Our story is much like yours

At Autoimmune Families, our mission is to form a community that supports families and care providers faced with the challenges of autoimmune disorders to help improve our mutual quality of life. Our goal is to speed the path of inquiry through quality experts who focus on the whole person, have real-world experience with the causes that drive autoimmune responses, and are willing to work through the multi-factorial experimentation that it can take to achieve long-term, positive outcomes in the face of serious, chronic disease. We hope that, by sharing our stories and others like them, we can spare each other needless pain. We work within the knowledge that we are seeking progress, not a cure; within a framework of finding causes, not just treating symptoms; and with the belief that by embracing the body, mind, and spirit together, we can yield a higher quality of life than through a focus on physical needs alone.

We can’t diagnose or treat anything — that would not only be illegal, since we’re not physicians ourselves, but it would also be inaccurate. Identifying the causes of your autoimmune disease is as personal as has been identifying ours. This is an individualized process — albeit one with certain key factors in common, one to another, that can give you good ideas on where to start.

There are some essential areas of inquiry we want to give you the advantage of knowing about: key areas of inquiry worth pursuing, to get at the root causes of your autoimmune challenge. Because that’s the opportunity here: to get at causes. Traditional specialists do tell us that there’s no known cause for what turns on an autoimmune disease -– only risk factors, and certain attributes that people with autoimmune disease have in common, particularly after the fact (like inflammation and a genetic predisposition, for example). Unlike traditional practitioners, however, who treat the disease process after it’s already triggered and in motion, Functional Medicine (FxM) seeks to uncover the root causes and prevent triggers. Blocking the disease in motion is a different approach than healing the body in an attempt to prevent the disease from activating. We believe in the latter approach, because we’ve found causes that do have effect.

We’ve witnessed improvement by following FxM practices, including natural medicine protocols like acupuncture. And we’re living drug-free, making progress on the continuum of not just achieving, but maintaining long-term remission -– without living with the fear of what many of the pharmaceutical drugs prescribed for autoimmune diseases can do to our bodies. We prefer the healing approach to the immunosuppression approach, and believe that you can learn a lot about how to achieve a higher quality of life through functional and natural medicine, as well.