Can Someone With Auto-Immune Disease Get Off Their Immune Suppressing Drugs?

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Can someone with autoimmune disease get off their immune suppressing drugs? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer. Been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Paul a patient from Dr. Ailey Cohen's practice asks, how do you manage patients with autoimmune disease? Can patients get off their immune suppressing meds? How do you, as an integrative rheumatologist, evaluate these patients for medical and non medical management? Hey, it's JJ and I have Dr. A. Lee Cohn with me to answer this question. She's triple board certified in internal medicine, rheumatology and integrative medicine. And by the way, an integrative rheumatologist. There are only five of these in the United States. And she's also an environmental health specialist. And she's always been ambitious. She was even an EMT in high school. She's a huge animal lover and she lives on a farm surrounded by animals. She'll be right back with me, so stay tuned.

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So as an integrative rheumatologist, I try really hard to look at every patient individually and personalize because not any of us are are alike compared to anyone around us. So whether or not someone will respond to nutritional changes versus or in addition to medication is really something that we have to work together on as a patient and a doctor as partners. Yes, many patients do either get off medications, lower their doses of medications, or maybe don't even start medications, assuming that all of these other things are put into place. What are these things? Well, improving diet is a good place to start since we have to eat and we have to eat a lot. So we want to make sure that what we eat is clean, is pesticide free as much as possible, is not processed, that we're using whole clean foods wherever available, even if it's organic frozen foods which are also a lot cheaper perhaps or even accessible than fresh organics at places across this country. So thinking about the quality of our food and the fact that we want to go to less chemical, less processed, less adulterated content of our food really affects our body's nutritional level but also keeps the gut microbiome from being destroyed to be disrupted. Many of the pesticides that are on fruits and vegetables can can actually disrupt the gut microbiome and all those vulnerable bacteria and microbes that live within our gut. So we want to think about that. We also want to have clean drinking water which can contribute quite a bit of contaminants as well as pesticides, chlorine and see whether or not we can filter our water to help the immune system of the gut help our bodies to thrive. Thinking about sleep, I work on sleep with my patients. I try to help them get longer amounts of sleep, but also better quality of sleep. Better quality not only means restfulness and feeling cognitively clear the next day. It also lowers pain perception, so people's pain levels are often read as lower after a good night's sleep. Sleep also allows the body's immune system to regulate itself and to also remove chemicals during sleep sleep, which could accumulate during the day from a variety of sources, be it food, water, or even poor air quality. I want people to think about stress. Stress has an enormous impact on the body's immune system and it can affect every health condition, but also autoimmune diseases that I manage quite a bit of, whether it's Ms. Or Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid lupus, polymyalgia rheumatica. So anything that's already any any outside environmental components that are already irritating the body should be removed. And we discuss that Medications are not the worst things in the world. I'm not anti medication. I use them quite a bit and all the time. But what I like to do is not use them reflexively. I like to integrate them, such as integrative medicine describes, integrate them into a healthy lifestyle so that that we can either lower the dose or maybe even move people off of these medications if possible. So it can be done. It certainly is done quite a bit in my practice, but it takes a little work. It certainly takes education and it takes partnership. So I tend to really try to work with my patients closely and it's been a really wonderful experience so far with this practice.

This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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