Stephen B. Edelson - What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About(TM) Autoimmune Disorders

PUBLISHERS NOTE: This book is not intended to be a substitute for medical care and advice of physicians. You are advised to consult with your physician or healthcare professional with regard to all matters relating to your health, including matters that may require diagnosis or medical attention. In particular, if you are taking or have been advised to take any medication, you should regularly consult with your physician.

This book provides selected information about autoimmune disease. Research about this complex subject is ongoing and subject to conflicting interpretations. Please note that the information provided in this book is based on sources that the author believes to be reliable. All such information is current as of March 2002. In order to protect the identities of the patients whose stories appear in this book, we have changed names and in a few cases created composites.

Copyright 2003 by Stephen B. Edelson and Lynn Sonberg

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.,

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

First eBook Edition: March 2003

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2756-0

WHY DO I HAVE THIS DISEASE?

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MY BODY?

WHY DONT DRUGS AND OTHER CONVENTIONAL

TREATMENTS MAKE ME FEEL BETTER?

Toxins, which are all around us, are at the root of many autoimmune diseases. They lurk in our clothing, our furniture, and in the products we use every day. Our bodies make heroic efforts to eliminate the toxins, but sometimes the burden is just too much. Get the facts on:

Bottled water: Toxins from the plastic bottles can leak into the water. Use a water filter instead.

Plants: Did you know pollution-reducing plants, including mums and spider plants, can remove chemicals such as formaldehyde and benzene from the air?

Toxins in your home: Carpets, furniture, plastics, foam rubber, upholstery, tiles, linoleum, paint, and varnishes emit hazardous chemicals into the air.

Safe pest controls: Use boric acid and heat instead of toxic pesticides.

Radiation: Protect yourself from the dangers of microwaves, computers, cell phones, televisions, power lines, heating pads, electric blankets, and more.

LEARN
WHAT YOUR DOCTOR MAY NOT TELL YOU ABOUT

AUTOIMMUNE
DISORDERS

This book is dedicated to my wife, Carol, who has always been the major supporting structure in my endeavor to achieve the best in the work that I do, and to my children (Dana, Richard, Alex, Brad, and Joshua), who make me want to continue to produce. Lastly, to my mother and deceased father, who were there from the beginning.

S.B.E.

This book is dedicated to my ever-patient husband, Tim Schaefer, and to Shiloh, my faithful feline companion during the writing of this manuscript, who succumbed to a fatal disease at the age of four and a half years as the book was completed.

D.M.

I am indebted to the Edelson Center staff, which includes my clinical supervisor, Danna Carlson, my front office manager, Maria Speizer, and the remainder of the front and back office staff. Over the last two years there have been many other employees at the Center, and I would like to thank all of them for their dedicated assistance in running it. For critical assistance in laboratory diagnostic assessments of immunocompetence, immunotoxicology profiles, oxidative stress profiles, and other relevant aspects of physiological integrity, I would like to thank the following individuals and diagnostic laboratories: Aristo Vojdani, Ph.D., of Immuno-sciences Lab Inc. (Beverly Hills, Calif.); Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratories (Asheville, N.C.); John L. Lasseter, Ph.D., of Accu-Chem Laboratories (Richardson, Tex.); and Jonathan Pangborn, Ph.D., of Bionostics (St. Charles, Ill.). I am grateful to Lynn Son-berg for her guidance and for giving me the opportunity to write this book. Lastly, I wish to express my gratitude to all my patients, who have allowed me to learn so much in taking care of them. Without their help and courage I could not have unveiled the deeper levels of the biological disorders that underlie the disease.

M ore than forty million Americans wake up each morning in a war zone. There arent any guns going off or tanks bursting through their homes. These individuals dont need to dive for cover to escape enemy fire. Thats because the enemy lies within them. They have an autoimmune disorderone or several of more than eighty identified so fara condition in which the body attacks its own cells and destroys them.

You know these disorders by names such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma, multiple sclerosis, diabetes type 1, Crohns disease, and thyroiditis, among others. These conditions largely affect women; in fact, about 75 percent of all autoimmune cases involve women, most often in their childbearing years. Among U.S. women, autoimmune disorders collectively are the fourth largest cause of disability, ranking behind cancer, heart disease, and mental illness. Clearly, autoimmune disease has a dramatic impact on lives.

Youve probably picked up this book because you are one of the forty million. If you are like many of your fellow sufferers, youve been to two, three, even six or more doctors in search of

answers to why you feel so poorly. When you recounted your story to a doctorabout your chronic fatigue, persistent muscle aches and pains, low-grade fever, dizziness, or how you generally feel lousy all or most of the timeyou may have been told it was stress, or a part of aging, or depression. Then you may have been handed a prescription for a painkiller, a sleeping pill, or an anti-depressant and sent on your way.

Maybe you were one of the lucky ones who found a doctor who ran a lot of tests and came up with a diagnosis for an autoimmune disease: for example, lupus, or thyroiditis, or rheumatoid arthritis. Then you felt validated; someone had named your disease. You went home with an armful of prescription bottles, but after months of taking pills and more pills, you still didnt feel good. Chances are you had side effects from some of the medications, and then you were given more drugs to treat those side effects. You felt caught in an endless cycle of pills, pain, and confusion.

Every day at the Edelson Center for Environmental and Preventive Medicine, I see people who were once caught in that endless cycle. They were caught there because the current approach to autoimmune diseases by the traditional medical community is basedlike with most diseaseson treatment of the symptoms of the illness rather than removal of the cause. But, you ask, isnt it more logical to remove the cause than to just put a bandage on the symptoms, which doesnt make any attempt to heal the body?

Sure it is. But current medical school curriculum is based on a doctrine of medicine that dates back to the 1800s. That doctrine is founded on naming a disease and finding a medication or other treatment that will suppress it. This approach is not interested in identifying why a patient is ill, nor is it concerned with discovering ways to heal the body. Thus you and millions of others with autoimmune conditions are not being helped by conventional medicine, because doctors are not trying to remove the root cause of your disease: they only want to treat its symptoms. And that is only a temporary solution.