Interview-style conversation focused on preventing and managing autoimmune disease through individualized lifestyle changes, functional lab testing, and addressing environmental toxins. Dr. Tiffany Caplan emphasizes symptom journaling, identifying person-specific primary dysfunctions (e.g., blood sugar, digestion), working with functional labs, typical clinical timelines (often a minimum of six months), and practical toxin-reduction measures (mattress off‑gassing, diffusers, new-car smell).
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Because we're all about preventing autoimmune disease. So if someone's recognizing, okay, I have these potential triggers, or I'm constantly in a state of stress, or I'm not sleeping enough, or, yeah, maybe I could clean up the way I eat, potentially. How do they even know where to start? Right? What's. What's the. What's the magic first step?
It's a good question. And it is different for everybody. Like, I'm sure you guys see, too. Like, everybody has their different triggers or their main areas that they need to focus on. And for some people, like, getting off the soda is, like, the. The biggest thing that they could do. And, like, that's the one thing to focus on at first, you know, and build tiny habits, take tiny steps. Other people are, like, all ready to go into, like, a full reset of their diet and their lifestyle all at once. And so we kind of have to meet the person where they're that. But I think what somebody can do themselves is to start taking kind of an inventory of what they notice in their body and starting to pay more attention to what it's telling them. So the way we look at symptoms, symptoms are kind of like if we were a car, it's our check engine light. It's like our way of noticing that there's something going on in our body. And so if somebody's noticing that they're tired all the time or they have some pain or they're getting headaches or they're having diarrhea or bloating, start to kind of take note or journal what they're noticing and when and if it's connected to anything else. Oh, yeah, I was really stressed. Oh, yeah, I didn't sleep. Oh, yeah, I ate this certain food. And then they can start to kind of investigate it for themselves and start to put some of those pieces together. But really where we find the biggest difference is when somebody works with functional lab testing to know exactly what's going on in their body so they're not just guessing. And in that way, too, we can start to narrow down, well, what are the biggest culprits? Like, what are the areas that we should focus on to build a good foundation so that the house doesn't fall down as we're building it. So, like, something as simple as, like, a blood sugar problem could be a priority in fixing so that your cells work so that everything else works, or making sure somebody is digesting so that the food becomes less of a problem. So just trying to figure out, like, for that person what the biggest dysfunctions are and what's trickling into everything else. Because sometimes the symptoms that they're chasing are really just a response to something else that's going on, right?
So, I mean, people come into your practice and they. They have an autoimmune disease, and you can fix them in a week, right? Because you're that good.
Just get my magic wand out, and there we go.
I keep forgetting mine at home. I keep telling people I had one.
And it broke, it shattered. I was so bummed.
How long does it take to like. Yeah, what, What. What does it take and how long does it take?
What does it take and how long? So, again, everybody is so different. I have seen some people turn around pretty quickly because, like, let's say they're eating the standard American diet. They're, you know, not doing anything right, they're not sleeping, they're constantly stressed, they're not moving, they're sedentary. And then they just start to, like, go through an elimination diet. And, like, so many symptoms start to clear up in a matter of weeks. And I've seen that type or that end of the spectrum. And then I've also seen where, you know, we're doing all these things and it takes months to start to get the person to a more stable place, because maybe they've had this autoimmune disease for, like, two decades, three decades, you know, like their whole life they've had problems. It's not going to go away overnight. And so typically, like, the patients that we see that come in with an autoimmune diagnosis, because sometimes we get people that haven't had the diagnosis, but they still know that there's something wrong. And we can still help them get some answers, but just, you know, when there's something like RA or even a Ms. Or lupus patient, typically we'll work with them for six months to a year to really get them to a good, stable place. And that's our goal, is to get them to a place they know how to keep taking care of themselves from that point on. So usually it's like a minimum of six months that we'll work with somebody.
How much work are you doing on toxins? What role is that playing in your practice?
So we definitely look at that as one of the root causes. And for some people, that's one of the top things that is continuously keeping their immune system unhappy and causing problems. I could think of a couple people on the top of my head. There was a Ms. Patient that we were working with For a while, I think we did work with her for, like, probably six months. And she was doing really good for a couple months. And then she came back and she was all flared up and she couldn't figure out because she wasn't doing anything different with her diet or lifestyle. Like, everything seemed fine. She wasn't doing anything different. And we really started to talk about, well, what could be the issue. Turns out she got a new mattress and it was like off gassing and causing her to have a reaction. Or I had like a RA patient who went on vacation and her symptoms got so much better. She came home, they came back, and it ended up that she's using an oil diffuser every night in her bedroom. And like, she stopped using that and things got better. So toxins definitely could be a role. And sometimes that is like the thing we'll focus on. Sometimes we're just kind of making sure the body can handle the toxins and like working on the liver detox pathways and the stool, like being able to eliminate through having good bowel movements or sometimes glutathione. Glutathione is like a staple for when we're talking about autoimmunity. It's like one of the things that literally regulates our immune system. So that's an antioxidant that can help us detox. So depending on if that's the main driver of their immune system challenge, it might be something we focus on first or it might be just kind of cleaning up everything else and the body can handle the toxins better and then educating the person on, like, where the toxins come from. Right?
Yeah. So huge plug for. If you're in the market for a new mattress, make sure that it doesn't have flame retardants in them because they are tremendous endocrine disruptors and throw your system off. And, and, and I always say, like, if something needs to be important, if.
You decide to smoke in your bed, it's really important to have that.
If you're a smoker and you live in a row house and you're going to smoke in bed, you need that. Yes, but otherwise you don't need that. But I think I always say, if it needs to be off gassed, maybe don't buy it. Right. Like, think about if it's going to stink when you get it home. And that's another plug for filter your car. Especially if you get a new car, filter out that new car smell. Even though it's tempting, because that new car smell is 300 chemicals coming your way. So someone who's hypersensitive. Hypothetically speaking, like someone on this call.
