Do you know what an autoimmune disease is?
An amazing one in every thirty Americans has an autoimmune disease. And these autoimmune diseases are supposed to be incurable. That’s what they taught me in medical school. And that’s what they still teach doctors. But in most cases, it isn’t true.
Let me explain what an autoimmune disease is. Then, I’ll tell you about a recent case that shows how to cure the incurable.
There are many diseases that are referred to as autoimmune diseases. Essentially, an autoimmune disease is a condition in which the immune system becomes disrupted and improperly triggers inflammation in various parts of the body. The inflammation destroys the tissue and organs in which it’s present and ultimately leads to the disease. The disease is named based on the tissues or organs it affects.
The most common autoimmune diseases are rheumatoid arthritis, polymyositis, lupus, scleroderma, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, and ankylosing spondylitis. But there are many other forms. And here’s what you need to know about autoimmune diseases.
They are all caused by something! They do not simply appear out of nowhere. I have detailed the causes in a previous report, which you can find on my website. They include infections in the teeth, sinuses, and intestines. They also include disruptions in the hormonal system, allergies, and toxicity. Often, autoimmune diseases are caused by multiple factors acting together, much like a perfect storm. And here’s the point: Remove the cause or causes of a disease, and it goes away.
How amazing! It sounds simple. And sometimes it is, like Ted’s case.
Ted first saw me a few years ago. He was 42. And he had been healthy until he was 27, when “for no reason at all,” he started to have pains in his lower back. Of course, there really was a reason. But when autoimmune diseases start, there’s often no obvious cause. So, for a while, he thought it was just your basic sore back. However, when it intensified and he began to stiffen, his doctors sensed that something was wrong and ordered further testing. Eventually, he ended up seeing a rheumatology specialist who diagnosed him as having an autoimmune disease known as ankylosing spondylitis.
In ankylosing spondylitis, the autoimmune inflammation primarily affects the spine. Often it’s in the lower back. The body responds to the chronic inflammation by depositing calcium in the ligaments of the spine. Over time, these calcium deposits fuse together, and the backbones are unable to move freely.
This can dramatically limit mobility and flexibility as well as cause pain. Conventional treatments focus on reducing inflammation. Over the years, Ted had been receiving acupuncture, supplements, and medications – anything that helped reduce inflammation. But here’s the problem with this limited approach.
Although anti-inflammatory treatments can reduce the symptoms and slow the progression of the disease, they do nothing to address the underlying cause of the inflammation. And so, as soon as the treatments are stopped, the disease immediately escalates.
For Ted, they weren’t even helping much with the symptoms, and they were doing nothing to treat the cause of the disease. That’s why he came to see me.
Unlike many of my colleagues, I believe that autoimmune diseases can be cured if the cause or causes can be identified and treated. Why? It’s because I have seen it happen many times before. So, when Ted came to see me, the first question I asked myself is what caused his disease? I asked Ted if he had suffered any infections in his sinuses, teeth, or intestines prior to the onset of the disease. It turns out that he did. He had developed an infection in a tooth about six months before his first symptoms. The infection was so bad that it did not respond to antibiotics. So, his dentist treated it with a root canal. That got my attention.
When a dentist performs a root canal, he removes the dental pulp contained in the roots of the tooth. The dental pulp is the living part of the tooth. It contains the cells, blood vessels, and nerves that keep the tooth alive. When the pulp is removed, the tooth is no longer living tissue. It’s a dead piece of bone. And here’s the problem: Infections will not go away in the presence of dead tissue. That’s why 100% of all root canals are infected. But if all root canals are infected, why don’t they all hurt?
It’s a good question. And the answer has to do with the fact that dental bone is unlike bone in any other part of the body. If you were to have an infection in any other bone in the body, it would cause great pain and toxicity. But it’s very common to have a bone infection in the jaw without any symptoms at all. So, since Ted’s symptoms started right after he had this root canal, I wondered if it was the root canal that caused his disease. I had him get some X-rays of the tooth in question.
Not only did he have a large abscess at the root of the dead tooth, but it had also eaten into and eroded the root. A 3D image of the tooth showed that the dentist had only treated three of the roots in the tooth. He had missed the fourth root.
Actually, that’s pretty easy to do. It’s hard to see in there, and that particular tooth usually only has three roots. Incidentally, this particular tooth was right over the acupuncture pathway that goes to the lower back. So, you can guess what we did next.
We pretreated Ted with several systemic ozone treatments to ensure that he would have a successful surgery. Then, I referred him to a biological dentist who was trained in the dental use of ozone. There are hundreds of dentists in the country who have additional training in detoxification and ozone therapy. Two good referral sites for biological dentists are www.aaot.us and www.iaomt.org. I, for one, would never have dental surgery from a dentist not trained in that way. Here’s what Ted told me when I talked with him about four months after the tooth was extracted.
“I went into a complete remission a few days after the surgery. I’m now off all medication. And I’m doing well and I feel great.” Of course, I was happy. But I wasn’t all that surprised. That’s what can happen when a doctor starts looking for the cause of a disease. Sometimes he can find it. And when he finds the cause, there is a good chance he can cure the disease. And that’s the big problem we have with conventional medicine these days.
Because of the incredible influence of Big Pharma, doctors have been trained not to look for the causes of disease, but rather to focus only on what medications can help with the symptoms. After all, the logic goes, everybody knows that these are “incurable diseases.” So why waste a bunch of time trying to cure them? That’s why they don’t spend any time asking about what caused the disease they are treating. And as everybody knows, if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re never going to get the right answers.
So, if you have been told you have an autoimmune disease, and are seeing a doctor who has never cured a case, let me suggest that you get a second opinion from a doctor who has. Here’s a list of websites that feature doctors and other practitioners who are trained in looking into the causes of a disease: www.acam.org, www.naturopathic.org, www.abihm.org, www.faim.org, www.ahha.org, www.amfoundation.org, www.aihm.org, and www.icimed.com.
Yours for better health,
Frank Shallenberger, MD