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Treating Autoimmune Diseases With Dr. David Bilstrom
Welcome to another exciting episode of the show. I am honored to be joined by Dr. David Bilstrom. This can be so fascinating. Dr. Bilstrom, please introduce yourself.
Thank you for having me. I’m a medical doctor, and I’m changing how autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide.
Autoimmune Diseases
That is so fascinating. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you on. How and what are you doing to help change how autoimmune disease is treated?
It’s a worldwide problem. Autoimmune disease is when the immune system starts attacking our own body parts. It is never a good idea to attack our own body parts. It is counterproductive. You’re self-destructing. Historically, when your body starts attacking your own body parts, the only thing that’s offered to people is medicines that suppress the immune system.
By suppressing the immune system, a couple of symptoms of this attack on our body parts might get better. Still, you haven’t addressed why this is happening and why this keeps pushing you in the wrong direction, so people can get a second, third, fourth, or fifth autoimmune disease. I can’t tell you the number of kids or people in their 20s with five autoimmune diseases already.
Since cancer is the flip side of the same coin as autoimmune disease when the immune system is disrupted, it’s not only trying to push you to autoimmune disease but it’s also trying to push you to cancer. All these medicines that are offered put a bandage on something and you keep getting worse anyway, have a side effect that increases cancer risk. As a side effect, they can give you a new autoimmune disease. They increase your risk of getting an infection because your immune system is so suppressed. It is an infection that no amount of antibiotics can treat. You die of a massive infection.
What we’re trying to let people know is there’s another option. When your body is attacking your self, you can be in such pain. Your brain is so foggy. You’re so tired. If you’re attacking the gut like Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, you’re pooping 50 times a day. You can’t get out. You can’t get away from the bathroom and do your stuff. If you can’t do what you need to do to get through your day and you have to put your pants on, the medicines aren’t wrong.
What is wrong is thinking that they’re the only option or that you might want to be on them long-term. We’re trying to let people know that the science is very clear about why this happens and the science then is clear what we need to do to ideally prevent it in the first place. You can see this stuff coming a mile away. Also, if you already have it, we can reverse it and make it go away. If you need those meds temporarily, you don’t need them anymore. You don’t need the side effects that they produce. You’ve addressed the root cause and you’ve done your due diligence to try to keep somebody healthy for the rest of their lives so they don’t get new stuff.
Since I started this, we know that this immune system disruption is part of so many chronic health issues we didn’t know before. We have all the classic autoimmune things that we now know are part of heart attacks, strokes, and osteoporosis. Seventy percent of all autism is one particular autoimmune disease like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and all these things. We go, “That’s part of the immune system too?” It is. I get excited about that because I’m like, “That’s good. We know what causes that. We can prevent that too.”
That’s fascinating. The question is how are you doing this? How are you helping to reverse it? Being a semi-educated layperson, I didn’t know that we could stop Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, fibromyalgia, or any of the autoimmune diseases.
Rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Sjogren’s, and all that kind of stuff.
How might this happen? I know that’s a big question.
You inherently know the answer in that epic begins with one step forward. The first step is knowing that we know where this comes from and we can reverse it or prevent it. You may ask the person who offers you this immunosuppressant medication, depending on the specialty, “Why did I get this?” They’re like, “We have no idea why people get this though.”
You’re like, “How can I make it go away?” They’re like, “You can never make it go away. You get stuck with it forever.” That means that person doesn’t know where it comes from and how to reverse it. They may be excellent at being able to use those medicines to get you through your day, but the first step is understanding, “We know where this stuff comes from. We know how to reverse it.” You’re then in a position to go, “All right.”
Also, it’s easy for people to think when they get a chronic health issue that that’s how it’s going to be, “My body is not able to do this. Body, you’re abandoning me,” especially when your body is attacking yourself. An epic first step to know is that your body is so smart. Its default mode is always to move towards wellness.
An example I like to tell patients and people is if you’re walking around your house barefoot and you kick a chair leg, you start hopping around in tremendous toe pain. If there are small children around, you try not to cuss, but you are like, “This hurts.” Inherently, we have such confidence in our body’s ability to heal. We’re not thinking, “We’re going to have terrible toe pain. I’ll hop around in pain for the next 50 years.” We’re thinking, “My body is going to fix it in 2 to 3 minutes. I’ll probably be fine. I’ll try not to do that again because that hurts like crazy.”
We get these chronic things and we’re like, “What are you going to do? I’m going to have it forever. It’s going to get worse.” I may even go on the internet and read about this thing. We can reference fibromyalgia. We’re told, “We have no idea why people get this. We have no way to make it go away. This is going to get worse over time. You’re going to live a miserable life, and you’ll die a miserable death.” I go, “I wish I hadn’t read that.”
Your body is always trying to fix something. It always knows how to fix something. If you get a health issue and your body doesn’t make it go away spontaneously like it would a cold, a flu, or a stubbed toe, you know something has gotten in the way. The science is very clear about what that tends to be. That’s a little different for everybody so we got to treat everybody as a unique individual. If you figure out what’s in the way and you get it all the way, the body goes, “I can fix this now.” Off it goes, fixing all this stuff. We’ll see people that have a health issue for 80 years and it goes away. Your body has been sitting there for 80 years waiting for an opportunity to fix this. It can fix it.
Your body is always trying to fix something. It always knows how to fix something.
How are you and your colleagues discovering what’s getting in the way?
The science was clear, even 15 or 20 years ago. We have known so much more in the last 8 to 10 years. I was already doing this in private practice near Chicago. I had a lot of people from Chicago, the East Coast, and this kind of stuff. I read this story. This is a heartbreaking story in the New York Times. It was about this famous journalist who was both losing her career and her life to lupus. Her story was one that I’d heard 1,000 times. It was so sad.
She went to multiple doctors and spent multiple years getting worse, and then she got the diagnosis of lupus. The only thing she was offered was medicine to put a bandage on a symptom, which kept getting worse. I go, “This is terrible. Somebody has to change how autoimmune disease is dealt with worldwide.” That’s where I said, “This is a worldwide problem. This would go as a medical tourism model where people are willing to travel for healthcare they can’t get locally.”
This is pre-COVID. I go, “Where do people travel already?” I don’t want to have to reinvent travel patterns. I want to plop down in some place where everybody goes to already. This is how I got up into the Rocky Mountains. I’m about an hour outside of Jackson Hole. I am close to Yellowstone, Sun Valley, and all this kind of stuff.
What an ugly place to stop. They had to choose a terrible place. It’s so ugly.
I don’t know why people come to visit this from around the world. People started traveling very quickly to see us to get healthcare they couldn’t get locally. The week before COVID hit, we had three people fly down from Alaska to see us. Since COVID and telehealth, it’s so easy to see people from anywhere, including somebody locally who’s waiting for their child to pick them up after school. It’s a lot easier to do the visit on your car and phone than it is to try to get down to the doctor’s office.
Immune System
Also, this is where we see adults and children from every state in the US and across 21 time zones worldwide. This is a worldwide problem. To your point about the science, I can also share about the immune system and how this stuff works. The body loves balance. The body doesn’t want too much of anything or too little.
Autoimmune Diseases: The body loves balance. It does not want too much of anything or too little.
It’s always going for homeostasis.
Blood pressure and blood sugar won’t be too high or too low. The immune system is super interesting because when you lose that set point right in the middle, you move away from it up and down at the same time. All the overactive immune system issues include autoimmune diseases, but then also allergies, asthma, and skin issues called eczema. The underactive immune system issues are colds, flu, and infections. They are getting the same infection over and over again.
As a child, you’ve lost this set point if you get recurrent ear infections, strep throat, sinus infections, or all this kind of stuff. The infections that drive chronic disease are different than the infections that cause obvious disease and then cancer. This is where they talk about cancer being the flip side of the same coin as autoimmune.
If you get an autoimmune disease, we go, “You lost your set point. We got to get you back to the middle. We have to reestablish that set point.” This is where the medications are so problematic, but it’s very logical why they cause what they do. When you take an immunosuppressive medicine, they move you from here to try to move you down here.
We’re like, “This medicine we’re using to suppress the up stuff is going to increase your risk of cancer and life-threatening infections.” You may go, “That’s weird because, with this immune system disruption and loss of the set point, I already have a huge increased risk of cancer. I already have an increased risk of life-threatening infections. Now, I’m on medicine to make it more likely?” Your body is like, “That’s not quite what we want. What we want is more immunomodulation, rebalancing the immune system, versus suppression.”
The things that cause loss of immune system setpoint, the very first thing is the gut. The gut is the super central mechanism for everything. Eighty percent of the immune system surrounds the gut. Whenever the immune system is disrupted, any of the up or down stuff, you go, “What happened to the gut?” The gut is a huge one. The next thing is the stress hormone cortisol. The stress hormone cortisol is designed to go up and down for any kind of emotional stress, fight or flight mode, or life or death mode. To the body, stress is stress. Whether it is emotional, physical, or spiritual, it’s all stress.
The gut is the central mechanism for everything. 80% of the immune system surrounds the gut.
The physical stressor is like a disrupted gut. The things I’ll name next create physical stress. They kick the stress hormone cortisol up into the stress mode, but then they lock it in place. You’re stuck in the stress mode. People can feel this. They’re like, “I hold my shoulders up. I grind my teeth. I pick up my cuticles. I bite my nails. I can feel this.” Sometimes, it’s more obvious than others. They’re like, “I don’t sleep.”
The somatic system is high all the time. It never comes down.
It is a terrible place to be. The body doesn’t fix anything while in stress mode, so you start getting one problem after another. When the immune system gets stuck in the stress mode, it suppresses the immune system when we start getting these infections that drive chronic disease. We can always have infections. We knew this about the immune system and autoimmune issues for a while, but we realize that all chronic disease is driven by infections, the kind that drive chronic inflammation in the body.
There’s this great study and report that I always reference when I lecture that’s about eight years old or so where they say hardening of the arteries, atherosclerosis. We used to think that atherosclerosis was an inevitable consequence of aging, but there’s nothing inevitable about it. It has nothing to do with aging. It is like all chronic diseases. It is a chronic disease of infection and inflammation. We go, “That’s what we knew about autoimmune disease.”
You get these infections that drive chronic disease, but then because of the gut disruption and what they call the leaky gut and intestinal permeability disorder, we start getting food sensitivities. Food starts bugging us either in an obvious way that people can figure out themselves because they feel crummy every time they eat it or a sneaky way where the food proteins wack you, creating inflammation days or weeks after you consume it. You don’t know it’s bugging it because it’s so sneaky, but the inflammation is building over time and driving the system crazy.
Since the gut is disrupted, it creates biome deficiencies. It starts throwing hormones off. If the gut is disrupted, the whole hormone symphony starts taking a hit, thyroid, estrogens, testosterones, insulin, and blood sugar. The last one that drives the system crazy, the immune system included, is toxicity. Unfortunately, we live in a very toxic world. We have environmental toxins like lead, mercury, arsenic, plastics, and BPA. They create a huge disruption to the immune system. When you get the disruption, we go, “Gut, infections, foods, vitamins, hormones, and cortisol, let’s address this.”
We do test it. We like to say, “Let’s test and not guess,” because the body is super complicated but it is also super logical at the same time. Everybody’s unique. We can test, like a simple blood test that can be run at any clinic or hospital in the country. Most of the countries and the people we see can run these tests too.
They’ll tell us exactly what infection we’re dealing with. They’ll tell exactly what vitamin is deficient and what hormones are off. They’re like, “Do this poop test. Get a digestive stool analysis.” You poop and mail it off. The poop gets to travel through UPS or FedEx, depending on which one you do, and we get a great look at the gut. We can see exactly what’s going on with the gut. By addressing that, we’re in a position to bring the immune system back. People start reversing the immune process.
When you get these health issues going, everything is connected. This is when people go, “How can I feel this bad in so many different ways at my age? I’m 30. I’m 40. I feel like I’m 140. I should feel better at 140 than I do right now.” You got all this stuff going on at the same time, which in the more traditional and Western allopathic model, you go, “How can everything be off at the same time? It is so confusing.”
Truly, for folks like myself, it makes it so simple. It’s super easy. The only way that everything can be off at the same time is if these supercentral mechanisms are off. They’re driving everything to be off at the same time. We go, “We know where to look. If we can fix those well enough but you’re buying a position of healing, you can fix all this stuff at the same time.” You go, “Who would have thought that my joint pain was connected with my dry eyes? This rash I can’t get rid of is connected with the twitch in my eyebrow. All this is connected. My tinnitus goes away as well.”
Autoimmune Diseases: The only way everything can be off at the same time is if the body’s supercentral mechanism is off.
What comes to my mind is if it is a blood test that could be done at any lab, it could be ordered by any doctor.
It should be covered by insurance when you use the right codes.
Why is that not happening? Why isn’t it like, “Let’s go to it.” You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken. I don’t want to say it’s broken. Shouldn’t that be like you’re going for a physical where you’re like, “Let’s run this test to see what’s going on?” It’s a blood test. If you’re already in there having your basic metabolic test, take another vial of blood while you’re there and run this and see if something is going on that even I don’t know about.
To your point, the tests that tend to get run aren’t the ones you want to see something coming a mile away or to see what’s the root cause of this. By the time the stuff that traditionally is run gets thrown off and they go, “We probably need to do something about this,” this has been going on for 10 or 20 years.
I’m sitting here and going, “Everything is going good,” but I’m always curious and would love to do preventative stuff and go, “It looks like this isn’t on.” The whole mailing the poop thing is not my favorite test to have to do, but if I needed to do it, I would.
You got to be a good aimer with the poop test because they give you this little thing like how a hotdog comes at a baseball game.
Career Path
We don’t need to go too much into that. I’m fully aware of what all of that is. Is this stuff that you and your colleagues are working on? Why is the whole medical profession going, “Absolutely.” Is it that you guys are so far ahead of the game that you’re an outlier? It seems to me it’s a blood test if you are not having to do anything fancy for it, are you?
No. Truly, the way that I want this to be done ideally is to work within the insurance model because most people get their healthcare through the insurance model. It has to be done in a way that people are familiar with. I have been board-certified four times. The first one is in physical medicine rehab. My original area of subspecialty was spinal cord injury. Everybody is paralyzed from the waist down, neck down, and all this.
In my second area, I was trying to help this population because I got boarded in medical acupuncture. The patient population that I was seeing, for example, was incredibly complicated and incredibly sensitive to medication side effects. Taking something over the counter for a sinus issue that maybe you and I wouldn’t even think twice about could kill them.
It taught me a lot about the huge gaps in treating most chronic diseases simply with medications and surgeries. As I’m trying to fill those gaps, I go, “Here is this medical acupuncture. I’m going to learn it and see if it can help these folks. I’m like, “It looks so much better than I ever thought.” My eleven partners in the rehab hospital at the time who were specializing in all kinds of rehab go, “We have one other option. We can help people with stuff.” Almost instantly, I was seeing 100 people a week. I transitioned that way.
Here’s the acupuncture where people would come to see me in these big hospital settings. It’s such a leap of faith. They’re like, “I got this health issue. Nobody can help me with it. I’m going to try this acupuncture because I understand the doctor in this huge teaching hospital that does it.” They come in and I’m like, “What’s your problem?” They tell me and they go, “What can you do to help me?” I’m like, “I’m going to take these little tiny thin needles. I’m going to put them in your body. It is going to make you feel better.” They’re like, “How do you know where to put them?” I’m like, “I’m going to feel your pulse. I’m going to let you stick your tongue out. I’m going to have you tell me what you’re feeling, and that will tell me where I need to put them.”
That’s surely not what I’m used to, but then people would get better and they go, “This is great.” Here’s the way that we do this for the autoimmune stuff and chronic disease in general. They’re like, “How are you going to be able to tell me why I have these issues?” I’m like, “I’m going to write a prescription and send you for a blood test.” That’s what I’m used to. That makes sense. It’s very consistent with the vision that most people have about how healthcare should be run. You run a test before you decide what you’re going to do.
You have to know where you’re starting. It makes sense. If I’m going to go in for a physical, I have the blood test. The doctor has to know what’s my potassium level and what’s my HDL, LDL, and overall cholesterol. That helps the doctor say, “These levels are fine. This level is off. That means you have a calcium deficiency. Your potassium is too high,” or whatever. It makes sense. Everyone gets that.
You can’t fix what you don’t know is right. If you’re in your house and you turn on a light switch, and the light doesn’t go on, that’s an indication that maybe you need to check your light bulb or something else. You don’t walk into a room, look up at a light that’s not on, and go, “The light bulb is out.” Your doctors are good, but you’re not that good.
You hate to waste somebody’s time doing something they don’t need. We talk about how the body is super complicated, but it’s super logical. It’s so complicated that you’re not going to help folks prevent chronic disease or reverse chronic disease by guessing. If you understand the inherent logic in the body, you know what causes chronic health issues. You know how to reverse them.
I find that the body is so logical that it’s not difficult at all for non-medical people to understand the inherent logic when you explain it logically and in terms that non-medical people can use. You go, “That makes such sense.” You can see those things happening in the outside world. They’re like, “When this happens, that’s the result. This is how it happened.” You probably go, “I understand it.”
Resetting Immune Systems
I’m dying to know. What are you using to help reset people’s immune systems to help reverse these autoimmune? Is it acupuncture? Is it some medication? Is it not medication at all but something else?
There are a couple of things that typically always get missed even by practitioners who tend to think along these lines and do some of the same testing. One thing that always gets missed is that there are always infections as part of what’s driving this inflammation, disease, and tissue damage. We know which ones they are. We can test them on a blood test. We can test them on a poop test. It’s not difficult. You have to know which ones to look for.
For example, in Type 1 diabetes, because of gut disruption, a type of virus called enteroviruses can leak from the intestine past the leaky gut wall into the bloodstream. The enterovirus, a big one that we find a lot, is a big driver of chronic disease called Coxsackie virus. A simple blood test detects six different kinds. Coxsackie B4 is a classic one to get from the gut to the cells and the pancreas to make insulin. They hurt the cells to make insulin. The pancreas stops making insulin. It’s Type 1 diabetes. We have to get rid of that infection.
With no infection, the cells can wake up and do their work again. The fact that they happen, but also how can you get rid of it? There’s this product out of Canada. It’s a nano silver, not colloidal silver. Colloidal silver has been used for generations around the world to get rid of infections. It’s a broad-spectrum antimicrobial. It gets rid of viral, bacterial, and other kinds of infections. It builds up in your system and you can’t use it long-term, but it’s great for a couple of weeks to get rid of an easy infection. Infections that are chronic diseases are stubborn.
They’re well-established. They’ve got a lot of friends.
They are there. They’ve been there a while. They worked their magic and built this inflammation over time. It takes 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, or 12 months sometimes to get rid of these dudes. As you get their numbers down, people start feeling better, but you have to get rid of them all the way and then keep them away long-term.
We use a nanosilver product out of Canada called pH Structured Silver Solution. It’s nano silver. It doesn’t build up in your system, so you can use it as long as you need to. It’s so much more powerful than the colloidal. It gets at these dudes. One of the cool things about this product is the water. I’m going to be a total geek out here. It’s structured water. It’s what’s called pH Structured Silver solution, but the structured part is the water being structured. They call it the fourth phase of water.
Solid, liquid, and gas, most people have that question on a test in high school or junior high, but there’s a fourth phase where the water molecules start kicking out protons and the water molecule starts stacking like pallets. This is not biochemistry, but the biophysics of water molecules. It is fascinating. How this works is through epigenetics.
The first thing we teach people is what we call the Medical Bill Detox course. It’s a free online educational email course where we’re trying to teach people why they get this stuff and how they can make it go away. I went in order on what causes this stuff, except I left out the very first email, which is about what they call epigenetics. In our cells, that’s where our DNA or genes are. We used to think our genes or DNA was hardwired. We have good, bad, and otherwise from parents and grandparents. I see what they got. Hopefully, I got the good gene, not the bad. It turns out it’s not what genes you have. It’s which ones get turned on and turned off.
Epigenetics is things that alter gene expression without changing the genetic code itself. It turns out that in every cell in our body, our DNA, we have a ton of bad genes. We have to turn those guys off. We have a ton of good genes. We have to turn those guys on. When people aren’t feeling well because of all the stuff we’re talking about, it’s because they got flipped the wrong way.
This is why it’s so easy to get everything going the wrong way at the same time where it’s like, “How can everything be not good in my body at the same time?” Every cell is being told the wrong info. Everything that we talked about works through epigenetics. It flips the genes the right way, including meditation. Meditation helps reset cortisol, but meditation works through epigenetics.
Harvard did a great study many years ago. The biophysics of water molecules or structured water works through epigenetics. They figured this out through burn injury patients. With burn injury patients, you try to keep away infections of the burn so that it doesn’t start damaging tissue. We’re using this nano silver product on burn injuries to keep away infections, but then they saw that the tissue was healing faster than usual. They go, “That is so cool. What’s happening? Let’s look at what this pH Structured Silver solution is doing to be working through epigenetics.”
It turns out that in skin cells, there are 88 different genes that code for skin cell healing. This product upregulates and makes it more active 59 out of the 88 eight genes that code for skin cell wounds. It works through epigenetics. It’s flipping genes the right way in tissues. Not only does it get rid of inflammation, but it helps damaged tissue to heal as well. That’s one of the huge game-changers.
There is another huge game-changer that always gets missed. A lot of people figure out the food part and how you have to relax and take care of vitamin deficiencies. Another big central mechanism is vitamin D receptors becoming resistant to vitamin D in the gut. Every cell in our body has receptors for vitamin D. People tend to know that vitamin D is super important.
For example, they did this study out of Northern Finland where they took every kid born in 1966 and said, “I am going to give half of you guys 2,000 IU of vitamin D for the first year of life, and I don’t care what you do after that, and a half of you’re not going to do that. We’re going to follow every one of you as best we can for 31 years. We’re going to see what happens.”
What they found is there was almost an 80% reduction in the risk of Type 1 diabetes. They were able to prevent almost 80% of all Type 1 diabetes. They looked at some brain stuff and went, “Also, these kids never end up getting schizophrenia. How cool.” Every cell in our body has receptors for vitamin D like every cell in our body has receptors for insulin. The pancreas makes insulin. It goes to the cells, attaches to the receptors, and tells the cells what to do when it comes to blood sugar control.
Insulin resistance happens. Not a lot of people know that. You can have insulin, but it can’t attach and do the work. It’s almost like you don’t have insulin. Your blood sugar goes up and you move towards diabetes. It turns out that every cell in the body has vitamin D receptors. Vitamin D can attach and tell the cells what to do. There are more vitamin D receptors in the gut than in the other body parts. They saw that and went, “That’s so cool. Vitamin D must be important for the gut.” What happens though is the vitamin D receptors become resistant, and the vitamin D can’t attach. It’s a super central mechanism in why the intestinal microbiome, the bad mix, and the gut get disrupted. It’s a super central mechanism for the gut disruption that drives autoimmune disease, but it drives everything.
The original researchers back in 2018 at the University of Illinois in Chicago go, “This is a central mechanism.” This is exactly what you want to do if you’re going to try to reverse ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, recurrent C. diff or H. pylori infections, and all this kind of stuff. They go, “This is exactly what you want to do if we think about everything.” They named everything you can imagine.
Six months later, they go, “In this study, fixing this vitamin D receptor thing is a nuclear weapon against metabolic syndrome, insulin-resistant diabetes, abnormal weight gain, and cholesterol issues. It fixes insulin resistance. That’s what drives insulin resistance and this epidemic of insulin-resistant diabetes we got.” A few years ago, Harvard came out and said, “If you can fix the intestinal microbiome this way, you can fix the major depressive disorder. It fixes brain chemistry that way.”
Another study came out a few months later in another psychiatry journal. It said, “You fixed the microbiome this way. It fixes personality. You get more outgoing and more social.” It has a super central mechanism. There are three things you have to do to fix it, which are Vitamin D, probiotics, and then something called butyrate. Butyrate is something made by the good bacteria in the gut. Good bacteria make all these important things, serotonin, GABA, and melatonin. Butyrate is a short-chain fatty acid. Butyrate is so important as are the short-chain fatty acids made by the good bacteria in general on the poop test that you mail off and test for these things.
Those three things are all available in capsule form. They fix the vitamin D receptor resistance. The good bacteria in the gut go up. The bad guys come down. The lining of the gut stops making chemicals that create inflammation in the gut. The lining of the gut starts making proteins called antimicrobial peptides that keep away bad bugs in the gut long-term, but then that translates into all this stuff. Every cell in our body has vitamin D receptors. Vitamin D connects to vitamin D receptors. Vitamin D receptors that are sensitive make vitamin D-responsive elements that go to other genes and turn off bad genes.
Autoimmune Diseases: Sensitive vitamin D receptors make vitamin D-responsive elements that go to other genes and turn off bad genes.
This is why the genes that code for Type 1 diabetes and autism, every one of them is turned off and made inactive by the vitamin D responsive elements. That’s why they call them vitamin D-responsive genes. You’re turning off all the genes that code for Type 1 diabetes, increasing your risk. You’re turning off the ones that code for autism, increasing your risk.
All these genes that code for other things that are going to try to drive it in the wrong direction, you turn them off. How cool is this whole epigenetic thing? You go, “If you can hit these central mechanisms, the ramifications are huge.” These are things that people miss. They don’t quite understand this. It’s not difficult to fix it. You have to know where you need to put your effort.
Closing Words
This is so fascinating. I’m going to have to have you come back at some point soon because there’s so much more to talk about, but our time has flown by. I am so into this. I could sit here for hours and talk to you about this.
I hope this qualifies as epic.
It is truly epic. Certainly, for the number of people who have autoimmune diseases, to hear that if you have Type 1 diabetes, there might be a way for you to re-kickstart your pancreas. I’m not saying that that’s going to happen. I’m not a doctor, but I have a doctor here. The implications are enormous, huge, and exciting.
It makes medicine so much more fun to know that you can prevent stuff from reversing it versus putting a bandage on something, a medication, which isn’t wrong. There’s so much more we can be doing.
I’m sure people are like, “This is cool. How do I find out more? Where can I go to get more information?”
If you go to DrDavidBilstrom.com, we have the courses there. There are 2 levels for non-medical and 2 levels for medical people because we want to teach medical people this. It has all the social media postings about this stuff and all the YouTube channels. It’s very important that people understand that this is not one person’s opinion. It’s science. For everything that we talk about, I’m usually holding up a scientific study from the journal or something in some year. I tell you what it’s called and what it says so that you know that this is what science tells us. It is empowering to know the science behind this.
I want to thank you so much for coming. It’s so fascinating. I’m going to have to get you back because there’s so much more to explore. I want to thank you for coming in. I want to remind everyone that if you are ready to step into your epic, you go to EpicBegins.com. If you want to take one of the courses, you can put in the code EpicBegins, and you get a discount on the course. As always, I want to remind people that epic choices lead to the epic life that you want to lead.
Important Links
About Dr. David Bilstrom
Dr. David Bilstrom, M.D., is an author, international speaker and distinguished member of the American Academy of Integrative Medicine and American Academy of Medical Acupuncture. He is an advanced fellow in anti-aging, regenerative, and functional medicine, and holds quadruple board certification in Functional and Regenerative Medicine, Integrative Medicine, Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, and Medical Acupuncture.
As the Director of the International Autoimmune Institute & Bingham Memorial Center for Functional Medicine, Dr. Bilstrom is affiliated with the first medical center in the country associated with a teaching hospital to treat all types of autoimmune diseases. The center is the first in the nation to utilize nature and its healing properties as a fundamental component of a wellness program.
Dr. Bilstrom is passionate about educating individuals and medical professionals on the importance of reversing and preventing autoimmune diseases using the fundamentals of Functional Medicine. Instead of relying solely on symptom-controlled medications that may lead to additional health complications.
Dr. Bilstrom’s mission is to revolutionize the way autoimmune disease is treated worldwide by teaching the fundamentals of Functional Medicine. He is a sought-after speaker and has lectured on five continents and has been featured at the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine (A4M) in Las Vegas in December 2022.
Dr. Bilstrom is the author of the book, “The Nurse Practitioners’ Guide to Autoimmune Medicine, Preventing and Reversing All Autoimmunity.”
He has also developed a course called “The Autoimmune Paradigm, an Experts Program,” which is available to all clinicians. It’s accredited for CEUs/CMEs of 8 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™
Dr. Bilstrom has also created a course, Autoimmune Hope, for patients to empower them with science-based hope that there is a solution for their autoimmune disease.
In 2018, Dr. Bilstrom declared and named a positive ANA as Bilstrom’s Nuclearitis, because by definition an antinuclear antibody is antibodies being produced by a confused immune system, attacking a person’s nuclear material (DNA). Named in 2018 and first published in 2020, in the textbook Advanced Therapeutics in Pain Medicine, Chapter 6: Managing Pain in the Presence of Autoimmune Disease.