Dr. Miller:  A participant had a question that his brother was diagnosed with Macular Pseudohole.  The ophthalmologists have a different view about this than the integrative physicians do.  There are numerous diagnoses: macular hole, macular pseudohole, macular fold, macular tear.  There are all of these different terms that basically refer to structural degeneration of the retina that the ophthalmologist sees when they examine your eye.  They would say that those are all different from macular degeneration.

I would say something else.  I think if you’re having a structural breakdown in your eye, that’s not normal.  Very often, I have people come in. They have a clear diagnosis of macular degeneration, and it began years before with doctors noticing structural problems with their retina.  I have just a very small series of people back before genetic testing became somewhat affordable.  Here’s a topic for another day, but I don’t recommend that everyone run out and get genetic testing.  I had a few people who came to me with these diagnoses: macular tear, macular hole; their doctors said, don’t worry you don’t have macular degeneration.  But, they had the means to pay for what was then pretty much a research test.  They had a genetic test to see if they had any of the genes that were known to predispose someone to macular degeneration.  A handful of these people that were willing to put up their own money to do that genetic testing. ​100% of them, that did the testing had genes that suggested they were at risk for macular degeneration, should they live long enough and not be healthy. 

So I tend to get concerned if someone has a physical breakdown of the structure of their retina, because like I say, that’s not normal.  You want to be doing a program to care for the health of your retina.  Do you need to be doing the full Better Eye Health program? If someone is suggesting surgery for correction of these structural problems in the retina, you need to know that there are alternatives to surgery that can lead to healing of the problem using a more wholistic approach. Call us to learn more.

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.

Today we are doing the second section of three-part series on autoimmune issues and eye disease. Last week I discussed an overview of autoimmune disease from the perspective of Western Medicine. It’s not an alternative view. Although, it’s not a view that a lot of doctors use when they think about or deal with autoimmune disease.

But the data to back up what I was talking about last week all comes out of UCLA and some very prestigious institutions who are looking at how our bodies are reacting to all the insults that are thrown at it. Infections, toxins and foods that are not good for us can all lead to autoimmune disease where our body makes antibodies that are destructive against our own tissues. In this second part, I’m going to talk about the relationship between the health of your gut and the development of autoimmune disease.

HOW IT'S ALL CONNECTED

Before, I get into the gut, I want to talk about about how all these things that seem so distant from the eye can affect the eye. I mentioned last week how there is a way that the immune system overreacts. It’s so challenged with so many things that it must deal with that eventually you get autoimmune problems. What we don’t understand is why the autoimmune problem affects our body where it does.

Sometimes autoimmune problems cause issues in their eyes, but for others, it affects somewhere else like their gut, thyroid, joints, skin or lungs. We know the underlying mechanism for all those things are all very common. But why one area is hit in one person, and why another is hit in another person is something that no one in integrative medicine, or western
allopathic medicine understands.

What I’ve seen is that for people with these degenerative diseases, an autoimmune problem makes helping them much more complicated because laying on top of that is a second problem that’s debilitating their eyes. That’s not for everyone, but it is the case for a lot of people. The immune problem is not the cause of Macular Degeneration, Retinitis Pigmentosa or Stargardt Disease. They are not immune problems to begin with, but these immune problems are very common, and so it’s very common to see people who have more than one thing insulting their eyes and insulting the health of their eyes.

YOU CAN DO SOMETHING

The fortunate thing about the autoimmune diseases is that there are things that can be done to minimize your risk or help you heal if you are already deeply into it. That’s the purpose of these calls, is to show you the simple things that you can do that can be very powerful. I said I wanted to talk about the gut, and you know there’s an increasing understanding of the importance of having a healthy population of bugs living in your gut. There are a lot of things that stand in the way of that. For example, a lot of things that come from the way foods are processed in the foods we eat are bad for our gut.

One specific substance are antibiotics. Antibiotic residues in foods affect the population of things
living in our gut. Pollutants in water and air and just all kinds of things that can upset that balance and the gut. The population of things in the gut is very important overall to our health. This may
sound bizarre, but we are outnumbered by bacteria in our own body. We walk around with about 10-11 maybe more trillions of cells. Yes trillions. Trillion is a big big number.

THE BUGS IN OUR BODY

But of all those cells we walk around with, only about a tenth of them are human. The other 9/10 are the bugs that live in our gut, on our skin and everywhere else throughout our body. Some of those bugs are very very tiny and that’s why they don’t take up a lot of room. Between the viruses and the funguses and the bacteria and atypical bacteria, and the parasites, there are a huge number of them. And they’re not all bad. If we had a sterile gut, we’d be dead.

Over the centuries we’ve evolved to have a relationship with the things living in our body and the gut is where most them live. They need us and we need them. There are some that do the job well and there are others that can cause imbalances, and others that can cause problems. There are essentially healthy bugs and unhealthy bugs. The gut is important because it takes the food that we eat and separates the pure from the impure. It extracts what is necessary for our nutrition and lets the rest pass through and be eliminated.

The gut has another critical function. It seems hard to understand why this would come so late, but this next thing I’m going to say the understanding of this has only come in the last 20 years. That understanding is that there are a lot of way that the body can put things into the gut. So, it doesn’t just take what it wants and leave the rest. The body can use that continuous flow to get rid of stuff it doesn’t want. It’s a way for your body to get rid of garbage. In an ideal world, there would be a strong barrier between what’s in the gut and the rest of the body.

LEAKY GUT SYNDROME

One of the things that happens if the population of bugs in your gut gets out of balance is that the barrier breaks down and you develop what’s called in a kind of slang way, “leaky gut syndrome”. That’s not an official medical term, but it is very descriptive because that’s exactly what’s happening. Things that should not be able to get into your bloodstream get into your blood stream, and some things leak out. Leaky gut can be bad with a poor balance of healthy bacteria, because a lot of unhealthy bacteria are essentially weeds. They get into your body and set up shop in your gut. They’re not well suited to live in your gut. But they can persist and survive because they produce toxins as a survival trick.

The purpose of those toxins is to keep antibodies, white cells and other bacteria at a distance so that they’re left alone to survive and persist in your gut. But those toxins can make you a little sick. If the barriers of your gut have broken down, you are going to absorb some of those toxins. Very often when you get a case of food poisoning, these kinds of bacteria are the cause. When you get bad food, contaminated food or contaminated water, very often the thing that makes you feel sick, is not the bugs themselves, it’s the toxins that those bugs make.

SHIGELLA

There’s a very common food bacteria that causes food poisoning called Shigella. Shigella is one of the things you would typically pick up from poorly cooked chicken, or other poorly cooked meat. Once Shigella gets into your gut, it can keep away all the things your body would do to get rid of it, and so it becomes a sort of a permanent infection. The toxin that Shigella creates is notorious for causing arthritis. It’s not that Shigella is a major cause of arthritis, but if you’ve gotten food poisoning, fever, a lot of diarrhea, and swollen and painful joints, it’s probably Shigella.

I just used that as example of extreme example of things that can happen at a very low level if your gut is not healthy. That where things going on can have an effect elsewhere in the body, at a great distance from the gut. The other thing that happens if you have a nonhealthy population of things in your gut, is that the barrier will be disrupted, giving you a leaky gut. Then you’ve got stuff getting into the bloodstream that was never meant to. What does the body do with garbage and stuff that’s not supposed to be there? The body develops antibodies against it.

RELATING TO AN OVERTAXED SYSTEM

Just going back to the talk last week, the thing that is at the root of a lot of autoimmune disease is an immune system that is overtaxed, overstimulated, reacting to all kinds of stuff and eventually it boils over and eventually it starts creating antibodies against your own tissues. Sometimes the mistake is accidental, those antibodies were originally created to attack something real, but it turns out this is kind of a lock and key phenomenon, that the key that was made to fit in the lock to the bad bacteria or the toxin happens to also fit certain cells in your thyroid, and now those antibodies start attacking the thyroid or other tissues. That’s why you want to have a healthy gut.

There’s a lot of controversy about the use of probiotics, but overall, over 50 years of research, the outcomes people experience says pretty strongly that there’s a value to taking probiotics. That’s why we include probiotics as part of the basic protocol. It’s the simplest first thing we can do to push your gut towards being healthier. The data that’s convincing to me is the clinical data, meaning that you take people with certain problems, certain issues with their gut, and you put them on probiotics, and those things get better. That’s the kind of proof I’m talking about.

ANTIBIOTICS

The causes of the controversy about the use of probiotics come more from the pure science, where you say, well we put in a probiotic that contained certain Bifidus bacteria and we don’t find those in any great numbers in the stool. Therefore, the probiotic failed and it didn’t do anything. That’s a little bit nearsighted and a little bit of tunnel vision that the scientists have there. Yes, you might not find the sort of data you’d want to see, with finding the very bacteria that you put in in the probiotics. But the data that measures outcomes is more convincing, which says that if people have problems, probiotics can help.

They have even done double blinded studies where they give some people probiotics and other people a placebo and the people taking the probiotics show remarkable clinical improvement over the other people. So, there is good proof that they actually help you. I would not get caught up in the modern controversies that are floating around about whether you should take probiotics. I still see enough benefits that I’m still recommending them. It’s certainly an inexpensive and safe and potentially a very useful thing to do.

Coming back to our program, the probiotic we give people to start is JarroDophilus. We provide that product in the first months’ worth of supplements in the program. After a 12- 18 months or so, you may want to change maybe to a different brand. We have different brands that we can recommend if it’s time for you to do that. If you’re calling in and ordering supplements and you want a different probiotic, just let us know and we will substitute something else in for the JarroDophilus.

CONCLUSION

The final thing I want to say about the gut, is an issue that can be of concern in dealing with autoimmune disease is chronic infection. I just want to say that for most people, the issue with infection that they have is the issue with abnormal populations of bacteria in their gut. It isn’t that they have syphilis or tuberculosis or chronic Lyme disease or hepatitis, or chronic herpes.

There are other infections that fit that bill, but having a gut that’s gunky and out of wack counts as a chronic infection. You’ve got consequences from an improper mix of bugs in your body and that’s something that can be remedied, and that’s something that can be reversed. The whole idea in approaching autoimmune disease is not to necessarily do everything perfectly, but to quiet down some of the things that are affecting your immune system and pulling you back from that threshold where things are so overstimulated that you’re having symptoms. I’m going to leave that there. If you have questions we can cover those in the Q&A session.

Today, we’re going to be doing the first talk of part of our three-part series on autoimmunity. I’ve been getting questions about autoimmunity, and specifically there was one question last week that prompted me to do a series on the topic. The main idea of this series is to talk about autoimmunity and eye disease, how they are related, and what to do about them.

This series leads into the Detoxifying Your Home And Detoxifying Your Body workshop, or as I like to call it, the do-it-yourself detox course, which we will be doing in October. You’ll see in the talk next week why the toxins are so important, but I’m not going to talk so much about toxins today. I know that’s an intriguing topic, but hold off questions on toxins until next week. There are a few reasons I want to spend time on autoimmunity in this conference call. It’s becoming much more common, not just for people with eye problems, but everybody. Unfortunately, it can worsen your degenerative eye disease but, there are steps you can take to treat it.

THE AUTOIMMUNE EPIDEMIC

The journalist Donna Jackson Nakazawa wrote a book called The Autoimmune Epidemic. She wrote that book many years ago. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good book, and I don’t recommend you go out and get it. But when it first came out, it was well received and well criticized. People thought it had good information, and she was talking about the very things that I’ve been talking about, the things we’re going to be talking about here. That said, she’s coming at it almost purely from a Western Medicine, allopathic perspective, so when it comes down to treatment, we have different approaches.

The advice in the book, comes down to taking toxic drugs and steroids and things like that. One of the things about The Autoimmune Epidemic that made it interesting to me was that she acknowledges that food sensitivities, toxicity, emotional stress and out of balance gut biome and infections can lead to autoimmune disease. So, autoimmune disease is common, that’s one of the reasons I want to talk about it here. And it can look like a lot of different things, but there is a core similarity between all the autoimmune diseases. I’ll name some of the diseases later.

AUTOIMMUNE AND THE EYES

The other reason I just want to say up front that I want to talk about this in the context of this call is that there’s increasing evidence that autoimmune disease complicates these different eye problems that all of you are struggling with. That is especially true of the degenerative eye disease, like Macular Degeneration, Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) and Stargardt Disease. I chose my words very carefully there. Autoimmune problems complicate those disease. It is clear that autoimmune problems do not cause problems with your eyes. In other words, degenerative eye diseases are not autoimmune diseases.

But autoimmune diseases are common, and they effect the eyes. When you have a worrisome disease that leads to loss of vision, autoimmune problems just make it worse. It means that you essentially have two problems in your eyes. Allopathic literature and the western medical literature understand the relationship between autoimmune problems and RP fairly well. From my perspective in my practice, I think the association with autoimmune problems is common in both Macular Degeneration and Stagardt Disease.

Even though autoimmunity may affect all of us in some degree, there are things you can do about it. It isn’t just a theoretical conversation. It isn’t, “Oh you have an autoimmune disease, I’m sorry.” There are things that we can do to quiet down your over-active immune system and back you out of it. The next thing I want to talk about it, is just a little bit of background about the understanding, the current understanding about autoimmune disease. Again, this is not some crazy alternative medicine understanding, this is mainstream medicine. This is stuff that’s being looked at UCLA and other centers around the country.

LEARNING FROM DNA

We’ve learned a lot from our ability to look at complex molecules like DNA and molecules used by the immune system. A lot of the work that went into decoding our DNA and DNA sequencing, is also applicable to sequencing other complex molecules in the body, most notably, antibodies, and immune proteins. The ability to sequence these molecules has led to a better understanding of what’s behind the formation of some of autoantibodies, which are antibodies you form which attack your own tissues. The basic understanding of autoimmune disease is that results from an immune system that is out of control. An immune system that is so reactive, so twitchy, so angry, that it boils over and creates antibodies that attack your own tissues.

CAUSES OF A WORN OUT IMMUNE SYSTEM

There are many causes of an overstimulated immune system. There are things that you would all understand. Environmental allergens like dust, pollen, cat hair, dog hair, whatever it is you’re allergic to, or even formaldehyde from the new carpet that you bought can irritate your immune system. There are foods that you might be sensitive to, which would also irritate your immune system. There are sensitivities to cow-dairy, wheat, eggs, tomatoes, shrimp and many other things. Emotional stress, or emotional toxicity, is another thing that stimulates your immune system in a bad way.

Toxins are obviously toxic to your body, that’s bad enough, but they also evoke an immune response. Chronic infections can also overstimulate your immune system. That includes things like Lyme disease, Hepatitis, AIDS. Something slightly more common is when you have a biome that is out of balance. A biome is the combination of things that are living in your gut, and if that population is out of order it can cause an immune reaction in you. You may have gum disease, gingivitis, chronic inflammation in your gums, that can be causing overstimulation. You may have viruses that are chronic, like herpes.

SEEING HOW THE PIECES INFLUENCE THE WHOLE

I name all these things because it’s never just one of these things, it’s always a combination of a number of these things together. It’s the infections, emotional toxicity, foods that we eat, toxins including heavy metals, infections and even environmental things. Of all these things, the environmental causes are the hardest ones to do anything about. We all have to breath air, drink water and eat food. The idea of autoimmune problems is that all of these things together tax your immune system to the point it boils over and in that state it starts making antibodies against your own tissues.

WHY IS THIS NOT MORE PREDICTABLE?

The thing that no one really understands is why that same setup, that same combination of factors can produce things that look so different in different people. So, all of these toxins and immune systems boiling over in one person it may look like Thyroiditis, an immune thyroid disease. In another person, it may look like inflammatory bowel disease. In another person, it may look like inflammatory arthritis. Someone else might have an Eczema, Psoriasis or another skin disease.

Another might have a kind of asthma or lung inflammation. I don’t know why in one person it’s the thyroid that’s affected and in another person it’s the gut and in another person it would be the brain and the eye. No one understands that. How you express autoimmune problems is just a personal thing. Maybe that part of your body was where you were vulnerable or I could make up some other explanation, but in the end no one knows.

LOOKING FOR COMMON THREADS

The point is that the underlying setup is the same for all these different diseases. Even though they are called different things, and looked at differently, they are all much more common than they are different. The treatment for these ailments is to do what you can about each of the causes that I names just a minute ago. You want to clean up your diet, detoxify, work on your emotional stress, deal with the health of your gut, clean up any of your chronic infections and make sure you have good dental hygiene. You should clean up your environment in terms of cleaning products and pet hair and dust and other things that can be in our environment that might be causing you to react.

You don’t have to do any of those things perfectly, but if you do the best you can with all of them, you can pull yourself back from that threshold you crossed. The threshold is where things got so bad that now you’re having symptoms wherever that might be. If you do enough, the net effect is that you pull yourself back from the threshold and now you don’t have symptoms anymore. It’s a very effective strategy. I use it a lot, and it works. It’s not easy. It’s not a drug.

FINDING A BETTER WAY

That is one place where Western Medicine and integrative medicine agree in theory. Western Medicine would also say that the problem is an immune system that’s out of control, and the therapies that Western Medicine would offer involve drugs that would kill your immune system. The first level would be steroids like Prednisone, or something similar. The next level involves using other drugs that poison the immune system, and a lot of these drugs are cancer/chemotherapy drugs. One of the side effects of cancer/chemotherapy drugs is that they suppress your immune system. Normally, that is an unwanted effect, but when treating an autoimmune disease, we want that effect.

That works, but at a great cost. The cost of using these drugs over many years is an increased risk of cancer and very serious infections. Even if you want the easy way out, and you go with what your allergist or your medical doctors says and you take those drugs, I promise you it will be a therapy that will only serve you for a few years. You will eventually reach a point where you will have to quit those drugs because of their toxicity, if they don’t just kill you first.

CONCLUSION

The methods I propose aren’t just a weaker way of treating these problems. It’s also a much more sustainable treatment. We are trying to address the core of the problem, which is my favorite way to treat things, rather than just trying to suppress symptoms.

So that’s sort of our first introduction to autoimmunity. We’re going to be talking in the next couple talks about the relationship between autoimmunity and diet and the relationship between toxins and some of the things that can be done about emotional toxicity. We’ll touch on all of them.