What If Autoimmune Disease Isn’t Self-Attack—but Overprotection?

What if we didn’t have so many autoimmune diseases but so many dysfunctional tissues or organs that achieved an autoimmune phase?

What if we stopped looking at autoimmune illnesses as the body attacking itself and instead started looking at the body as overprotecting itself?

Sharks In The Water

How do you attract sharks in the ocean? You put blood in the water. Auto-immune illness is no different.

Sharks are the auto-antibodies (antibodies against your tissues), and the blood is the auto-antigens (the breakdown of your tissues)? Antibodies rise in response to antigens.

When you have an infection, you create antibodies. COVID or flu antibodies don’t just show up. There has been exposure, recognition, and then development of those antibodies as a way for the body to protect itself.

When you develop antibodies against your own tissues, it’s also not this random act of violence. Those antibodies are in response to an offender in the bloodstream.

What is leaking into the bloodstream? It’s the contents of cells from certain tissues that are damaged that end up overloading the lymph system (the designated cleanup system) and instead leak into the blood circulation.

As a result, your immune system senses a foreign invader (antigen) and creates defenders (antibodies).

Traditional medicine sees the antibodies as the problem and creates strategies around suppressing those antibodies with heavy hitters like NSAIDS, steroids, and biologics.

Functional medicine sees antigens as the primary issues and creates strategies around strengthening the tissues so they are not destroyed prematurely.

Deficiency & Toxicity

Why would your tissues become so feeble that they are being destroyed, thus overloading your lymph system and spilling their contents into the bloodstream, creating sharks in the water?

It comes down to two simple reasons. They are either chronically NOT getting what they require (deficiency), or they are chronically being exposed to what is harmful. With enough time, this will put the body into a state of tissue breakdown. What tissues are affected first is what makes us individuals.

There are many categories of deficiency and toxicity, but here are some common ones I see clinically.

Adverse Childhood Events (ACE)

You were exposed to trauma as a child, which has perpetually put your nervous system in a state of overprotection. What is an autoimmune disease? It’s NOT antibodies randomly attacking healthy tissues. It’s a chronic state of being in an over-protection mode.

There is actually a questionnaire you can take called the ACE. The higher your score, the higher your likelihood of not just autoimmune but also depression, alcoholism, etc. This doesn’t mean you’re screwed. It just adds insight into the experiences we have as kids, which can shape a lot of our health struggles as adults.

Malnutrition

We reside in a nation that is overfed but undernourished. We are what we eat. We have essential fats we have to ingest. We have essential amino acids that we have to ingest. There are essential vitamins and minerals.

But how much of our calorie consumption falls into the “non-essential?”

Case in point. There is no such thing as an essential carb, yet the average American consumes 350 grams per day, typically over 50% of their calories.

This doesn’t mean we can’t utilize carbs. It just means that if you’re looking at strategies to build healthy tissues, start with the essentials and then fill in the gaps with the non-essentials. Not sure where to start, use testing as a guide.

The US “Healthcare” System

The system we call “healthcare” that many politicians want to give away for “free” is actually the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. Great for emergencies, but when it comes to managing chronic illness, it seems it just manages to make things worse.

Specifically for autoimmune diseases, there are over 90 medications that damage tissues so effectively that they lead to JUST Lupus.

Solutions

Traditional medicine focuses on killing sharks. Functional medicine focuses on lessening the load of blood in the water. The less blood in the water, the fewer sharks that are attracted.

There may be some short-term benefits to killing sharks, but in the long term, you need sharks to attack real invaders like infections, so you don’t want to get rid of them. This is why you often hear the side effects of immune-modulating drugs associated with other immune system problems, like cancer or other infections like tuberculosis.

How do you lessen the load of blood in the water and build up tissues so they aren’t becoming weak and decrepit? Start with better questions.

Start asking and answering the questions, “Where am I deficient? Where am I toxic?” Don’t just pigeonhole those answers to nutrition. Look at relationships. Look at movement patterns. Look at outdoor time. Look at muscle mass. The list can go on and on. That’s the beauty. Life is a constant state of self-examination and adjustment.

​Socrates says, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

And this is where functional testing allows you personal insight into your deficiencies and toxicities. Once you identify those, you have strategic lifestyle recommendations to build tissues back to better function.

The stronger your tissues, the fewer sharks are attracted to the water.

Real World Results

Can autoimmunity be resolved? I say yes, because I’ve seen it ample times over 20 years of my career.

Here are 2 recent improvements.

Client 1:

She was told she had a thyroid condition by her primary after some routine blood work, but didn’t want to go on medications just yet if she didn’t have to. The traditional provider didn’t test antibodies, so we did back in May 2025.

TPO Antibody of 540 IU/ml + Thyroglobulin Antibody of 4.2 IU/ml. Major Hashimoto’s going on. Is Hashimoto’s really a thyroid issue, or do we have other systems involved? We discovered other deficiencies and inflammatory processes happening and built strategies around those (lessening the “blood in the water). Forward to January of 2026, TPO reduced to 74 and Thyroglobulin reduced to “non-detectable.”

Client 2:

She also had a Hashimoto’s situation happening with elevated antibodies that resolved. But her bigger win was with ANA (Anti-Nuclear Antibodies). This “positive” to “negative” doesn’t do it justice.

The real measurement from her initial labs was that she had a measurement of 1:160 in a speckled pattern, which sets the stage for a diagnosis like Sjogren Syndrome and many of the Systemic Lupus Erythematosus variations.

If you’re tired of being told to suppress, numb, or “just monitor” autoimmune markers, it may be time to start asking better questions.

Functional testing reveals patterns of deficiency and toxicity that tell us where tissues are breaking down and why.

That’s where real change starts.

The immune system isn’t confused.
It’s responding to something.

Stop chasing sharks.
Start finding the blood.