Autoimmune

When the Body Turns Inward: A Root-Cause Approach to Autoimmune Conditions

If you are living with an autoimmune condition, you already know what it feels like when your own body seems to become the problem. The fatigue that no amount of sleep touches. The flares that arrive without warning. The long stretch of appointments that name what is happening without ever quite explaining why. I want to offer you a different starting place: your body has not turned against you. It is responding, with tremendous intelligence, to a load it can no longer carry alone.

What is actually happening in autoimmunity

In an autoimmune process, the immune system loses its ability to distinguish self from other and begins directing its defences at the body's own tissue. More than eighty distinct autoimmune conditions have been identified, and their prevalence has risen sharply over recent decades, faster than genetics alone can explain. Researchers increasingly point to the interplay of three factors: genetic susceptibility, environmental triggers, and a compromised gut barrier. The work of Dr. Alessio Fasano at Harvard has been central here, showing how increased intestinal permeability can allow partially digested proteins and bacterial fragments into circulation, keeping the immune system in a state of chronic alarm.

There is another thread the research keeps confirming, one I see in my practice constantly: the relationship between stress, trauma, and immune function. A large study of adverse childhood experiences found that people with significant early adversity had meaningfully higher rates of hospitalization for autoimmune disease decades later (Dube et al. 2009). The immune system and the nervous system are in constant conversation. A body that has spent years in survival physiology, flooded with stress hormones, sleeping poorly, digesting poorly, eventually shows that history in its immune behaviour.

PANS and PANDAS: when autoimmunity affects a child's brain

This part of my work is deeply personal. In 2014, my second son was born, and not long after, he developed PANS, an autoimmune condition in which the immune system's response, often triggered by infection, creates inflammation that affects the brain. In PANDAS, the trigger is specifically streptococcal infection, and through a process called molecular mimicry, antibodies meant for the bacteria cross-react with tissue in the basal ganglia, a brain region involved in movement, emotion, and behaviour. The result can be sudden and frightening: a child who changes seemingly overnight, with acute anxiety, obsessions and compulsions, rages, tics, food restriction, or regression.

I know the terror of watching that happen to your child, and I know the exhaustion of being told it is behavioural when every instinct in you says it is medical. My son's recovery took me deep into training with the Institute for Functional Medicine, focused on the gut-brain connection, immune dysfunction, and detoxification. He is one of the great teachers of my life. Because of him, I now support other families walking this road: helping parents understand the condition, identify and address root-cause contributors alongside their medical team, support the child's gut and immune health, and tend to something that is too often forgotten, the nervous system of the whole family. A child in a PANS flare lives in a household under siege. Parents need regulation and support too, and providing it changes what is possible for everyone.

How I work with autoimmunity

My approach weaves together Functional Medicine coaching and somatic work, because autoimmunity lives in both the biochemistry and the biography. On the functional side, we look for root-cause contributors: gut health and intestinal permeability, hidden infections, food sensitivities, toxic load, blood sugar instability, and nutrient status. On the somatic side, we work with the survival physiology itself, helping your body find its way out of chronic alarm so that the immune system can stand down. Research on the vagus nerve and its anti-inflammatory pathway makes the mechanism clear: the state of your nervous system directly shapes the behaviour of your immune system.

This work does not replace your medical care. It surrounds it. I collaborate with what your physicians are doing and address the terrain they rarely have time to explore: how you eat, sleep, digest, feel, and carry your history.

If you are living with an autoimmune condition, or parenting a child with PANS or PANDAS, you do not have to figure this out alone. Reach out and we can explore whether this work is right for you.