PDF How to Overcome Autoimmune Disease Guest: Dr. Amy Myers

How to Overcome Autoimmune Disease Guest: Dr. Amy Myers

The purpose of this presentation is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure your condition. These interviews are not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult with your medical professional if you have questions.

Dr. Axe: Welcome! Today, we're going to be interviewing Amy Myers. Amy is a medical doctor who, actually, has a new book coming out here really soon called The Autoimmune Solution. And she's one of the world's leading authorities on how to naturally overcome autoimmune disease with diet, supplements, and lifestyle. Also, she runs her health website, which is and really suggest you go and check it out. She's got some great programs on there on the elimination diet on supporting leaky gut. She also has some free giveaways for you guys to check out with some gluten-free and dairy-free recipes for healing.

And I just want to say, Dr. Amy, welcome!

Dr. Amy: Thank you! Thanks for having me! I'm excited to be here, Josh!

Dr. Axe: Well, great! I know that we have a lot to cover. And autoimmune disease is one of these things that is rapidly growing. But before we go into the stats and what is autoimmune disease and some of the natural remedies for it, give me a little bit about your background and story. How you became a physician and what got you into studying autoimmune disease and becoming one of the experts on this topic?

Dr. Amy: Well, I could actually spend the entire forty-five minutes, probably, telling you my stories. So I'll whittle it down. I do actually have a podcast if people want to hear more about it.

The abbreviated version is that I, actually, grew up with parents who were very openminded, into nutrition. My mother taught yoga. My father was a university professor. And we ate homemade food. The whole wheat bread and homemade yogurt and grew sprouts and had a garden as a child. So I was very into nutrition

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and a holistic way of life. When I got sick, my dad used Chinese herbs to help us get well.

And then after college, I joined the Peace Corps and was down in the middle of nowhere in South America learning about natural remedies and teaching organic farming to farmers and was reading a book by Dr. Andrew Weil, who is the forefront leader of integrative medicine, and came back from that experience wanting to do holistic health or medicine of some sort.

Long story short of my looking into various options, I decided to actually get my MD degree and go to conventional medicine school, knowing that I wanted to treat patients more holistically, but just wasn't really sure how to go about that. So I was president of the Complementary and Alternative Interest Group. Actually, as a fourth year medical student, I actually went and spent a month with Dr. Andrew Weil.

And backing up, my second year of medical school, I actually was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, with Graves' disease. My mother had passed away very unexpectedly and shortly, thereafter, I started having panic attacks and losing weight. And really anybody's whose suffered from an autoimmune disease knows that there really aren't that many great options in conventional medicine for them. And certainly for Graves' disease, your options are to ablate your thyroid, to pull it out, or to take really harsh medications.

So I started with the harsh medications, ended up having--not liver failure--but it was damaging my liver. So I immediately had to get off of it and ended up ablating my thyroid. And, again, in my book you can read about all of this and my traumatic story from that to healing. But it was a really rocky road. And I knew just from my holistic upbringing that there was a better way to do this.

I ended up doing emergency medicine as my official training in conventional medicine because I wanted to, again, practice holistic medicine, but didn't know how to get there. And I knew if I did emergency medicine, one, there is a need for it. And two, I could just simply get out once I found what it was I was looking for.

So after finishing all that training and practicing for several years in a major trauma center here in Austin, I went to a conference and heard about functional medicine for the first time and really how it puts all the pieces together with the body. It looks for

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the root cause. It uses nutrition and supplements to help heal the body and reverse systems and get to the root cause. And when I learned about that or heard about that, I knew right there and then that's exactly what I wanted to do. And so I dove into all of the training through the Institute of Functional Medicine.

And about six months later, I opened my practice and have naturally just sort of...I see any and every body--but a lot of very chronic people with illnesses such as autoimmunity, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia--find their way to me just because of my experience with autoimmune and how I have come to heal myself, ultimately. And so that's really my passion in terms of autoimmunity is that I have my own personal story directed towards it, as well as how I originally got interested in holistic or natural healing.

Dr. Axe: Wow. It's an incredible story. And working under Dr. Andrew Weil, I think, was amazing. You have a really unique background of both, conventional medicine, as well as natural medicine, which I think, obviously, has a lot of benefits to it.

And so let's talk about these conditions of autoimmune disease. What is autoimmune disease, exactly? And then, what are some of the symptoms that somebody could have autoimmune disease in his whole family?

Dr. Amy: So autoimmune diseases are when your body begins to attack itself thinking it's a foreign invader. So our immune system is always active, even though you can't really feel it. You're constantly ingesting microbes when you eat something every day. They're landing on your skin. And our immune system is active and on alert to figure out, "What's friend and what is foe?"

What happens when you get an autoimmune disease is your body...Something happens in that immune system that it begins to think that some part that should be friend, i.e. one of your organs--for me it was my thyroid gland--is no longer a friend and is now a foe. And it goes in to attack that.

Some of the names of autoimmune diseases--because often people know the name of the disease, but don't really understand it's an autoimmune disease--is lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto's thyroid, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, alopecia, Sjogren's. The list goes on and on. But those are some of the most common ones.

Of course, Crohn's, celiac, ulcerative colitis, polymyositis, these are all conditions that

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are under the category of autoimmunity.

Dr. Axe: Well, obviously, as you're saying, there are a lot of conditions. And some of the things, we hear something even like hypothyroidism, today. And you think, "Oh, well, that's just a regular condition." But as we're seeing now and seeing more research, we know that it's more and more, we're finding that most conditions of thyroid issues have to do with autoimmune disease. And so I know as you're saying, we're seeing this growing. There's so many conditions with this today.

So in terms of food, diet, lifestyle, all these different factors and when you have a patient come in and they've got a, let's say, Hashimoto's or Graves' or rheumatoid arthritis or any of these autoimmune diseases you've listed out. And they say, "Dr. Amy, what caused this issue?" What do you tell them? What is the actual cause of their autoimmune issues?

Dr. Amy: Yeah. I'm going to absolutely answer that. And I want to just back up because you'd asked me about symptoms, as well. And I just want to say that the average person sees six to ten doctors before they get diagnosed with autoimmunity. And it takes about an average of five years and that is because the symptoms can be so vague. It can be things such as just fatigue. That's probably the number one cause for a lot of people.

And as you know, that can be a myriad of things, from something not overly serious to lack of sleep to anemia to B12 deficiency all the way up to an autoimmune disease. But it really depends on the system that it is affecting. But it can be fatigue. It can be muscle pain. It can be weakness. It can be--it terms of low thyroid--it can be constipation or weight gain, dry skin, dry mouth. So the symptoms are extremely vague. So I just wanted to bring that up that there's not really...The list would go on and on in terms of symptoms.

And to answer this current question, when somebody comes to see me...And what I write about in my book is that there's really five factors that I think of when it comes to autoimmune disease, the first one being our diet. This processed foods. Certainly, gluten plays a large role, a lot of the genetically modified foods and other inflammatory foods like dairy and grains and legumes for those of us with autoimmune disease.

I think about leaky gut, which I'm sure people have talked about to some degree on your summit. But that's when the tight junctions in the gut, which are normally a little bit permeable so we can let in small particles that we digest, that's how we actually absorb

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food particles. But when we are stressed, we take medications, we're eating a poor diet, these tight junctions can break apart. And then larger particles of food and infections and toxins that weren't supposed to get into our system suddenly can. So leaky gut plays a large role. The work of Dr. [Alessio] Fasano says you absolutely have to have a leaky gut in order to have an autoimmune disease. And now we believe it's the gateway to cancer, as well.

I think about toxins. So that can be heavy metals, mercury, aluminum, lead. That can be environmental toxins, BPAs. That can be even toxins from moles, mycotoxins or toxic moles. I think about infections. Viruses like Epstein Barr and herpes are linked to certain autoimmune diseases and even certain bacterial infections have been linked to autoimmunity, as well as Lyme.

And then I think about stress. And stress, as we all know, is a huge factor in many, many diseases. It suppresses your immune system. And it really just snowballs everything. So there are a lot of case reports of patients, their autoimmune disease getting worse during stress or actually like in my case, coming out after a very stressful situation.

So I walk through those five factors and address each one of them. There's generally not one cause when you get into the boat of something like autoimmunity. You usually...I think of it as a pie. And there are five pieces to this pie. And how much is the leaky gut versus the gluten or diet versus the stress? For one person, the stress might be seventy percent of the pie. But for somebody else who meditates daily, it might be ten percent of the pie. And the leaky gut or the mercury is the larger piece of the pie. So it's never, typically, one thing by the time you get to autoimmunity. You usually have all five pieces of that pie. It's just to what degree do you have them?

Dr. Axe: So when you're saying five pieces to the pie, what are those five things?

Dr. Amy: Yeah. So, again, it's diet. It's your gut or leaky gut. It is toxins, infections, and stress.

Dr. Axe: Wow! Okay. So, obviously, things that we need to be aware of...I know one of the things and we have...And I've personally talked about leaky gut, some of the issues there and how it can be linked to autoimmune disease and that hyper permeability. And you hit the nail right on the head. A lot of times people are wondering, "What's that one thing?" And as you're saying, there are so many different things today that can

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