Phoenix Helix: Autoimmune Resilience

In cultures around the world, we gather together over food: we have dinner dates, drinks with friends, favorite festivals, and big family meals at our grandparents’ house. What happens when we can’t eat that food any more? Some people make the mistake of giving up their social life altogether because they simply don’t know how to manage it. Today, I have 3 experienced AIP-ers on the podcast to share their experience and advice for having a full and fun social life while still staying true to your healing diet. It can be done!

Stress is intimately connected to autoimmune expression. Many of you have experienced this yourself, when a high-stress situation kicked off an autoimmune flare – or even an autoimmune diagnosis. While we can take steps to strive for a lower-stress life, the truth is that part of life is experiencing tough times. Whether it's aging parents, troubled teens, the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, the death of someone we love, or our own autoimmune struggles, we can’t avoid stress altogether. So, that means we need to have tools to manage that stress so that it doesn’t negatively impact our health. That’s what today’s show is all about. Evan Brand is a functional medicine practitioner and the author of the book, Stress Solutions. Here's here to teach us how to take care of ourselves through the ups and downs of living.

One of the tragedies of modern life is the belief that health is meant to decline as we age, and there's nothing we can do about it. On today's show, I have 3 guests proving otherwise. They all transitioned to a healing diet after the age of 60 and saw a dramatic improvement in their health. They hope to inspire others in their age group (or any age) to do the same!

If you've been doing the paleo diet and lifestyle perfectly and aren't seeing results, infections can sometimes be a roadblock to healing. On today's podcast, Dr. Michael Ruscio talks about which infections are common, which are rare, and how he diagnoses and treats them in his clinical practice. We talk about SIBO, h. pylori, parasites, candida, Epstein-Barr and other intracellular infections. We also talk about overtreatment and how to differentiate a healing crisis from an allergic reaction to the treatment itself.

Emotional Freedom Technique, otherwise known as EFT, is a simple technique designed to release emotional blocks to healing. What does that mean? The idea is that no matter what challenges we are experiencing, including chronic illness like autoimmune disease, there is always an emotional component. Long-held blocked emotions make us more vulnerable to disease, and they also make it more difficult for us to heal. Today, we have EFT expert, Dr. Anne Merkel, on the podcast to teach us all about it. She has been practicing EFT and other forms of energy psychology for the past 25 years, and her specialty is autoimmune disease.

We have a special guest on the show today - Mark Sisson, the paleo leader and voice behind Mark's Daily Apple, and the author of many books including The Primal Connection. One of the things I’ve always loved about Mark’s message is that health is about more than just food. It’s about every aspect of life. The Primal Connection explores the disconnect between modern life and the life of our ancestors – how we live completely differently now. We can’t go back in time, but we can learn from our past. Today, we’re going to talk about what aspects of ancestral living we can incorporate into our modern lives, and what we can gain from doing so, in terms of health and happiness.

Low-Dose Naltrexone (LDN) is a nontraditional autoimmune medication that sometimes dramatically decreases symptoms at low cost and with minimal side effects. It has been mentioned in some of the healing stories shared on this podcast, so I promised to dedicate an entire episode to learning more. Our guest, Dr. Thomas Cowan, is a medical doctor in San Francisco who uses LDN as part of his autoimmune patient treatment plan. Today we learn what this drug is, how it works, how to find the right dose, and how to find a doctor who prescribes it.

I think every woman with autoimmune disease knows how strongly our hormones can impact autoimmune symptoms. Some women flare around their periods. Some go into remission during pregnancy and then flare after delivery or after they stop breastfeeding. Others find their symptoms start to increase during the hormone fluctuations of perimenopause. And others actually develop autoimmune disease after menopause. So clearly hormone balance is a topic near and dear to us all. In this podcast, I interview Dr. Justin Marchegiani, a functional medicine practitioner who specializes in hormone balance. He'll teach us what's at the root of hormone problems at all stages of a woman's life, and how to correct them. For my male listeners, today's podcast focuses mostly on women, but at the end of the podcast, Justin talks about hormone balance for men as well.

Do you believe that you can't meditate? In this episode of the Phoenix Helix podcast, I hope to convince you otherwise. Meditation relieves stress, reduces inflammation, and can have a powerful impact on your life. There's no one "right" way to do it, and you really can't do it wrong. Today, I interview four people with autoimmune disease, each sharing a different form of meditation and the impact it's had on their life and health. At the end of the podcast, I share how meditation has worked in my own life since my rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis 4 years ago.

Today's podcast delves into a potential healing roadblock: Histamine Intolerance. Do you have unexplained skin rashes, headaches, digestive upset, mood issues and brain fog, even though you are following the paleo autoimmune diet and lifestyle perfectly? Our podcast topic today might be a piece in your healing puzzle. Histamine is a natural component in both our food and our bodies, but certain things can make it overproduce, causing myriad symptoms that keep our body in a hypersensitive state. Today, we talk with histamine expert, Alison Vickery, on what causes histamine intolerance, and what we can do about it.