The idea is that you should just accept your diagnosis and the inevitable lifelong battle with painkillers, drugs that suppress your immune system, and the side effects of both some of which can be devastating and long-term. I simply refused to accept that there was nothing I could do for myself or the other But with the prevalence of autoimmune diseases on the rise, I know that there are many, many people living with these conditions who will never make it to my office. I wrote this book so I could offer this plan—an effective and healthy approach—to a broader audience.
The mind-body connection is real and powerful. There are many studies that show that the more control a person feels he or she has over a situation, the higher the rate of healing. People do better, feel better, and live better with various health conditions if they have a sense that there is something they can do for themselves.
And there is! So what exactly is a functional medicine expert? First, let me tell you what it is not. Most traditional doctors take note of your symptoms and figure out what diagnosis they can bundle those symptoms into. This usually dictates your treatment.
Therefore, if you and a friend have the same symptoms, you often get the same diagnosis and then the same treatment. This works for trauma and for health issues such as appendicitis or a broken leg, where certain things such as surgery can remedy an immediate problem or symptom.
A functional medicine expert is like a medical detective gathering all the clues of your past where you grew up, your family situation, traumatic events, health history, etc. Armed with this information, a functional medicine expert tries to uncover how and why your body is not functioning well. This type of detective work is what I offer all of my patients at Blum Center for Health and what I used to cure myself of the serious autoimmune condition that I had.
It is exactly what I will offer you with the interactive elements that run throughout this book. Sidney Baker, M. The solution is to find the tack and remove it.
It will take you through the four critical steps that will remove things from the body that are bad for the immune system and then make sure the body has exactly what it needs to function properly. Shockingly, there is no other book on the market that tells the average person how the immune system works and shows how to fix it. Antibodies are molecules normally made by your immune cells to attack and destroy foreign invaders, but in autoimmune diseases, these antibodies are misdirected and attack and damage your own tissue.
Many of these conditions are chronic, debilitating, and potentially life-threatening. In fact, autoimmune diseases are one of the top ten leading causes of death in girls and in women up to sixty-four years of age.
How can one book address whatever autoimmune condition you have? Because most of these conditions have similar underlying imbalances.
Through the interactive aspects in The Immune System Recovery Plan, which include checklists, questionnaires, and self-assessments, you will be able to do with this book what my patients do with me in my office. However, each one can also stand alone, so you can target one area at a time if you prefer. The Immune System Recovery Plan is divided into four parts, corresponding to the four steps.
Using the results of these assessments, I will help you personalize your own treatment plan. This chapter will provide all the information you need to implement the plan, including specific instructions on how to integrate these tools into daily life and how to make permanent lifestyle changes.
Each recipe includes foods specifically targeted to each of the four steps. As we move through the four steps, I will explain why each is important and show you how quickly you can begin to feel better. By following each of the four steps, either alone or together, you will begin to improve your immune system immediately. The steps outlined here have helped my patients who suffer from asthma and allergies, as well as people who feel they catch every flu or cold bug that they encounter.
More people today than ever before have autoimmune diseases, and this epidemic is partially the result of an environment that bombards us with toxic food, stress, chemicals, and heavy metals. And while we cannot live in a bubble, we can protect our health by becoming more aware and changing what comes into our homes, into our families, and into our bodies.
Every single one of us has both a choice and a responsibility to care for ourselves. Yes, being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease is something to take seriously. But it is not a life sentence and should not be treated as one. You can heal your own immune system. The Immune System Recovery Plan gives you tools for treating and even reversing your autoimmune conditions as well as the tools for preventing them in the first place. My goal for you while reading this book is to see that autoimmune disorders are treatable and that permanent solutions do exist beyond a lifetime of taking pills.
There is hope and so much that you—yes, you—can do to be the facilitator of your own healing. And you are not alone. But as you read through it all, take a deep breath and look past the trees. I want you to see the forest. While you do need to focus on the trees, which are the details of each of the four steps in this book, keep your eye on the big picture of what we are trying to accomplish: healing your body on the deepest level. My goals for this book are threefold.
First, I want you to realize that an enormous body of scientific literature supports this approach to healing and balancing the immune system. You may come up against physicians who are unfamiliar with functional medicine and unfamiliar with some of the studies I share with you in this book. My goal in this book is to empower you to take charge of your own health. I also want you to have the confidence to share this information with others. My second goal is to offer you treatment like what you might get at my office.
There are millions of you and only one of me. This is why I created a workbook. It is broken up into sections so that you can put it down and pick it up later, working through at your own pace. You can do it. And remember, help is always close by: you can get help from our website, or you can find a functional medicine doctor to help you figure some of this out if it is too much for you.
See the appendix for resources. My third goal for this book is to offer a message of hope. I sincerely wish each of you a healing journey as you make these changes that I know will help you feel better. About The Author. David Bender. Product Details. Related Articles. Best Guidebooks for a Holiday Detox. Detox Separating Fact from Fiction. Raves and Reviews. Resources and Downloads. Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today! By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use.
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Thank you for signing up, fellow book lover! See More Categories. Your First Name. The author, Susan Blume, was suffering from an autoimmune disease and shares with readers what she bel To see this review and my favorite recipe from this book, please visit www. The author, Susan Blume, was suffering from an autoimmune disease and shares with readers what she believes are the answers to living a healthy life after autoimmune disease.
The author offers self assessments for foods that can trigger issues with our bodies and helps create a plan for discovering these food sensitivities. The key is removing the inflammation from our bodies by destressing our lives, something many people could benefit from. How stressed are you?
Take the self assessment to find out your stress number. This section includes some recipes to help counteract stress as well. She covers leaky gut and how we can heal our digestive tracts. There are more self assessments and a treatment program included with recipes. The author covers some of the most problematic toxins and discusses how to remove them from our bodies.
This book, in my opinion, would be good for anyone suffering disease in general. The steps that she outlines including healing the gut and supporting the liver can make anyone feel better and will also help to ward off disease before it strikes. I love most of the recipes in the book and use them on a regular basis. View all 19 comments. May 12, Carina rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fiction. Having a more rare auto immune condition which can't be cured, I found this book helpful.
While it repeats what I have already learned from other sources regarding wheat and gluten and why we are seeing more sensitive to it now, it also connects the average American diet's over consumption of wheat at every meal, as well as sugar and unhealthy fats to autoimmune disease.
Autoimmune disease is on the rise- and in these cases of immune systems attacking the body's own tissues you can reduce the eff Having a more rare auto immune condition which can't be cured, I found this book helpful.
Autoimmune disease is on the rise- and in these cases of immune systems attacking the body's own tissues you can reduce the effects of an autoimmune condition by following the steps in this book. Nutritional healing is key, but so is healthy thinking, exercise and rest. You know all those things you are supposed to do anyway but might not do enough of?
Take care of yourself. Don't take things too seriously and find and reduce stressors in your life. Do it like your life depends on it. If your condition could kill you, then your life does depend on it.
It it can't - if it will just be a part of every day of your life until you die- the quality of each day you are on this earth depends on it because it can at times, become hard to see how you can live this way for 40, 50,? Make the changes you can make to improve each day. This book will help you. View 1 comment. I'm done with this. Like not in a "got to the end of the book" way but in a "fed up with nonsense" way.
The really frustrating part is that there is some reasonably sound medical advice here, but it's surrounded on all sides by "functional medicine" nonsense and woo woo unscientific theories. Instead of consulting this book, perhaps just visit the Mayo Clinic 's website or the National Institutes of Health 's website for scientifically-vetted evidence based medicine.
I was recently diagnosed with I'm done with this. I was recently diagnosed with another autoimmune disease so I thought heck why not try this book.
But one of my most recent non-fiction reads was Do You Believe in Magic? This book has it in spades. Aug 06, Iona Stewart rated it it was amazing. This is an immensely valuable book for those with an auto-immune disease I have several. She found out that the four steps to healing and preventing auto-immune disease are: 1 Using food as medicine 2 Understanding the stress connection 3 Healing your gut 4 Supporting your liver.
The ingestion of glut This is an immensely valuable book for those with an auto-immune disease I have several. The ingestion of gluten is believed to cause auto-immune disease, and genetic modification of crops like corn, soy and wheat exacerbates the problem. Modern-day diets in general trigger the development of auto-immune disease. Also, a diet high in animal-based foods such as dairy, eggs and beef can promote inflammation and throw off the balance of good bacteria that live in your gut.
Potential triggers are chronic stress, hormone imbalance and infections. The author discusses gluten, celiac disease and gluten sensitivity and foods bad for your immune system, such as sugar and saturated animal fat and trans fats from processed foods. Each part of the book includes a workbook for each theme and beneficial recipes.
We are informed of which foods to avoid and which to include. There are three valuable chapters on stress, and tests to enable us to assess our degree of stress. We are told about leaky gut syndrome and how to heal our gut. Important additions to our diet are coconut oil and probiotics. The author includes three chapters on supporting your liver, and edifies us about toxins such as mercury, lead, plastics, pesticides, prescription medicines, heavy metals, vaccinations and xenoestrogens — the latter being chemicals that mimic the effects of estrogen in the body.
We need to detoxify our body, and remove metals by means of glutathione. Heavy-metal chelating agents include chlorella, cilantro and fibre. This is an absolutely valuable, excellently-written book on healing auto-immune diseases, perhaps the only one of its kind. I highly recommend that you purchase this book. It provides detailed information on what to eat, what not to eat, what to do and what not to do. View all 4 comments. Thankfully, this book is well written, cites its research thank you!
I'll admit that I'm still a little skeptical every time a health book refers generally to "toxins" what exactly do you mean by that?! I don't know if I buy this. I'm not sure if I could embrace a whole-hog abandonment of wheat and dairy without seeing a bit more research case studies are cool, but not as persuasive when you don't know the people personally , but I would strongly encourage people who have struggled with odd immune and autoimmune conditions, as well as pain conditions to give this book a chance.
I wanted so much to love this book. I'm the perfect target audience. I have many of the medical conditions, believe in the diet changes, am into alternative and holistic medicine, and already understand the link to toxins the author talks about at length. I was hoping for a book that would explain the science behind autoimmune disease and connect it to the rest. That's not this book. I don't know if the author has farmed out sections to others and didn't check them well enough, or if she really i I wanted so much to love this book.
I don't know if the author has farmed out sections to others and didn't check them well enough, or if she really is that ignorant about things. But there were so many huge glaring errors big stuff too, not just small things that it meant I couldn't trust the rest of the book.
If I find mistakes in the stuff I already know, how can I tell if the stuff I don't know is correct? Here are 3 errors I remember off the top of my head. Okay, there are some valid arguments for that and I can go with it. The error was when she said we humans have only changed over to farming 10 generations ago. Ummm, that's about years. So, nope. That's the small error maybe she meant millennia, but it's still the sort of thing an author and her editor! She said this twice that I saw.
Not a simple typo. And not the sort of over-simplification that is acceptable in a book about autoimmune disease. Does she provide that? She says the reason they cause problems with wheat is that GMO wheat has "more gluten" than regular wheat and that eating more gluten is leading to medical issues. Oh my God, where do I start? First of all, while GMO wheat exists, it's not yet on the market as of last year anyway, source Wikipedia. Blum uses William David, author of Wheat Belly, as a source in this chapter and even he has a blog post out saying in "While current research efforts continue to work on genetically-modified wheat, e.
Third, I've seen zero evidence anywhere eating a somewhat higher amount of gluten than the usual American is going to make any difference whatsoever. I skimmed the rest of the book hoping there might be useful information there. Not really. The vast majority of it is quizzes to determine if particular types of treatments are useful to you and they weren't very insightful quizzes either and recipes for healthy foods by her definition, though I didn't have a problem with her version of healthy diets.
All in all, this book was a huge disappointment. Jun 29, Phyllis rated it liked it Shelves: non-fiction , food. This book is okay. While my personal experience is that diet does have a major impact on health, it doesn't follow that eating gluten is the root cause of all autoimmune diseases.
Putting patients on elimination diets is great, but there are also people who just have messed up health and there's no magic bullet. Nor is it great to take a million supplements.
There are some good recipes in the book and its worth a look, but I don't think the anti-gluten movement is fully researched. Mar 28, Krissy rated it did not like it.
There was a majorly alarmist tone in most of this book what I read of it. I stopped reading halfway through - as long as these kinds of medical practitioners use fear tactics, anecdotal "scientific" evidence, and nonsensical analogies on vulnerable people those suffering from chronic illness to make money, they're going to lack credibility.
Nutrition science has a long way to go. Follow the money and you'll find snake oil salesmen. Apr 08, Jo rated it it was amazing. I've been a health educator in the field of complementary and alternative medicine for a decade. If I were asked to recommend one book for someone seriously looking to improve their health, this would be it. Science-based and heart-centered, Susan Blum's book combines the very best of nutritional, mind-body, and functional medicine in a comprehensive healing plan.
View 2 comments. Aug 16, Elizabeth Gabhart rated it did not like it Shelves: nutrition , medicine. I read about fifty pages before giving up. I'd read a paragraph that set off all my alarms that the author really doesn't know what she's talking about, resolve to set the book down, and then there would be a paragraph that seemed careful, scientific, and well cited.
Finally though, I decided there were just too many blatant inaccuracies and scare tactics for me to trust any information here. She claims to have completely "cured" her own hypothyroidism through her functional medicine plan, but t I read about fifty pages before giving up. She claims to have completely "cured" her own hypothyroidism through her functional medicine plan, but then throws in, "Oh yeah, I also take Levothyroxine I laughed out loud when I read her claim that our ancestors only started farming ten generations ago.
Seriously, any intro history class could have cleared up this confusion. On page 19 she starts using "chemicals" and "toxins" as scare words, which is a huge red flag for me. In order to avoid chemicals, you'd have to visit the vacuum of space, and anyone with any science degree should know that.
And while toxins do exist, the word is usually do vaguely defined it's become a red flag word for me. Then she repeatedly hammered home the anecdote about the woman with debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, whose symptoms disappeared as soon as she stopped eating gluten.
Don't get me wrong; I'm happy for anyone who gets pain relief, and I congratulate the patient on such a miraculous recovery. But from a medical perspective, it's been proven repeatedly that for most people, most of the time, symptoms that appear and disappear with gluten ingestion are the result of a placebo effect.
If someone is convinced that gluten causes them pain, they will experience pain after eating a gluten-free item that they were falsely told has gluten, and vice versa. This has been documented repeatedly. Blum should know this science well enough to not use one anecdote as "proof'. And she repeatedly cautions patients that your traditional medical doctor may disagree with her.
Anyway, fifty pages in, count me out. Too many red flags here. If the ideas in this book bring you peace and health, that's fantastic for you. I prefer to read books more grounded in solid science. Aug 31, Cathy rated it really liked it.
I was especially interested in this as I have an autoimmune disease - MS - and am finding that diet really has an impact on my health. I understand now a lot about how the immune system works and in the case of autoimmune disease doesn't. Although I felt the information regarding MS was sorely lacking, I recommend this to anyone with an autoimmune disease -- and there are a lot of us. Jun 08, Kali rated it it was amazing.
This is definitely one of the best autoimmune books I've read. My favorite thing about this book by far is her dedication to science. She puts in as much science as she can. In instances where she can't find a study she even said something along the lines of "it would make sense to quote a study here but there currently are none, hopefully there will be soon".
That gave me a deep respect for her. Blum uses several anecdotes from her practice to put a face to the facts and make it more relata This is definitely one of the best autoimmune books I've read. Blum uses several anecdotes from her practice to put a face to the facts and make it more relatable.
She never seemed to use them as a substitute for real science. This book had good information. I was pretty skeptical but Dr. Blum has convinced me. My boyfriend is just starting to alter his diet and we will see how it goes. But it was this book that convinced me to at least give it a try. Aug 30, Rachel Pollock rated it it was amazing Shelves: food. This book was recommended to me by both a nutritionist and a friend whom it helped with a collection of disparate health issues.
Basically, if you read the description and the free sample and think it seems promising, give it a shot.
It's easy to follow, the author clearly knows the many medical and nutritional aspects of the subject, yet makes all her scientific info accessible and clear to the lay reader. The questionaires are easy to use, and the phases are easy to customize for your own heal This book was recommended to me by both a nutritionist and a friend whom it helped with a collection of disparate health issues. The questionaires are easy to use, and the phases are easy to customize for your own health and experiences.
Jun 26, Shelly rated it it was amazing. The recipes in this book alone make it worth the purchase price but it is so much more. I had discovered through trial and error much of what she recommends to be true. I wish I would have discovered the book earlier.
It would have certainly helped me regain my health much sooner. It is a must read for anyone with autoimmune challenges or for those who have been told repeatedly by doctors that "nothing is wrong", yet you still feel like crap. As a person who has gone through it, I can assure you The recipes in this book alone make it worth the purchase price but it is so much more. As a person who has gone through it, I can assure you, what she is sharing works.
Jul 23, Jessica Summerton rated it it was amazing Shelves: continuous-reference. This book has changed my life and I will continue to refer to it throughout.
I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's two years ago and have been struggling with thyroid issues for six years. It has been a difficult and challenging time trying to figure out what was wrong with me while trying to raise two little kids. I am so thankful to Susan Blum for providing me with the medical explanations and natural ways to go about trying to alleviate my symptoms and help me live a better and healthier life.
Shelves: non-fiction , health-wellness , aborted-abandoned-unfinished , gi-uc-ibd , auto-immune. The Functional Medicine crowd, with whom Susan Blum affiliates herself, might be on to something, but as long as they muddy the waters with self-serving sales of the proprietary lab tests and supplements they tout, I can't accept their perspective as anything but the shill's pitch that it is. But, I'll keep the 'eat better food, move around more' tenets that they reminded me about. Oct 09, Maribeth rated it it was ok.
She seems to be saying that anyone with an autoimmune disease should just eat better and then it will just go away. It is your own fault if your body isn't working properly because you have been naughty and eating too much gluten.
Just eat organic nuts and berries and you will be fine.
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