earshot, will stop and start grazing again because they know the pride is totally fine. Now they've they've been fed and they're not hungry.

And then everyone can wander along and graze and all of their organs systems come back to homeostasis. Humans don't do that very well. Robert Sapolsky did this really beautiful book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and it's because of what I just said, you know, they can return back into that space of alignment very quickly where we have all of these different things like telephones and computers and driving and, you know, like all the things that can make us we can instantly see things that can stress this out.

So I always think we live in a time that's that's, whose hallmark is one of overwhelm. And I always think about overwhelm as the gateway to perfectionism, you know, because if you're overwhelmed, that means you're overwhelmed because you're maybe not doing things up to the level that you would want to do them. And that's a that's a sign of perfectionism. So then we also have this past pain and hurt, okay, that we hold on to. And then the relationship to satisfaction that I was telling you about.

So these are one of the reasons that women get 80% of the autoimmune illnesses. And then is it hormones that you need because that's often what I get. Is someone coming in looking for hormones. Oh, my alarm just went off again. Instead of looking at the the root of that and saying, oh is because I feel stressed, overwhelmed. I have a really I really unhappy in my relationship right now. All of these things that are happening are causing my adrenals to be in overdrive, which then if your adrenals are in overdrive, your body says, oh, we're not surviving.

So then all of the hormones that are responsible for you feeling good and having libido and reproducing are going to be hijacked by your fight, flight, freeze, or faint system, your sympathetic nervous system. Because survival wins over reproduction. So then I always say, instead of really thinking first and foremost about, oh, I need to take bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, I really need to think about the hole in the bottom of my boat, that why my hormones are off in the first place, and they're both appropriate bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, but also fixing the hole in the bottom of the boat because we really want to know, like, is this for a stress response system going off all the time internally and for every five minutes that you are upset in this sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, flight, fight, faint or freeze.

You know, I call it the internal hormone alarm. For every five minutes you're in that state, it takes your body eight hours to recover. Five minutes, eight hours. When I learned that math, I said to my body, I am so sorry and so much debt to you. So that's really how stress impacts your hormones. You know, we have this perceived threat, which is it's up to our perceptions. And then we go into that fearful thinking, and then our adrenals hijack everything from our ovaries or our testes, and we're off to the races.

Now, what does this have to do with your immune system? Well, that cortisol that's released from those adrenals breaks down your gut wall. And then when you have a leaky gut, then bad bugs can move in and, you know, you and then you're, you're into that autoimmune issue. So I always say a hyper vigilant mind equals a hyper vigilant immune system. Instead we want to be in the for half life support system. Parasympathetic right. Where we're fed we're friendly, we're fertile, and we're fearless. We call it the rest and digest or the feed and breed system.

And in that space, we're more willing to engage in self-care and in self nourishing and breathwork and meditation and a gratitude practice in prayer and contemplative work. Being introspective, that's the only way we can is when we're in that parasympathetic place. So you need to find your why, right? What is the why that's going to help me engage in self-care to that level? How am I going to change my autoimmune mindset? I have to figure out my why. So for me, it was being confronted with methotrexate and I have four little kids at home who are used to the Energizer Bunny is their mom and I'm now debilitated just really overnight.

This is what it felt like. And so my why was I don't want my kids to have to suffer because of the things that are happening to me right now, so I really want to get after it. And so I did, which meant a lot of trauma work and learning how to kick my sugar addiction and learn my genetics, learned what my diet was that was supposed to be for me, learn what I what my toxins were that I had on board,

Individualized Detox, Training Offer, and Closing 39:58

which I had and, you know, really, really work through all four corner pieces of that puzzle. And within six months, the autoimmunity was in remission. So I always say reversing autoimmune disease doesn't mean curing it, because I could get rheumatoid arthritis back today. I could start working on it today and probably have it back within weeks. Yeah. So I don't I don't do the up and down everything that I learned back then, that switch that I stay with. I don't eat gluten, I don't eat sugar. You know, I make sure that I engage in self-care and I do it according to my individual four corners of my puzzle.

Because what I do is going to be different than what you need. And we really want to individualize all that. So people always ask me, what's your autoimmune protocol? Right. What's Doctor Hughes's autoimmune illness protocol? And I always say, no, there's no such thing. Instead we want to make sure that we test, don't guess. We want to look at what what are the meanings and the beliefs you created when you were a kid in response to your different experiences in life, and then what sets your nervous system going?

We don't want to just do like vagal nerve ish, you know, like work at a vagal nerve level where we're saying, oh, let's just do vagal nerve stimulation. No, we want to learn what setting you off in the first place, right? Then. Sure. Emotional freedom technique, facial nerve simulation. These are all great for getting the tidal wave to come back again so you can get your, your, your body back to homeostasis. But what I really like is to get it so that you learn how not to go off in the first place, and then your immune system can settle.

So this, doctor keesha.com/aim, which is Academy for Integrative Medicine, HCA health coach aim HHC. This link right here that we're doing during this summit only okay. You get $3,000 off of the tuition, which is usually 8997. So it puts it down to 5997 or 5000. Even. So, take a look at that. And there are payment plans. So if you want to do the health coaching program with me and learn all of this and how to do it for yourself on an individualized level and then help others, and I really want to make sure that you can do that.

So this is what we're what we're, I'm going to have at the end of each of the talks this week, and then I'm going to be giving you information about how to detox on all of these levels using that freedom framework. So until tomorrow, I hope that you're really, really enjoying this series and all of the remarkable people that I have here that are talking about their expertise and detoxification, really. I mean, you can't get better experts. It's so amazing to listen to Liberal talk about Emfs and Doctor Tom O'Brian.

And we talked a little bit about Covid and, just, I mean, just really, really good talks. And so think about as you're listening to them, think about the freedom framework and how that all applies for you. Because at the end of the day, it's really important that we individualize everything to your system, your body, your life experiences. All right. Until next time, be well and I'll see you tomorrow.