Autoimmunity and Your Eye Disease Part Three

This is the third of three talks on autoimmune disease and eye disease. The first part, which was a couple of weeks ago, was an overview. Last week, we talked about gut health, because that’s important. Just as a reminder, both the kind of integrative medicine I do and allopathic medicine, the hospital based regular medicine that I was first trained in agree that autoimmune disease is a consequence of an overactive immune system. 

ALLOPATHIC APPROACH

In Western Medicine, allopathic medicine, the solution is to give drugs that suppress or even kill the immune system. That works, but as you can imagine, it’s not a desirable long-term solution. In integrative medicine, you are trying to look at the root of the problem and try to figure out why your immune system is so overstimulated, that its starts making antibodies against your own tissues. You have that conversation by looking at all the things that stimulate the immune system, and quieting down as many of them as you can.

You don’t have to do any of them one-hundred percent perfectly, but if you quiet things down a little, things can quiet down enough overall that the autoimmune disease essentially goes away. In my first lecture two weeks ago I also talked more about the connection that doctors have seen where people who have the degenerative retinal diseases are also having their basic eye disease complicated by an autoimmune disease. 

HELPING YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM

Today I just want to talk about two big things. Things that can stimulate the immune system and things that you have some control over. The first is diet. The second is toxins. Foods that your body doesn’t like, foods that your body has a sensitivity to cause an immune reaction. Toxins, the kinds of things that bedevil us all because it’s such a toxic world, the things that your body cannot easily eliminate, hang around in your body and cause an immune reaction.

To help your immune system you want to eliminate certain foods from your diet that irritate your body from and detoxify yourself by both reducing the number of new toxins you introduce and doing other things so your body has a better ability to excrete toxins. If you can take both of those action, you will reduce your overall toxic load and reduce the amount of immune reaction and inflammatory reaction that you’re having to those toxins.

The strategy then becomes figuring out which foods you might be sensitive to and figuring out what you can do to detoxify your body and environment. I just want to say that we do have dates now for the two classes we will be running. You’ll be getting a letter in the next week or two, which will contain information on these two classes that we include as a part of the Better Eye Health Program. The two classes are the Healthy Eating Workshop and the Detoxify Your Life course. The reason we include these classes is that they can help you clean up your diet and body overall, which is a good thing for your health and eyes.

The courses are done weekly in a virtual format. We will send you a link to a video that you can watch on the computer. Even if you don’t see the computer very well, the audio is very important. If all you can do is listen to the audio part of the video, it’s still worth doing. If you have no access to a computer at all, this course isn’t going to be much use to you, but you are still welcome to join the conference calls for each of these courses.

APPROACH OF HEALTHY EATING WORKSHOP

If you are not a part of the Better Eye Health Program and want to participate in these courses, email us at [email protected] The reason we do them together is that they are complimentary to each other. For instance, one of the biggest toxins that you need to eliminate from your body are foods that your body doesn’t like. Foods that your body doesn’t like are toxic to your body. In the course, we talk about how there are no good lab testing to measure these things.

The lab testing is improving, but it still quite expensive, so if you really need to see things in black and white on paper, we can spend a thousand dollars of your money and get some decent lab testing done. But it’s just as easy to just play with your diet for 6 weeks and see how you respond when you remove the most common toxic foods. During the six weeks, we will do a pared-back diet.

The diet is all real food, there’s no fancy milkshakes. You eat a simpler diet for six weeks, and you will see how you feel. Then, you’ll slowly add in the foods that we’d removed and you will see how you feel. That description might sound a little vague, but believe me, it’s very powerful. If there are foods that your body doesn’t like, it becomes very apparent. Then, it’s up to you to get rid of them. I’ll tell you that some of the foods that are the most common causes of immune response, inflammation and autoimmune issues are staples in the diet.

Things like wheat and dairy including cheese. We talk about how to work with that. There will be a lot of people in the program who have done the Healthy Eating Workshop before, who can help. They will tell you how it’s worked for them. We’ll leave some time in future weeks of the Healthy Eating Workshop for people to talk how its worked for them and what they’ve experienced. 

ADDING IN DETOX

Taking these two courses should be your starting point for working on autoimmune issues and toxicity. The detoxification course is more informational. We have a little book that a colleague of mine, Dr. Lee Cowden, wrote called Create a Toxin-Free Body & Home Starting Today. That book is provided as a part of the course and we use it sort of a textbook. It’s just a small paperback book, but it’s something I want you to read.

Even though the book is small, the information can be a little overwhelming. It doesn’t tell you how to apply the information to your life. It gives you all kinds of information, very good information, but after you’ve read through it, you go, “Well now what do I do? What do I actually do first?” That’s the purpose of the course.

To give you break down the information into smaller bites so you can get started. It’s easy a lot of it is common sense when we do it together bit by bit. For those of you who are in the full program within the last couple of years, these courses are included. If you joined earlier than that, there are discounts for that. If you are already a part of the Better Eye Health Program or if you’ve already taken the Healthy Eating Workshop before, there’s a significant discount to retake it. You get a graduate discount. All the information on the workshops is coming in a letter, so please don’t ask questions this week about the details of the course, because you’re going to be getting something in a letter. Once you have the letter, then if you have more questions, then we’ll deal with those. 

CONCLUSION

Just to let everyone know, next week there will be no call. I’m going to be in Orlando giving a talk on cancer. Specifically, I’ll talk about Chinese herbs and their place in the treatment of cancers, meaning I won’t be able to do the call next week.  Anyhow, toxins and food are the major things to be working with if you’ve had issues with autoimmune disease and not just an eye problem. If you have autoimmune thyroiditis, inflammatory bowel disease, inflammatory arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, eczema or asthma, these courses are a great resource. The courses are of great use to you if you participate in them and you do the work to help your immune system.