Susan Blum - The Immune System Recovery Plan: A Doctors 4-Step Program to Treat Autoimmune Disease

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This book is dedicated

to the millions of people suffering

with autoimmune disease.

This is your message of hope.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

Lao-tzu

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 Healths (NIH) budget for this problem to study its potential causes?

The 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 systemlike autism and maybe even depressionand others affect our joints and muscles, our skin, our endocrine glands, our hearts, and more. Autoimmune disease occurs when the bodys immune system attacks its own tissues rather than a foreign molecule, such as a bacteria. There 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.

The emerging scienceand its practical application through functional medicinepoints 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 bodys optimal functioning through diet and lifestyle, you can actually recover from these conditions.

Dr. Susan Blums groundbreaking book, The 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. Blums 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 often give only partial relief.

These 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 causestoxins, allergens, infections, poor diet, and stressand deal with all of them while adding back the things the body needs to function optimallywhole, 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 diseaseher 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? They simply wanted to shut it down. After 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. After a year, she had no symptoms and was off all her medications and her autoantibodies returned to normal. This type of disease reversal is not seen in conventional practice, but it is possible and available to everyone now through Dr. Blums book, The Immune System Recovery Plan.

One woman had crippling psoriasis and related arthritis. She was forty-two and couldnt walk up and down stairs or get into a bathtub by herself, nor could she properly care for her children. Nine months after 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 after 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. The approach of finding and removing triggers of disease, such as hidden microbes, toxins, or allergens, and supporting the bodys 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. The valuable wisdom of functional medicine is described clearly and thoroughly in The 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 gift of health and well-being.

Functional medicine gives us the knowledge and the methods. Now you just need to apply them.