There are a number of conditions that are known as autoimmune conditions. That is you attacking yourself with your own immune system that have very obvious rashes associated. The typical butterfly rash from sun exposure, Lupus is one of the foremost ones.
People who have patchy hair loss, known as alopecia areata also have an autoimmune disorder as do people who have vitiligo. In many of the cases, they have an attack on the pigment cells in their skin. Any type of information can be a kind of an autoimmune disorder. If you have redness or any of the things that I’ve mentioned before, they are possible signs that you have some autoimmune condition.
It’s important to get to the basis of this, not just to try to treat the local area, so that your body stops attacking itself and causing destruction through autoimmune disease.
Your body ought to know who’s you and who’s not you, right? This is what whole immune system is set up to figure out: who is you and who is not. This is an extremely important task, and this task is done by a whole network of different cells. Indeed, when you’re born, your body determines who is you and who is not. The immune system becomes tolerant of cells that are you. When there is an external attacker, like a bacteria, your body produces antibodies to destroy it.
But, when there is a subtle threat, such as one of your own cells transforming into a tumor (or virus or a fungus) living inside your cells, altering your cells, then it takes a very subtle immune system to detect that there is a difference and to recognize and attack those altered cells.
When your immune system becomes confused, perhaps because of various issues, you can become sensitized to that cell or foreign agent that looks a little bit like your own cell. With the confusion from something else going on, you can attack your own self by mistake, and that’s what we call autoimmune inflammation. The following can sensitize or confuse your immune system, especially if more than one of these things is present in your body at once:
stress
a virus
infections
vaccinations
medications
exposure to something that looks like some particular cell or cell component
Just the wrong set of circumstances can cause this “confusion” so that perhaps a bacteria or virus entering your body looks a little like some particular cell in your body. Your body attacks that bacteria and then begins to attack that cell in your body.
For example, certain viruses can cause an attack on the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin, which can cause Type One Diabetes. There are whole number of examples that are known and there are probably thousands or even millions more that have not been recognized.
These are some of the ways that autoimmune conditions can arise in your body and that your body might even attack itself. You can treat autoimmune disease with holistic medicine, but it requires real commitment.
The basic two types of inflammation. They are the immediate hypersensitivity and the delayed hypersensitivity.
The immediate hypersensitivity is mediated by antibodies, especially of the IGE class. These are the antibodies involved when you take a whiff of a flower or pollen and start sneezing, and develop hay fever.
The other type of inflammation comes on a day or two later. This type is mediated by lymphocytes: white blood cells that are in your body that distinguish what belongs and what doesn’t belong. Then, they set up a reaction to it by dividing in the lymph nodes and bringing an army of cells out to destroy the targets.
They destroy especially two kinds of targets. One target is you, modified, so if you have some poison ivy on your skill cells that get recognized as “you, modified”. The other kind of “you, modified” could be if you have a tumor that’s arising and the cells look a bit different than they should. Your body uses a very sophisticated arm of the immune system to distinguish those differences and set up a reaction to destroy them.
And your body is doing that all the time – getting rid of those tumors. And that is the delayed hypersensitivity system. Both of these systems can recognize a problem and get rid of it. For instance, hypersensitivity will attack virally infected cells or chemically modified cells as well as tumors, or even the fungus-modified cells. So if you have a fungus they’re involved in that attack as well.
However in some instances, your body’s immune system does something different. Once it has recognized some target that seems to be a problem, it may start to recognize some other parts of your system modified that look like the original target. And your body will attack that and cause destruction and an inflammation there as well. This we call cross-reactive attack because of molecular mimicry.
So the body’s immune system has two different major systems and many, many variations. Information has been growing since I started studying this decades ago. But these two basic types still prevail and are good starting points for understanding react to different things.
In functional dermatology, we examine the entire system of the organs and the body as a whole. We see that inflammation is the cause of most of the rashes and skin conditions with itching and redness in the skin, and with scaling, and even blisters. There are different kinds of immune responses that lead to each of these conditions and there are also different kinds of responses where the tissues themselves cause individual reactions you see as very different skin conditions.
It’s important to understand both how the physiology of how your skin works and how the immune system is reacting when you have inflammatory problems. This is the place where a good understanding of immunology is very helpful.
I have been very fortunate to have been involved in the area of cellular immunology and delayed hypersensitivity for many decades. It’s helped my perspective and seeing how conditions can be improved by getting at the underlying conditions that are there and causing difficulties. Be sure you find someone who understands this when you are trying to dig deeper to get to the cause of your inflammatory condition and treat it and get it better so that your whole body improves as well and including inflammation that can cause damage to other organs in your body.
Use your skin as an indicator of your health so it can lead you to the best overall heath possible.
Looking for natural skincare support? Gluten has a number of different activities including as a lectin punching holes in cell membranes and enabling things to get into cells or enabling things to escape from the intestinal track that shouldn’t be escaping. Since it’s so high on the list of likely allergens, it is one of the things that can make a difference in people’s health or having various kinds of manifestations of allergic or unknown conditions.
On the other hand, going gluten-free makes it very difficult to eat in restaurants or to eat anything that you don’t prepare yourself from scratch. If you truly have a gluten sensitivity or you truly are celiac, which is a gluten sensitivity plus certain genetic markers. Then it may also be worth identifying that before you go gluten free because it’s easier to do so while you’re still eating gluten and if you really are a celiac, even a tiny, tiny bit of gluten can set you back significantly and it’s good to know that. So going gluten free is a reasonable experiment to do.
Going gluten-free may be helpful, but it may not be sufficient. Furthermore, there are a number of people who have multiple allergies. Just stopping one thing is not going to make them all better any more than if you’re sitting on three thumbtacks, removing one of them is going to solve all the pain you’re having in your bottom.
Can natural skincare improve your energy and overall wellbeing? “The question I’d like to ask you, Dr. Dattner is, what is the most rewarding thing you find about your work in holistic dermatology?”
“Seeing people get really back into the world of the living where they’ve been having chronic fatigue your digestive problems or skin problems that have kept them indoors or out of the game, and seeing them begin to feel really good about themselves, feel more energetic. I really love making a difference in people’s lives, and that’s the kind of thing that that keeps happy.”
“So, it’s encouraging them to the the well to have a good diet exercise well…”
“Yes but there are many specifics for the given individual. It’s not just good diets–it’s the kind of diet that they need, the things they need to eliminate include in order to make shifts in how their immune system is functioning how their digestive system is functioning in what parts that actually their genomes are opened up in reaction to things.”And you can get a sensor that with the tests that you do by speaking with them?”
“Yes, because you see each person is a living example in their experiences up how they react, so I get it of a lot of information from just hearing a person’s story in asking pointed questions that let me know what’s going on with the various aspects physiology.”
“I had been on methotrexate for psoriasis. Dr. Dattner suggested I followed a diet and treatment plan. I did and got as excellent a result in clearing my skin with just diet and topical medications as she I had gotten with the potentially life-threatening pharmaceutical methotrexate. Relieved to be off the drugs.” -AP, New York
“Dr. Dattner is an extremely gifted physician who helped me recover from a painful and disfiguring skin disorder. My skin was bleeding, shredding, breaking, and swelling from inflammation–so much that I had to wear a surgical mask.
He identified my autoimmune damage, and within days, dramatic improvement occurred. I could finally sleep, and uncover my face, due to the reduction of pain and inflammation, after having seen many doctors. Progress steadily continued.
With gratitude and appreciation, I have only the highest recommendation for Dr. Dattner.” -MK, New York
