Are some conditions irreversible?

Chris: That’s a really good question. I think the answer is yes, and I would like the answer to be no, but sometimes what we like and want is not the same as what is. I’ve been doing this work for almost a decade now, a little over a decade if you include my internship, and I think a good example might be autoimmune disease. Our body has an amazing cellular memory, so we know this really benefits us in the case of antibody production and when we’re exposed to a pathogen. When we’re young and we are exposed to a certain viral pathogen or a different kind of pathogen, our body produces antibodies to that pathogen. Then, 30 and even 40 or 50 years later, if we’re re-exposed to that pathogen, our cellular memory of that is activated, and we can produce antibodies to help us deal with that, so that’s fantastic. In a natural evolutionary environment, that is what helped us to survive. Unfortunately, the other side of that is if we begin producing antibodies to our own tissue, the body remembers that for a very long time as well. That might mean that even if we remove all of the triggers that initially provoked the autoimmunity, we can dramatically improve the symptoms in the clinical presentation even to the point where that person is in remission, meaning they’re not experiencing the signs and symptoms, but often in those cases, if they go back to eating a crappy diet, they have a really stressful episode in their life, they start sleeping very poorly, or they stop doing some of the things that they did to recover in the first place, they experience the symptoms again, and the immune dysregulation will resurface.

I think it’s difficult to use the word “cure” in that situation because the autoimmune process is still there on some level. It’s just dormant and not active, and the patient is living mostly maybe a symptom-free life or dramatically reduced symptoms, which is great. I’m sure most patients would be totally happy with that outcome without having to take drugs for the rest of their life. But at the same time, we can’t necessarily say that we reversed that condition entirely because maybe before that patient developed that autoimmune disease, they were able to eat whatever and not experience those kinds of symptoms that they’re experiencing now. It’s a great question. Some people might answer it differently, but that’s the way I look at it. The good news is that most of the patients who I’ve seen and meet personally are people who have dealt with a chronic illness and understand that there are certain things that happen that are not fully reversible. They’re not so concerned with whether it’s 100 percent reversible, but they’re concerned with whether they can live a full and happy healthy life. I think with functional medicine we can offer most of the people that come to see us that as an outcome.