Chris Kresser: Okay, this one’s from Nick about myasthenia gravis. “It’s most likely beyond the scope of the course, but love to hear any thoughts or experience with myasthenia gravis as it’s a chronic autoimmune disease.”
Yeah. The basic approach to autoimmune conditions from a Functional Medicine perspective, we could split into kind of two phases. Phase one would be to identify and then address any triggering mechanisms that are contributing to the immune dysregulation. These could be things like diet, food intolerances, G.I. conditions like SIBO, parasites, dysbiosis, etc., HPA axis dysregulation, stress, of course, is a huge factor for autoimmunity, chronic infections, nutrient deficiency, or in some cases nutrient excess, hormone issues like thyroid problems, biotoxins like mold, or other toxins. As you can see that the list is quite long, and we’re not covering all of those things in this course, but we’re covering a good portion of them. You first kind of clear up all of those issues, and then you see where the patient is at.
In many cases, they’ll be significantly improved. In some cases, you’ll need to now go to the second phase, which is to take specific steps that help balance and regulate the immune system. Sometimes even after removing the triggers, the immune system doesn’t snap all the way back to normal function. In those cases, using things like high doses of turmeric, glutathione, baking soda. Believe it or not, I wonder if you all saw that study about baking soda and the treatment of autoimmune disease that was published in The Journal of Immunology. I’m not kidding. It’s pretty remarkable. We’ve been actually using it in our practice. I love treatments like this that are cheap and readily available and not harmful. And then medications like low-dose naltrexone, and then other therapies like sauna or PEMF, neuroplasticity-based approaches, etc., for helping to balance and regulate the immune system. We have really great results in many cases of autoimmune disease. Of course, AIP and clearing up the food intolerances and things like that is a prerequisite.
It’s kind of a general answer, but it will have to do because we’re not going into significant depth in autoimmune disease in this course, but that’s just a general template. A lot of things you are learning in this course are helpful for addressing autoimmunity.