So I know you guys are tired of hearing me go on about pills and shakes every morning while we're going through this cleanse protocol, so I'm going to do something a little different this morning.

I had a patient in for, a new patient, for autoimmune issues yesterday, and she suggested, she had been watching some of these, and she suggested that I talk a little bit about what I explained to her yesterday, so I'm going to do that now.

When we have patients come in with autoimmune issues or inflammatory problems, there's a protocol I have. It's called a fix anything protocol, and it's just an acronym that gives us about 11 different areas of concern that we have to deal with if we're going to get the inflammation and the autoimmune issues under control. I'm not going to go through all 11, but I'm going to go through the heaviest hitters, the ones that we see over and over again, the ones that are highest on the list, and the ones that are almost always at the root of the problem.

So if we're looking for how to get down to the root cause of inflammatory and autoimmune problems, these are the areas we have to investigate and we have to account for.

Number one on the list is always food and intestines. If you've got food, foods that you react to, right? A little bit different than food allergies. There are some technical differences there, but if you've got food reactions or food sensitivities, that can constantly be activating your immune system and creating inflammation. If you've got leaky gut or a gut infection, that leads to the food sensitivities, so those two go hand in hand. They're always first on the list.

Toxicity is next on the list. That's what we're dealing with as we go through this cleanse. Then there's something that's going to be in toxicity and one of the other headings together that I'll talk about in a minute, but toxicity has to do with all the [inaudible 00:01:52] we get exposed to on a daily basis and our food and our air and our water, our clothes, off gassing from paint, all that stuff.

Nutritional deficiencies. There are a lot of them, but some of the heavy hitters there are going to be Vitamin D, Omega-3 fats, magnesium, really all the minerals. We tend to be very mineral deficient. As time goes on, our soils are more depleted of minerals, and so our food isn't delivering that, but nutritional deficiencies like those have to be accounted for.

Hormone imbalance, you're going to have thyroid hormones, gender hormones, and adrenal hormones, and they all have their own place, and they all have to be in balance and working together to keep your body functioning and healing and repairing and doing all the good stuff it needs to do. If those get out of balance, things can go wrong pretty quickly.

Blood sugar. So blood sugar levels and insulin levels. If they get too high, if they're not well controlled, then you get a lot of inflammation from that, and it can actually do a lot of damage inside your body, so you want to watch out for those.

Lastly, I'm going to talk about immune. Now obviously if you've got autoimmune problems, your immune system is involved, but you can have stealth infections. You can have infections that have been kind of laying resident in there, Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, Lyme disease, co-infections of Lyme like Babesia and Bartonella, anything in the herpes family, you can have those kinds of things that they're just kind of quietly acting like spyware in the background and messing up your immune function, and you have to account for those and make sure that those aren't getting in your way. Make sure that they're kind of solidly in remission and not popping up and causing trouble.

And then here are the things that kind of straddle the toxicity and immune category. Mold exposure. If you live in a house that has moisture issues and mold issues, that is a very toxic situation, and it affects your immune system. It can also affect liver and kidneys and other things, but it falls into both the toxin and immune system.

And then, how should I say this? Periodic preventative injections, those, especially the recent ones, can fall into both the toxicity category and the immune category. Not everybody has bad reactions to those, but some people have very bad reactions to those, and that has to be accounted for as well. So those are the heavy hitters. Food, intestines, toxicity, nutritional deficiencies, hormones, blood sugar problems, and then immune system, spyware kind of stuff. If you can assess and address those, chances are you can get your inflammatory and autoimmune conditions under control. You can get your body to function normally again. So just wanted to share that. If there are other things you want to know about, if you want some questions answered in my morning routine here, just let me know, and I'll do those over the next few days. Otherwise, you guys have a good one, and I'll see you tomorrow.