Functional Medicine for Autoimmune Disease: How It Differs from Conventional Treatment
Conventional medicine and functional medicine take two different approaches to treating autoimmune disease. A functional medicine practitioner and a conventional doctor have different post-graduate training and therefore have differing viewpoints about how to treat autoimmune disease. Both approaches use different tools and produce different outcomes.
If you’re looking for a natural treatment for rheumatoid arthritis or any other autoimmune conditions, functional medicine can yield excellent results. Functional medicine seeks to address the underlying causes of autoimmune diseases, not just the symptoms. This can often be done with natural treatments like diet, supplements, and lifestyle changes. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the ways that conventional medicine and functional medicine differ in treating conditions like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and other autoimmune diseases.
How Conventional Medicine Views Autoimmune Disease
When a conventional doctor diagnoses you with an autoimmune problem, you get a label that tells you which disease you have. There is usually a matching medication that will address the symptoms. Most autoimmune diseases are viewed as having no cure. Conventional medical doctors may say it is an incurable autoimmune disease . Since you’re always going to have it and there’s really nothing you can do about it, the approach is to just manage it as well as possible while it continues progressing. It’s a very doom and gloom viewpoint.
How Functional Medicine Views Autoimmune Disease
In functional medicine, we like to look at it from a more optimistic standpoint. Autoimmune disease is a sign that your immune system is being challenged, and our goal is to understand what’s challenging it. Functional medicine takes the viewpoint that diseases have underlying causes, which can be modified so as to return a person back to healthy function. Instead of just managing your autoimmune disease symptoms, functional medicine practitioners manage the actual reason why it’s happening. We can help support you when you need it most, but the autoimmune disease isn’t going to be something that causes you problems forever.
Autoimmune conditions are by definition modifiable. After all, that’s what the word condition means. Conditions are conditional. They can be changed. Our focus is figuring out what factors we can change or modify in your health in order to put your autoimmune disease into remission.
Conventional and Functional Medicine Doctors Are Trained Differently
The reason why conventional medicine and functional medicine doctors view autoimmune disease differently is because they’re trained differently. In conventional medicine, doctors spend a lot of time learning how to diagnose conditions. This is great because knowing what your disease is called is helpful. Learning the diagnosis and the disease process help the conventional medicine practitioner to prescribe a specific medication that relieves the symptoms of the disease. Surgery is another important tool that conventional doctors learn about. However, they are not familiar with the how to restore the physiology of health and they don’t get trained on addressing underlying causes of diseases.
In functional medicine, we don’t want to just have a label for the disease. We want to understand why the label is happening, which is why we investigate deeper with lab work. We spend time understanding factors that contribute to disease, including how lifestyle and environment influences health. We learn about stress, sleep, exercise, hydration, nutrition, and environmental factors such as exposure to toxins. We learn about how these factors impact the gut microbiome, the collection of bacteria, both good and bad, that reside in your intestines.
Once we understand what root causes are affecting you, then we can pick and choose the right tools to improve your health such as lifestyle modifications, minimizing exposure to environmental triggers, or supporting health with dietary supplements. This differs from conventional medicine, whose toolbox primarily includes pharmaceuticals and surgical interventions.
Functional Medicine Uses Alternatives to Immunosuppressants
Typically, conventional doctors will treat autoimmune patients using medications such as immunosuppressants, which suppress part or all of the immune system with the goal of minimizing symptoms and damage that’s being done in the body. Or conventional doctors will replace a missing element such as prescribing a hormone.
On the other hand, functional medicine tries to make your body work better rather than just blocking the immune system or replacing hormones. We’re not just trying to suppress the immune system. We’re not trying to do what we call green pharmacy where instead of a pharmaceutical suppressing the immune system, we’re going to use herbs to suppress the immune system. Instead, we want to modulate the immune system.
We try to understand why you have an autoimmune disease in the first place. And then we try to help the body work more efficiently using vitamins, minerals, herbs, or even enzymes along with other lifestyle approaches. We’re using all these therapies more as a tool to fix the body rather than just band-aiding the symptoms.
Functional Medicine is a More Personalized Approach
Conventional medicine is very cookie cutter. Everybody with the same diagnosis gets put on the same medication. Some people will notice it helps, other people won’t notice anything, and some people have reactions to the drug. If you have a particular diagnosis, there’s a typical drug that they start you on. If that one doesn’t work, they use another one. It’s not personalized.
In functional medicine, everything that we do is personalized. We look at your individual lifestyle, goals, and what habits you have and which ones are helping and which ones aren’t. We look at your diet and your individualized nutrition. The supplements we choose are based on the lab patterns that we find.
A good example of personalization is the adrenals. A lot of people are hearing about the adrenals, the stress hormone cortisol, and the damaging effects of high cortisol. Once they read about cortisol, they might think they have cortisol problems. So they decide to take herbs and supplements to block cortisol. But sometimes, when we look at labs, we find out that they are in an adrenal fatigue state, meaning their cortisol levels are low due to burned out adrenals.
There’s actually eight stages of adrenal dysfunction. The stage where your adrenals are functioning and what forms of stress you’re currently experiencing will dictate your level of adrenal dysfunction. Depending upon what pattern we see in your labs, we can pick and choose different adrenal support herbs. There isn’t just one adrenal support supplement that everybody takes if they have adrenal problems. We are much more targeted and more specific in what we use to support adrenal problems and get better outcomes doing that.
Another example is a lot of people are hearing the term leaky gut and they assume they have leaky gut. A lot of people with autoimmune disease do have leaky gut—but not everybody. The tricky thing is that there isn’t just one pattern of leaky gut or one cause of leaky gut. There’s not just one factor that contributes to it. When we do stool testing, we can figure out if you have leaky gut, and what kind of leaky gut you have.
In terms of leaky gut, we ask the following questions:
• What are the factors that are contributing to leaky gut?
• Do you have a really inflamed gut lining?
• Do you have gut microbiome problems?
• Are you having food sensitivities?
• Are there pathogens in your gut?
We have to look at all the different reasons why you have a leaky gut in order to pick the right tools to fix it. Otherwise, people tell us, “I have leaky gut. I’m just going to go on this leaky gut protocol.” That leaky gut protocol may or may not do anything for you because it wasn’t personalized to your specific physiology or your situation.
One of our practice members has psoriasis, and she mentioned she had been working with a different healthcare provider who put her on a leaky gut protocol. Unfortunately, the provider never did any testing. She actually became worse doing the protocol. And when we reviewed her stool test, it made sense why the protocol was actually making her problem worse.
Functional Medicine Offers a Long-Lasting Outcome
Conventional medicine creates a dependency on symptom management because medications aren’t fixing the problem. Usually people on these medications still experience symptoms, autoimmune flares, and disease progression. What’s worse, the medications actually contribute to other problems and more medication is needed to handle those side effects.
In functional medicine, because we’re not just treating symptoms, we have better outcomes for people with autoimmunity. We look for the root cause, so we’re treating the autoimmune condition from a diet, lifestyle, and nutrition standpoint. That way, we can start making changes in somebody’s habits and routines. That gives the body the support needed to fix the problem. What’s ultimately happening is the person is creating a better lifestyle that is not only fixing the current issues that they have going on, but it’s also helping them create a new long-term way of living sustainably, rather than relying on symptom management.
With a functional medicine approach, you’re learning about what foods might trigger your immune system. You’re learning about environmental triggers. You’re learning about what stressors are in your life that influence your immune system. You’re looking at the things you use in your home and in your daily routines and asking if your relationships are potential triggers. Once you understand what your body likes and doesn’t like, you can make better choices to avoid the factors that are going to flare your immune system or cause disease progression.
Ultimately with autoimmune disease, we want to put it into remission, which means it’s not active, it’s not causing problems, and it’s not progressing. The outcome of the functional medicine approach is a long-term sustainable state of remission because we are not only fixing the problems that led to the issues to begin with, but we’re teaching you how to avoid those problems in the future.
There’s a time and a place for medication management. I have in certain cases in the past referred people out for medication management when I think that’s going to be the factor that gets them better faster or when it’s going to be the most efficient way to get them to a place where they can then do the work to improve their condition with natural treatments. Some people are in such a bad place that they need pain management medications before they can even make dietary or lifestyle changes.
Most people under functional medicine care are able to stop being dependent on medications or even many vitamins or herbs. They’ve created a new lifestyle that’s overcoming the need to be dependent on medications or supplements.
Functional medicine focuses on putting the patient back in the driver’s seat of their health by helping them understand how their actions impact their health. Functional medicine tools are designed to help support the healing process versus just trying to bully the body into complying, such as shutting down the immune system with immunosuppressants.
We Offer a Personalized Approach
As functional medicine doctors, Caplan Health Institute can create an individualized approach for treating lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, or other autoimmune conditions.
The first step? Schedule a free 15-minute discovery consultation, by phone or video.
If you decide to come on board as a practice member, we can order tests and create a personalized plan to show you which strategies will work best for you. We call our patients “practice members” because they take an active role in their health. In addition, our Caplan Health Institute coaches can work with you to make sure you’re staying on track and not slipping backward. We’ll work with you to put your autoimmune disease into remission so that you can feel like your old self again and enjoy the healthy future in front of you.
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