Autoimmune Illness Treatment Chapel Hill NC
What is Autoimmune Illness Treatment Chapel Hill NC? And why does the body turn on itself?
One of the most baffling categories of all disease is caused by the body’s own immune defense systems acting against itself. There are hundreds of illnesses that we now know are caused by the body’s own immune system attempting to fight the body’s own tissues. Approximately 50 million Americans, 20 percent of the population or one in five people, suffer from autoimmune diseases, with women being disproportionately affected. Autoimmune illnesses are on the rise in the industrialized world and are now the third leading cause of morbidity and mortality, after heart disease and cancer, in the industrialized world.
The standard treatment for most autoimmune diseases is dominated by pharmacological management and the use of immunosuppressive drugs that often have serious side effects, imprecise effects, and zero curative potential. This leads to lifelong pharmaceutical dependency, increased health risk through impaired immunity, and the poor choice of side effects or disease symptoms. It is rare for physicians to seek to understand contributing factors much less help their patients make fundamental changes to their lifestyle to improve their health.
At Plum Spring Clinic we can help you explore the underlying causes of autoimmunity, support the process of behavior change to address those causes, and seek non-pharmaceutical approaches to relieve symptoms that do not cause side effects or impaired immunity.
As part of this process, it is especially important to determine the health of your digestive system and its role in both the treatment of as well as the development of autoimmunity. This is because 70-80% of the immune cells in the body lie within the digestive system and the digestive system plays a critical role in educating immune cells. The flora contained within the digestive system also plays a major role in how our immune system operates. Even if your autoimmune disease did not arise due to circumstances within the digestive system, the disease process will involve the digestive system on some level.
We consider the following areas critical to the treatment of autoimmune disease:
- Assessing the integrity of the absorptive membrane of the digestive system (leaky gut);
- Assessing the health of the gut microbiome (dysbiosis);
- Detecting undiagnosed allergies and sensitivities (food, airborne, and chemical);
- Establishing an anti-inflammatory diet customized to an individual’s needs and preferences;
- Correcting poor stress reactivity, including the assessment of stress hormones and adrenal health;
- Assessing and correcting micronutrient deficiencies;
- A holistic approach that incorporates support of a whole person including healthy sleep, physical activity, and mental health.
The treatment of autoimmune disease is challenging and the results are uncertain whether conventional or alternative approaches are utilized. The Plum Spring Clinic difference is in helping our clients gain greater knowledge and confidence, providing support for behavior change, and in keeping the hope for a drug-free and symptom-free life alive.