I trust you’ve watched the previous videos where I spoke about what is autoimmunity, who gets it, things like that. Now we’re going to talk about the 14 common types of autoimmune diseases, actually 15. There’s probably 20. But I’ve shaved it down to about 15 types.

I’ll just mention the autoimmune disease. I’ll talk briefly about that one, so you sort of get to know a little bit about it. The first one we’ll talk about is type one diabetes, or diabetes Insipidus. Diabetes mellitus, or type two, is different. Type one is autoimmune. Type two is not autoimmune, it’s more adult onset or it’s usually lifestyle generated.

So when you’ve got type one diabetes, you’ve got an insufficiency of insulin production. So the acinar cells that produce insulin in the pancreas apparently have a problem. They don’t really make enough insulin anymore, they’re getting attacked by the immune system. Now that creates a whole bunch of problems.

Often people pick up type one diabetes quite young in age. But I have seen this condition also come about through various drugs or medications, and even severe emotional shock can push somebody into type one diabetes. So a good friend of mine, in fact has two kids, well they’ve grown up now, with type one. And it can happen, I mean it can just happen. It can happen in families and sometimes it’s idiopathic, and that means no known cause. It’s really strange how it just, it can happen.

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So in type one diabetes, the immune system attacks and destroys your insulin producing cells. High blood sugar results in, can lead to damage of course of blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, things like that. And nerves, you can get all sorts of damage occurring. So the person has to monitor the insulin levels and take regular tiny little jabs of insulin, often once or twice per day to keep the condition under control.

The second one, I’ve seen so much of, is rheumatoid arthritis. So this is the inflammatory arthritis. Okay? This is not the wear and tear osteoarthritis, which often occurs of old age. But I don’t believe osteoarthritis, or any form of arthritis, should occur in anybody. If you read all the books like I have in days gone by, many times for example, a graveyard would have to be removed because a road was coming through.

So studies were done on bones of people that lived in the 18 hundreds, 19 hundreds, and many studies have found people not to suffer from degenerative conditions like osteoarthritis or rheumatoid, in many different places of the UK and the US. And these are people just eating good food, basically, not really getting the deficiencies we’re getting today.

So rheumatoid arthritis often affects the hands, the small joints of the fingers, and it can be extremely painful. So yeah, this one really is bad for some people. Some people have terrible quality of life with rheumatoid arthritis. One of my key things I like to do with these kinds of patients is to do a comprehensive stool test, and check for Streptococcal bacteria, Klebsiella bacteria, and other kinds of dysbiotic flora, and we work on it. In fact, that’s the thing I’ll talk about later. Part of treatment, which I recommend for all autoimmune patients, is stool testing. Because bacterial infections are one of the key drivers behind inflammation.

So even my old textbook here, 1936, rheumatoid and cliometric arthritis, which, well basically, menopausal arthritis you’re talking about. But yeah, we’ll talk about this book later. But it’s interesting, in the book it says, in all cases, look for the hidden infection. And in fact, in all autoimmune diseases, I recommend you do that. So rheumatoid arthritis patients often go on strong medications to reduce the pain, but there are lots of alternatives, of course.

There’s psoriasis, of course, and psoriatic arthritis. So psoriasis affects quite a few people. So this, as I mentioned previously in another video, is the hyper proliferation of skin cells. So the skin is being attacked and the skin cells are being shed at a very quick rate, which causes flaking and irritation, and itching, and scaling, and sometimes even bleeding. So up to 30% of people with psoriasis, I think it’s something like 24%, in fact go on to develop PSA or psoriatic arthritis, which is very painful condition of inflamed joints and a skin problem. So the other thing that you’ll need to learn with autoimmune conditions is, if you have one condition, you can develop a secondary condition as well, unfortunately.

So the fourth condition is MS, or multiple sclerosis. Now in this case, the myelin sheath, or the installation around the nerves, is being attacked by the immune system. And this can create all kinds of sensations, like peripheral neuropathy, like burning feet, tingling, numbness, pain, tiredness. Mood disorders often come with it. There are different types of MS. You have some conditions where it will go quite fast. Others, it’s remitting and relapsing; so it will stop, start, stop, start.

You’ll find that with many autoimmune conditions, some will go in a steady, slow progression. Others will go a little bit, then they’ll stop, and they’ll go a bit, then they’ll stop.

So, according to a 2012 study, about 50% of MS patients need help walking within 15 years of the disease starting out. So can affect your feet quite badly, that one. Multiple sclerosis is a condition of the temperate zones. We see it predominantly in right up North, and also down South. To Scotland, regions of Canada, and also of course New Zealand have very high rates of MS. Which makes many researchers believe that could be a vitamin D problem, or a sunshine problem there.

So SLE, systemic lupus erythematosus. SLE. First described, I think in the 18 hundreds, lupus after lupus, the Wolf, because there’s a rash that people can get on their face, sort of a Wolf like rash. And that’s where the word lupus comes from. So lupus can affect women pretty bad. I’ve seen some quite nasty cases of lupus over the years. In fact, the worst cases I’ve seen are the people who had the worst digestive systems, which was quite interesting. Which made me wonder whether it was the medications that wrecked their gut, or if the condition brought on the lupus. I mean it’s hard to know in some cases.

So with lupus, as I mentioned previously, this is a systemic condition. So lungs can get affected, joints, the heart, eyes, kidneys, many different parts of the body can be affected. There are also various pharmaceutical drugs that drive these conditions. So that part of the cause of many of these autoimmune disease can be iatrogenic or drug induced, which is devastating.

Inflammatory bowel disease, IBD, is something I’ve seen an incredible amount of in New Zealand since I started practice. I saw many patients in Australia with inflammatory bowel disease, particularly ulcerative colitis.

In fact, most of the young people I’ve seen in New Zealand were taking a drug called Roaccuntane, or Isotretinoin, for their acne. And there are no links between that drug and inflammatory bowel disease. I’ve seen at least seven cases, seven cases I think last count, of young people who developed inflammatory bowel disease after taking this particular drug.

So be careful if you’ve got acne, not to go on Roaccutane or isotretinoin, can also be called Accutane. It’s a devastating drug. Go to Google and Google Accutane or acne treatment, and inflammatory bowel disease. You’ll find tons of stuff there. The doctors all know about it.

So there are two types of IBD, inflammatory bowel disease. The more insidious one or the very disturbing one is Crohn’s disease, which can create deep ulcers anywhere in the mouth, all the way through to the anus.

Whereas ulcerative colitis, as the name implies, it affects the colon or the large intestine. In both of these cases, it’s very, very important that you get a comprehensive stool analysis completed to see what needs cleaning up in the gut. I’ve worked with hundreds of cases of IBD, and the success rate on reducing symptoms to a minimum is very, very high when you work a natural program.

Addison’s disease, number seven. This is an adrenal insufficiency. So people with Addison’s are often born like that, but again, it can be developed iatrogenic through a drug or a shock, a big shock. I’ve seen some people develop Addison’s after the Christchurch earthquake that we had here in New Zealand in 2011. Seriously bad earthquake, I think we had 230 people pass away. I saw two cases of Addison’s disease that developed around that earthquake.

Addison’s disease affects the adrenal glands which produce hormone cortisol and aldosterone, as well as other androgen hormones. Having too little cortisol affects the way the body uses and stores carbs, but having too much is devastating also, for the circulatory system which occurs with high stress. Deficiencies of aldosterone can lead to sodium loss, excess potassium in bloodstream, weakness, fatigue, you get all these kinds of problems. A precursor to Addison’s disease often is adrenal fatigue. So some patients I’ve seen have had seriously poor adrenal function, and then just plunged into Addison’s disease.

Graves’ disease, overactive thyroid. So Graves’ disease basically is when the thyroid stimulating hormone drops down to low, because the thyroid got kicked in the butt too many times by the pituitary gland. So the thyroid works overtime. The eyes can get affected, they can be a lot of photophobia, like the sunlight’s affecting the eyes quite a lot. Anxiety, tremor, palpitations, these are quite common with graves’ disease. Restlessness, can’t sleep properly, weight loss. High appetite, but can’t gain weight.

So again, there are various medications that doctors will pedal for a graves’ disease. The Carbinmazole is a drug of choice often used for this condition.

And I’m not a verse Carbinmazole, because it works quite well, and once patients have learned to slow down, often they can be slowly pulled back on the medication.

What have we got here… Actually we should Chuck another one in there. Hashimoto’s is already in there. Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. So Hashimoto’s is not uncommon. It’s in fact the most common thyroid disorder, globally, is Hashimoto’s. So Hashimoto’s can affect your thyroid, often make it go too fast or too slow. Many patients who develop Hashimoto’s will initially go through a hyper phase and that can last anywhere from a couple of weeks up to a few months. The hyper phase will slow down and they go and plunge into a hypo phase.

So there’ll be shades of overactive and underactive every now and then in the patient who’s got Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. So as the thyroid starts going down in function, the body becomes colder, there’ll be more constipation, there’ll be huge fatigue and sleeping disturbances, all kinds of issues there.

Hashimoto’s, again, still testing needs to be completed. Comprehensive hormone panel needs to be completed. Hormones need balancing. Also worth, in cases of many of these autoimmune diseases, to do a hair analysis to see if there’s any toxic metal junk in the body. It’s not uncommon to find a lot of land, or mercury, or arsenic, or cadmium in these people.

Remember we spoke before about the environmental concerns, about toxins and fertilizers, and printing ink, and solvents, and junk like that. So the more you expose yourself to chemicals, the higher the probability you’re going to get a sickness.

So the next one is Sjogren’s syndrome, which is a little bit like… Can be classed as a connective tissue sort of disease, a little bit like lupus. Sjogren’s affects the eyes quite a lot. In fact, my mother in law has Sjogren’s currently, but my mother in law is naughty because she also likes to eat lots of white bread with jam. That was her breakfast for many mornings. So when you’re eating lots of sugar, of course bacteria love that. So you can push yourself into a bad bacterial state, which can drive up autoimmune disease.

So Sjogren’s affects the eyes. Dry eyes and dry mouth, and also joint pain. But the dryness of the eyes is a hallmark, is a red flag, for this condition.

Myasthenia gravis. So this is a really nasty condition that affects the nervous system. It affects the nerve impulses that help the brain control the muscles. So as soon as there’s an impairment there between the brain and the muscles, you’re going to get all kinds of problems there, right? You’re going to have problems with swallowing, with talking, with walking, with movement, with all sorts of things. So the muscles that control the eye movements, eyelid opening, and swallowing, and facial muscles are often involved. It’s not a nice condition. Myasthenia.

Then there’s Autoimmune Vasculitis. So this is a blood vessel condition. So the blood vessels can get attacked. The inflammation that results narrows the arteries and veins, allowing less blood to flow through them. You get a condition called Ischemia, and that can lead to all sorts of problems with hands and feet, and different parts of your body.

Pernicious anemia is the next one, so that’s a problem with vitamin B12. So usually it follows your stomach. Any cells that produce this stuff called IF, or intrinsic factor. And intrinsic factor is a hormone, protein hormone, that binds to B12, that takes it down to the terminal part of the small bowel for uptake. So if you’ve got a problem with intrinsic factor, you can’t really have a good source of B12 in your body. And that leads to neuropathy, that leads to depression, tremors again. Tongue problems, people get swollen tongue, sore tongue. Depression can range from mild to serious, bad clinical depression.

What else have we got with pernicious anemia? We got sleeping disturbances. We will have again, burning feet with some people. Tingling and they’ll have poor grip strength. There’ll be many different things going on there for pernicious anemia. So that affects people aged over 60, more than anything.

Celiac disease is the next one. So celiacs, of course, is a problem with gluten. So this is when you build antibodies against gluten. So it’s only a small percentage of people, I think it’s about 1% of people are celiacs. So many people believe that they can’t tolerate gluten, in fact dumped gluten, when they’re non-celiac. Most people can tolerate gluten to a degree, but depends how much you eat. All right? A study noted that celiac affects 1% of people.

A large number of people have reported gluten sensitivity, which is not autoimmune disease, but have similar symptoms. So you can have issues with gluten but not be celiac. Okay? That’s another thing that you’re going to think about.

So these are just a few of, I could spend an hour talking about so many different types of autoimmune diseases, but these are the common ones.

You might have a condition now that’s not amongst these 14, 15 odd diseases. But don’t worry, you can look it up on the internet and get an idea more of the condition.

What type of person gets autoimmune disease? Who gets it? I mean is it just something that strikes you like a bolt of lightning out of the blue? Not really. I mean everything has a reason. As you know, there’s causes for every single thing that occur in your life and including autoimmunity. There are probably four but maybe even a dozen categories that we could talk about.

If you look at it, it’s common, for example, to be genetic link. Genetics are not that uncommon when you have a look at the pattern of conditions, for example, like multiple sclerosis. Scientists are not sure whether it’s one gene or a combination of genes plus environmental factors that trigger the response of autoimmunity. I’ve got different theories on it as well here when we talk about the causes, because I’ve got my own ideas on causes based on my experiences, which are probably different from other people.

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Exposure is another thing. Many people I’ve seen over the years with autoimmunity, who develop autoimmune disease, were exposed to chemicals. Now, these could be solvents, they could be herbicides, weedicides, they could be sprays. I’ve seen people in printing presses a long time ago, when they had printing machines, develop autoimmunity. People playing on the golf course with lots of chemicals that were sprayed a lot around the green. I’ve seen some people like that develop, for example, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

People here in New Zealand did aerial topdressing, so they’ll have super phosphate fertilizers in aircraft and they’ll drop that fertilizer onto fields, pastures for cows. I’ve seen those guys develop autoimmune disease.

There’s no doubt, some people who are exposed to certain types of chemicals are certainly more prone to autoimmunity and also bacterial and viral infections. Other people who get those can get shunted straight into autoimmunity.

Women of childbearing years seem to be commonly hit, as I mentioned in the previous video, age between 15 to about 45. There’s much higher incidence of women contracting autoimmune disease at that time of their life, which shows you there’s likely a hormonal component there as well. Of course, ethnic groups, white people are more prone to type one diabetes.

African-Americans, for example, are more prone to lupus, for example. Again, it makes me think, is it the bacteria involved in here favoring certain types of communities based on their diets? Yeah, we’ll talk about that in causes.

There’s lots of different types of people who can get autoimmune disease, but there are clearly defined patterns that lead down that path to develop, what we call, pathophysiology, develop that disease. There are pathways that move down there, so yeah.

Why do only some people get autoimmune disease and not the others? I mean, if we have a look in America for example, I think it’s around 24 million people currently living now in the United States, which is I think, what, 7%, 8%, of the population, have autoimmunity.

If you look in Australia and New Zealand, it’s quite similar sort of statistics. So, but globally there’s a rise in autoimmunity. They’re noticing a certain shift. If you have a look at research done by John Hopkins, Mayo, many other major institutions, they’ll all tell that autoimmune disease is going up and up and up. But why the hell is it happening? Why just some people getting it and not the bulk?

Well, that’s a really interesting question. But we do know that women tend to get whacked more with autoimmunity than men do. So, is it a hormonal thing? Experts disagree on that too. But what a lot of people agree on, a couple of things. One is the hygiene hypothesis, because everyone’s so anally clean these days that it’s really hard for our own bacteria to thrive in a condition where we keep wiping our faces and hands down every five minutes with these wet wipes and spray chemicals all around the house. So, that’s one hypothesis.

But the other one, which to me is more plausible, is people are traveling around the globe a lot more. There’s many more people, there are many more chemicals, many more foods. So we’re getting an increasing exposure to an increasing population base.

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But, still, not everyone is copping autoimmune disease. And I believe it’s got a lot to do with the microbiome with our gut and with our stress. Those are the two key things I’ll talk about, which I believe are the two main drivers behind autoimmunity, is a weak microbiome and high cortisol levels.

And I believe, in my opinion, from where I’m sitting, why some people get it and others don’t, is because some people are far more prone to the effects of stress and also have a much easily upset gut because they have a more narrowly defined band of bacteria in their gut, so their resilient is not so good. So they can flip into an autoimmune state much faster than other people can.

When you have a very diverse microbiome, many more species, you have a greater chance, I believe, of a stronger gut immune health, less ability for things to be pushed around in there, less ability to develop larger biofilms of bad bacteria and yeasts.

So if you keep the bad guys at bay, keep the good ones humming along nicely, and keep the balance well, really established, and as we know, the chunk of the immune system resides in the small intestine. So if we keep the gut in great shape, it reduces our ability to have, to develop autoimmune disease.

Because many people who develop autoimmune disease, from my experience, from my clinical experience, were high-stress people, poor lifestyles, not so good food. And we see that with women of childbearing age. We particularly see that a lot, high stress.

We’ll talk more about that later, but this is why I believe some people cop it more than others. It’s the stress angle and the poor microbiome angle.

Greetings. Eric Bakker, the naturopath from New Zealand. Thanks for coming back. We’re going to do a series on autoimmune disease. I’ve had quite a few people asking me this particular condition now for some time. I’d like to talk about it. It’s an area I’ve got a big interest in. As you are aware of I’ve just retired from my clinical practice after 30 plus years. I’ve seen a lots of different case presentations of autoimmune disease. I’ve got a pretty good understanding of autoimmune disease, what it entitles, what I believe the causes are, and the effects and also different treatments and things like that. We’ll go into that.

But first, what the heck is autoimmune disease? You’ve probably heard of that word before. Autoimmune, what does it mean? It sounds really puzzling doesn’t it? Well, if you look at your immune system it’s basically designed to keep you alive. It stops really the onslaught of things like viruses, various pathogens, bacteria, yeast, fungi, different things from penetrating into the body and creating a problem. The immune system sets up that response.

There are two sides to the immune system, well two parts. You’ve got the front end and the back end. I may have explained this in a previous video. There’s the cell mediated response or the front end of the immune system. We would really call this the Marines or the hand to hand combat. Then we’ve got the guys up the back, the humoral response. H-U-M… I think H-U-M-O-R-A-L, humoral response. That’s the back end. These are white blood cells that are specialized. This is not hand to hand combat. These guys up the back can’t really see the enemy they’re fighting. They’ve created specialized chemicals in subsets of cells to help them. Now these are lymphocytes, B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes.

The front end are the neutrophils. These basically attack bacteria head on., A bit like the Marines can actually see the enemy they’re fighting. That’s the neutrophil hand to hand combat. But when that gets breached, of course the enemy goes through the humoral response have to pick up at the back end. If we look at the humoral response and the specialty kind of troops… If you look at a war, you’ve got guys in planes dropping bombs on people. You’ve got people shooting bombs at people that can’t see them, the rocket launches and stuff like that. That’s the humoral response. It’s a complicated system, front end, back end, but it works not unlike an Army. How an Army and how the Marines would work I guess in the Air Force and the Army would wait together. But that system can go astray horribly astray.

Now, in wars you can also create something called collateral damage where you’re shooting what you think is the enemy, but in fact you’re dropping bombs on your own guys. That’s a little bit like autoimmunity. Autoimmunity is when the immune system actually started turning on itself. Okay. Antibodies are created that start attacking or causing problems for specific parts of your body. There’s about, I think 75 or close to 80 known autoimmune diseases. Most are quite rare. You’ll probably knew that early on in your life. There’s probably about 15 or 20 of them I know reasonably well. However, what they believe… experts believe there’s another 30 or 40 that could be added to that category. We could be looking at over 100 different types of autoimmune diseases. They’re categorized into two major groups.

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You’ve got localized autoimmune disease and systemic. Localized, for example, being rheumatoid arthritis where it’s going to affect the joints, the small joints predominantly. Also, if we look at psoriasis, an autoimmune condition that affects the skin, that makes the skin cells shed too fast. You’re going to get this high proliferation of epidermis or skin cells building up and getting all this flakiness around the head and things like that. Others can be more systemic like systemic lupus erythematosus or SLE or lupus. All right. That can affect many different parts of the body, the skin, the kidneys. The heart can be affected. Often these things are quite vague to pick up.

Autoimmune diseases in many cases don’t get picked up for years. Women tend to have more of a problem with autoimmunity than men do. In fact, it’s two to one or even three to one in some cases. Women can be more prone, particularly between the ages of 15 to about 45 when the fertility is… They seem to be effected. Often conditions will start early on and build up. Then the woman will be diagnosed often several years later, which I find pretty poor, but that happens in many cases.

I’ve diagnosed several cases of autoimmune disease myself in my practice when the doctor had no idea what was going on with his patient. With all due credit to that medical doctor, the patient may have approached him or her in the early days when the symptoms are rather vague, but it surprises me how many doctors even get psoriasis and dermatitis mixed up, conditions like that. Anyone can make mistakes. Autoimmunity is when the immune system attacks your own body. All right? We’re going to talk in this series… We’ve got a whole lot of stuff we can talk about.

Who gets autoimmune disease? Why does some people get it? Why does it detect the body? What are common autoimmune diseases? Causes? Symptoms? We’re going to cover a whole lot of stuff. If you’ve got an autoimmune condition or you have a loved one or friend or relative, somebody you care about or anybody that has autoimmune disease, I’d encourage you to have a look at the entire series, to start from the first video and work your way through or you can watch it in any particular order, but you’ll learn lots of little things that you probably would not have heard anywhere else regarding autoimmunity. Why would that be so? Is it because I know different information? Well not really.

I’ve worked with patients now for over half of my life. I’ve worked with lots and lots of different people, thousands of people. You build up a sort of a knowledge bank over a period of time, particularly conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis, Hashimotos’s thyroiditis. These are conditions I’m very familiar with. I’ll certainly be speaking a lot more about these conditions. Do hang around, if you got autoimmunity. Even if you haven’t, you’re going to get a lot out of this series.