The Immune System Recovery Plan A Doctor's 4 Step
Program to Treat Autoimmune Disease
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Contents
Epigraph
FOREWORD by Mark Hyman, M.D.
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Autoimmune Disease Basics
Part I:
USING FOOD AS MEDICINE
Chapter 2: Using Food as Medicine
Chapter 3: Using Food as Medicine Workbook
Chapter 4: Using Food as Medicine Recipes
Part II:
UNDERSTANDING THE STRESS CONNECTION
Chapter 5: Understanding the Stress Connection
Chapter 6: Understanding the Stress Connection Workbook
Chapter 7: Understanding the Stress Connection Recipes
Part III:
HEALING YOUR GUT
Chapter 8: Healing Your Gut
Chapter 9: Healing Your Gut Workbook
Chapter 10: Healing Your Gut Recipes
Part IV:
SUPPORTING YOUR LIVER
Chapter 11: Supporting Your Liver
Chapter 12: Supporting Your Liver Workbook
Chapter 13: Supporting Your Liver Recipes
Part V:
ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS
Chapter 14: Infections and Specific Autoimmune Conditions
CONCLUSION
Acknowledgments
Appendix I: Helpful Books, CDs, At-Home Programs, and Destination Programs
Appendix II: Supplement and Herb Guide
About Susan S. Blum, M.D., M.P.H.
Notes
Additional References
Recipe Index
Index
is book is dedicated
to the millions of people suffering
with autoimmune disease.
is is your message of hope.
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are
heading.”
—Lao-tzu
FOREWORD
Relief from a Hidden Epidemic of Pain
and Suffering
What disease affects more women than heart disease and breast cancer
combined?
What problem affects 24 million Americans but receives only 5.4 percent
of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget for this problem to study
its potential causes?
e answer is autoimmune disease.
And it is mostly off the radar because it comes in so many flavors and
types. Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel
disease or colitis, diabetes, hypothyroidism, and psoriasis are all
autoimmune diseases. We think of all these problems separately, when they
are really just one disease with many different colors, depending on your
age, sex, and genes. Autoimmune diseases affect our bodies at almost every
level. Some affect our nervous system—like autism and maybe even
depression—and others affect our joints and muscles, our skin, our
endocrine glands, our hearts, and more. Autoimmune disease occurs when
the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues rather than a foreign
molecule, such as a bacteria. ere are more than one hundred different
autoimmune diseases, and as anyone living with an autoimmune condition
will tell you, it has a huge impact on quality of life.
• • •
e emerging science—and its practical application through functional
medicine—points to just a few basic causes of autoimmune disease, most of
which are ignored by conventional doctors, who try to shut off the immune
system with powerful medications that have dangerous side effects.
But the truth is that the root causes of almost all autoimmune diseases are
the same: microbes, environmental toxins, allergens, stress, and poor diet.
By removing these root causes and supporting the body’s optimal
functioning through diet and lifestyle, you can actually recover from these
conditions.
Dr. Susan Blum’s groundbreaking book, e Immune System Recovery
Plan, is a powerful guide to self-healing. Dr. Blum shows how you can
address the root causes of disease and rebalance your immune system. She
lays out a clear road map to recovery for the millions of people needlessly
suffering from autoimmune disease and provides solutions for changes in
diet, supplements, and environment that can help people deal with and even
reverse autoimmune conditions. Dr. Blum’s desire to find these answers was
fueled by her own struggle with autoimmune disease, a condition she has
successfully treated and recovered from by using the program described in
this book.
Our conventional approach to autoimmune disease is to shut down the
immune response with powerful medications including NSAIDs like Advil
or Aleve, steroids like prednisone, anticancer drugs like methotrexate, and
the new drugs like Enbrel, Humira, and Remicade that block the effects of a
powerful inflammatory molecule called TNF alpha. But those new drugs
slow down your immune system so powerfully that they increase your risk
of cancer or life-threatening infections. And they have frequent and serious
side effects and oen give only partial relief.
ese drugs may be lifesaving for some in the short term, but in the long
term they do nothing to address the causes of disease.
Dr. Blum and I use the principles of functional medicine, which takes us
to the root of the problem. We have treated hundreds of patients with
autoimmune diseases successfully by addressing the underlying causes,
including toxins, infections, allergens, poor diet, and stress.
I have even benefited from these methods myself. Chronic fatigue
syndrome has autoimmune features and my blood tests clearly showed my
body was attacking itself. Getting rid of my mercury poisoning reversed my
chronic fatigue and autoimmune problems.
And this has been true for so many patients. For each one, doctors like
Dr. Blum and I find all the causes—toxins, allergens, infections, poor diet,
and stress—and deal with all of them while adding back the things the body
needs to function optimally—whole, clean food, nutrients, exercise, stress
management, clean water and oxygen, community, connection, and
meaning.
Here are some of the stories of recovery that are possible for you.
• One ten-year-old girl came to see me with mixed connective tissue disease—her skin, joints,
liver, and blood cells were all ravaged by inflammation. Doctors attempted but failed to
control her symptoms with horse doses of intravenous steroids and immune-suppressing
chemo drugs. No one asked “why.” Why was she inflamed? What caused the overactivity of
her immune system? ey simply wanted to shut it down. Aer two months on a gluten- and
dairy-free diet, clearing out all the yeast in her gut and restoring her nutrition with whole
food and supplements, she was dramatically better. Aer a year, she had no symptoms and
was off all her medications and her autoantibodies returned to normal. is type of disease
reversal is not seen in conventional practice, but it is possible and available to everyone now
through Dr. Blum’s book, e Immune System Recovery Plan.
• One woman had crippling psoriasis and related arthritis. She was forty-two and couldn’t walk
up and down stairs or get into a bathtub by herself, nor could she properly care for her
children. Nine months aer we started treatment, including eliminating gluten and other
food allergens, removing her heavy metals, and balancing her immune system, she walked
back into my office not only thirty pounds lighter (being inflamed makes you fat) but
completely free of pain and psoriasis.
• Another man suffered for years with the bloody diarrhea and pain of ulcerative colitis.
Dietary changes and various digestive support helped but he never got better until we cleared
out the bad bacteria from his gut and got him off gluten.
• And a recent patient with debilitating fatigue and multiple sclerosis and little white
inflammatory scars on her brain experienced nearly complete relief of her symptoms aer she
had the mercury dental fillings removed and went on a comprehensive detoxification
program. And when she repeated her MRI, all of the white scars from the MS were gone!
Functional medicine practices around the country are helping countless
patients to recover from autoimmune disease. Dr. Susan Blum is the
visionary behind one such practice, and at Blum Center for Health, she has
improved the lives of thousands of people. e approach of finding and
removing triggers of disease, such as hidden microbes, toxins, or allergens,
and supporting the body’s function with nutrients, herbs, and “pro” drugs
such as probiotics is a movement that is now being practiced by
practitioners at the cutting edge of medicine. It is an approach called
functional medicine and has helped tens of thousands of patients worldwide.
e valuable wisdom of functional medicine is described clearly and
thoroughly in e Immune System Recovery Plan. By following the
straightforward, revolutionary program described in this book, you, too, can
treat the causes of autoimmune disease, reverse your condition, and give
yourself the gi of health and well-being.
Functional medicine gives us the knowledge and the methods. Now you
just need to apply them.
Mark Hyman, M.D.
West Stockbridge, MA
September 2012
INTRODUCTION
Ge ing Started: A New Partnership
ere’s a growing epidemic in our country. It doesn’t grab newspaper
headlines or make the evening news, but it’s there and it is debilitating and
potentially deadly. It is the epidemic of autoimmune disease. Autoimmune
diseases are among the most prevalent forms of chronic illness in this
country, now affecting an estimated 23.5 million Americans. More people
suffer from this group of chronic illnesses than from cancer or heart disease,
yet most people don’t even know what these conditions are. is lack of
awareness is killing us—literally. It’s causing severe pain, disability, and even
death. Worse yet, many people with autoimmune conditions suffer with
their symptoms because conventional doctors either can’t figure out what’s
wrong or can’t get to the root of the problem.
e answer is functional medicine, a medical specialty that has come of
age in the past ten years and focuses on reversing these chronic conditions.
Hope is here. You’re holding it in your hands.
WHY A BOOK ON AUTOIMMUNE DISEASE?
ere are more than one hundred different autoimmune conditions, and
they are all serious chronic diseases caused by an underlying problem in the
immune system. is book is a call to alarm: these diseases are reversible
and curable if caught early, before they progress and cause severe pain,
disability, and even death. e first symptoms might be vague feelings of
fatigue, muscle or joint pain, or a nagging feeling that something isn’t right.
With simple blood tests, you can be diagnosed at this early stage, and then,
by following the steps in this book, your immune system can be brought
back into balance before irreversible damage is done to your brain, joints,
thyroid, blood vessels, and other vital organs. If you have been suffering
from an autoimmune condition for some time and you have already
experienced some tissue damage, this book will help you feel better in
general, show how you can actually reverse the effects of the disease, and
help prevent your specific tissue damage from getting worse. As a doctor, I
have long been aware of autoimmune conditions such as Graves’ disease,
rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, lupus, multiple
sclerosis (MS), Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, psoriasis, alopecia areata, vitiligo,
Sjögren’s syndrome, and scleroderma, among others. But when I was
diagnosed with one of these illnesses, it changed both my personal and
professional lives forever.
MY STORY
Before I go any further, let me introduce myself the way I would if you were
one of the patients in my office. I’m Dr. Susan Blum, a board-certified
physician in preventive medicine and an assistant clinical professor in the
Department of Preventive Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine
in New York City. I am also the founder of Blum Center for Health in Rye
Brook, New York.
In medical school, I started down the road of traditional medicine. en
during my internal medicine residency, I quickly realized that I didn’t want
to focus just on illness or disease; I wanted to focus on preventing those
conditions in the first place. But back then preventive medicine consisted
mostly of screening tests and public health programs. It wasn’t part of a
doctor’s everyday practice. Physicians just weren’t given the tools in medical
school to help their patients change their behavior, such as how to get people
to eat healthfully or reduce stress. I knew I had to take a different route as a
doctor, so I sought training from institutions that were considered “outside
the box” at the time. In particular, I was interested in the relationship
between stress, nutrition, and illness.
I moved off the beaten path of traditional medicine toward a more
holistic approach and into an emerging field called functional medicine.
First I completed a program at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in
Washington, D.C., where I learned tools for stress management and
methods to reverse the effects of stress on the body. en, at the Institute for
Functional Medicine, I learned how food affects these processes, either
promoting health or causing diseases. When I started applying what I had
learned about stress management and nutrition in my own practice, I saw
firsthand how these methods helped people to prevent and actually reverse
chronic diseases. ese two ideas—prevention and reversal of chronic
disease—became my passions and are at the core of my medical practice
today. But there is one area where these techniques are truly life-changing:
autoimmune diseases.
I know this not only because I have seen the benefits for my patients who
suffer from autoimmune diseases but also because I saw the impact on
myself when I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease.
I discovered it more than a decade ago when a friend asked me why my
hands were so yellow. I actually hadn’t noticed this before, but she was right,
so I immediately had blood work done to find out why.
“You have hypothyroidism,” my doctor told me aer the lab results came
back. Me? A thyroid problem? I couldn’t believe it. Hypothyroidism is a
condition in which the thyroid gland doesn’t produce enough thyroid
hormone. is hormone is necessary to help the body convert beta-carotene,
a nutrient found in yellow and orange fruits and vegetables, into vitamin A.
Because this conversion wasn’t happening, all the beta-carotene from my
healthful diet wasn’t being properly processed. Instead, these nutrients were
building up in my body, and one symptom of this was my yellow hands. In
retrospect, I realized that this wasn’t the only one. Another was the fact that
I had to work really hard to keep from gaining weight, and a third was that I
was oen very tired. But at the time I didn’t realize these were signs of a
problem. ey had been part of my life for so long that I considered them
“normal.”
Further testing revealed even more bad news. I had an autoimmune
disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. In other words, my immune system,
which is normally the body’s defense in the daily battle against infection and
invaders, was no longer protecting or defending me. In fact, my immune
cells had turned against my thyroid, attacking it and damaging it to the point
where it was struggling unsuccessfully to make enough thyroid hormone. I
was shocked. I had become a vegetarian years earlier, I exercised regularly, I
practiced yoga and meditation, and I had cultivated a strong, spiritual faith.
I had faced my demons in psychotherapy and was finally content with my
life. Because I was doing what I thought were all the right things already,
being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease was shocking and frightening.
I was also a medical doctor, so I just couldn’t believe that something was
going on inside my body that I didn’t know about.
But my primary care physician just shrugged off this upsetting news. “It’s
no big deal,” he said. “You’ll just take thyroid hormone replacement
medication and be fine.” No big deal? Maybe not to him, but my intuition
told me something wasn’t right. My body was out of balance, and I wanted
answers. Why did I have this disease? And why now? To understand my
illness, I decided to use it as an opportunity to explore all that traditional
and nontraditional medicine had to offer me. I didn’t want to take a pill that
would only mask the problem and just manage my symptoms. I wanted to
know why those symptoms were there in the first place.
HOW FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE HELPED ME
e journey that I began aer my diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease led me
deeper into the unique and, at the time, relatively new field of functional
medicine, an approach that considers the whole person, not just his or her
symptoms. Aer receiving my diagnosis, I began using the principles I
learned at the Institute for Functional Medicine to treat myself. As a result, I
discovered that because of a genetic predisposition, I’m at high risk for
autoimmune diseases. I also learned that my body has trouble removing
mercury from my system. (Mercury is a toxin that’s damaging to tissue in
our bodies and a potential cause of autoimmune diseases.) I went on a
gluten-free diet and reduced my mercury exposure by no longer eating fish
high in this heavy metal (such as tuna, swordfish, eel, and striped bass), and
over the course of two years I had my many dental amalgam fillings
removed. I began to drink protein shakes that reduce inflammation and
enhance the function of the liver. (Since the liver is the body’s main
detoxifying organ, this helps it clear mercury and other toxins from the
body.) Two years aer I learned I had Hashimoto’s and started the journey to
treat my autoimmune disease using functional medicine, my antibody levels
were normal and my disease was cured. I was taking a small amount of
thyroid hormone (called levothyroxine), and I had great energy and my
weight was easy to maintain. I was thrilled and excited to share what I had
learned with my patients.
at was the first step. Because my thyroid was already damaged when I
was first diagnosed, my next goal was healing my thyroid, which can take a
variable amount of time for each person, depending on how long it has been
under attack by the autoimmune disease. Since my thyroid gland was quite
damaged from the Hashimoto’s, I still needed, and continue to need, thyroid
hormone replacement. at said, I now take half the dose that I was taking
ten years ago. Today I feel healthier and more energetic than I ever have. My
health journey has taught me what my body needs, how to ask, and how to
listen. Reversing a chronic disease takes time and effort, but it can be done.
My story is proof of that. I did it for myself and made the professional
decision to help other people living with autoimmune diseases do it, too.
Years ago I gave a lecture to an audience full of health care professionals
at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s professional training program.
During that lecture, I talked about the importance of using food as medicine
and how simple things such as breathing and relaxation can work to help
heal disease. I was stunned to find that these important, life-changing
concepts were new to most of the two hundred people in the audience. And
they were health care professionals! I couldn’t believe it. How could these
doctors teach these things to their patients if they didn’t understand them
and weren’t practicing them themselves? It was then that I realized it was
time to get the word out more broadly than simply to my patients and the
people who attended that lecture and other talks I continue to give.
HOW FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE CAN HELP YOU
In 2010, aer several years of planning (and many more spent dreaming
about such an opportunity), I opened Blum Center for Health in Rye Brook,
New York, where the focus is on a comprehensive integration of functional
medicine, mind-body medicine, and preventive medicine. It includes a
cooking school to teach patients and clients how to eat for their health and a
mind-body-spirit center that teaches an array of relaxation techniques not
only to prevent chronic health conditions but also to reverse them. is,
combined with the functional medicine treatment I offer as a medical
doctor, has created extraordinary, life-changing results for my patients.
I’m not the only person who has been told to simply pop a few pills and
move on. And I’m certainly not the only one who thought that there should
be a better way. Today, in my functional medicine practice at Blum Center
for Health, patients oen share with me what their traditional medical
doctors have said aer diagnosing them with an autoimmune disease: “Get
used to the painkillers. You’ll need them for the rest of your life,” “We don’t
know why people get these diseases,” and “Your immune system can’t be
treated.” ese are just a few examples, but the recurring theme is generally
one of hopelessness. e idea is that you should just accept your diagnosis
and the inevitable lifelong battle with painkillers, drugs that suppress your
immune system, and the side effects of both (some of which can be
devastating and long-term). I simply refused to accept that there was
nothing I could do for myself or the other 23.5 million Americans currently
living with autoimmune diseases. But with the prevalence of autoimmune
diseases on the rise, I know that there are many, many people living with
these conditions who will never make it to my office. I wrote this book so I
could offer this plan—an effective and healthy approach—to a broader
audience.
Many traditional doctors have an attitude of “just give in to your illness,”
which only leads you to feel utterly powerless. It also makes your disease
worse because it undermines the body’s natural healing process. e
mind-body connection is real and powerful. ere are many studies that
show that the more control a person feels he or she has over a situation, the
higher the rate of healing. People do better, feel better, and live better with
various health conditions if they have a sense that there is something they
can do for themselves. And there is! at is one of the core principles of
functional medicine, and as an expert in the field, I’m here to show you how
much control you can have over your own health and well-being.
So what exactly is a functional medicine expert? First, let me tell you
what it is not. Most traditional doctors take note of your symptoms and
figure out what diagnosis they can bundle those symptoms into. is usually
dictates your treatment. erefore, if you and a friend have the same
symptoms, you oen get the same diagnosis and then the same treatment.
is works for trauma and for health issues such as appendicitis or a broken
leg, where certain things such as surgery can remedy an immediate problem
or symptom. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work when you’re trying
to treat and prevent complex, chronic illnesses such as autoimmune
diseases.
A functional medicine expert is like a medical detective gathering all the
clues of your past (where you grew up, your family situation, traumatic
events, health history, etc.) and your present (potential toxins in your
environment, social life, stress level, relationships, diet, workout regimen,
sleep habits, symptoms, etc.). Armed with this information, a functional
medicine expert tries to uncover how and why your body is not functioning
well. is type of detective work is what I offer all of my patients at Blum
Center for Health and what I used to cure myself of the serious autoimmune
condition that I had. It is exactly what I will offer you with the interactive
elements that run throughout this book.
Sidney Baker, M.D., a well-known preventive medicine specialist who is
oen called the father of functional medicine, once said, “If you are sitting
on a tack, the answer is not to treat the pain. e solution is to find the tack
and remove it.” e Immune System Recovery Plan will help you find the
“tacks” that are causing your immune system to malfunction and remove
them one by one. It will take you through the four critical steps that will
remove things from the body that are bad for the immune system and then
make sure the body has exactly what it needs to function properly.
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM RECOVERY PLAN
