Hidden Cures: Autoimmune Disease, to D or not to D

Dialectics and Dichotomies Purposely Obscure The Orthogonal Truth. The Complexity of Sunlight.

1. Destruction is a necessary part of a cycle of renewal whether societally or bodily. 2. In the past you may have burnt down entire libraries to hide forbidden knowledge, now you just bury it in obscurity, unreferenced by “thought leaders”, utterly lost amongst the tremendous torrent of trivial “scientific” papers published every year.

NOTE: This is a long, complex post, with some frills and curlicues, so if that’s your thing and you have some time to spare then read on, but if you want it short and sweet with an executive summary and just some quick details then click here.

The Whole Ball of (Sheep) Wax

(The vitamin D in most supplements comes from pressing and rolling sheep wool until it excretes a waxy substance rich in vitamin D)

The cause and cure for autoimmune disease was discovered long ago (no, it’s not vitamin D supplements, or just more sunlight, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was). The research is from 2006-2009, about a decade after the cure for Chronic Sinusitis was discovered and successfully ignored.

So why are we still spending $100 Billion dollars annually (10-20X more than on Chronic Sinusitis) on immunosuppressants that have to be taken forever and have serious side effects (like life threatening infections, go figure), while bemoaning the lack of funds to properly study autoimmunity?

I think you’ll find the answer to the question in the question (hint: it starts with a capitol B).

This sorry state of medical affairs, where nothing is every solved, but more and more health and wealth are taken away, has been in force for over a century and it was designed perfectly by none other than John D. Rockefeller - the original Bill Gates.

Virtually everything I thought I'd be doing (philanthropically) was (already) being done by the Rockefellers.

-Bill Gates

It’s well known that the Rockefeller family, looking for ways to utilize even the waste products of oil refining, diversified into mainstream medicine, both for profit and “philanthropy” and heavily influenced its direction towards the development of artificial patentable pharmaceutical drugs (the model they perfected is that the “philanthropy” pays for tax deductible research that benefits the for-profit side, and provides for endless positive press).

What’s less well known is that in order to control the mainstream medical landscape they also had to control the opposition, a practice which has become standard for both corporations and propaganda wielding intelligence agencies in the modern world.

Controlled opposition is like the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Big Pharma hires someone to pretend to fight against them, but to do it ineffectively - many research studies that purport to be an attempt to overturn some Big Pharma ideology are actually controlled opposition. We (the sheep in this analogy) may think they are on our side, but they are not.

The concept is that you nurture two seemingly contradictory ideas in order to lead people towards a forgone conclusion of what the ultimate “synthesis” of those two ideas might be, i.e. what is the actual truth of the situation that takes into account both ideas and resolves their contradictory aspects.

This is a twisted version of a Hegelian dialectic, usually used for actually finding the truth, but for the purposes of propaganda it is molded with the end in mind.

Humans naturally think in dichotomies like good vs evil, light vs dark, black and white, so dialectical narratives are automatically appealing and people tend to choose sides.

Some people may remain stuck on their side, while others “succeed” in synthesizing the two opposing ideas along the very lines they were meant to. In this case perhaps they finally come to “realize” that medicine should be “holistic” a marriage of modern mainstream medicine and traditional/alternative medicine.

This is what you see now at all the biggest medical centers in the western world (though there is still bitter opposition to it on both sides). You can get your chemotherapy in the morning and have your acupuncture right down the hall in the afternoon.

What people on both sides and in the “middle” all fail to realize is that this entire dialectic is a setup, a mental trap.

In fact it’s not even a real dialectic at all. It’s a false dichotomy.

When you set up two opposing sides, and give them superficially striking differences, it’s easy to hide the fact that underneath the hood they are essentially the same thing.

Both mainstream and alternative medicine primarily focus on superficial symptoms. Mainstream medicine offers to correct them with surgery and pharmacy. Alternative medicine offers to correct them with chiropractic, herbology and vitaminology.

Both of them offer you the same view of a body, and microbiome that are always two steps behind, are always playing the fool, are always making mistakes that need to be corrected by the doctor or the healer.

Neither of them understand that the symptoms are the solution itself. Your immune system is your friend. Your body and microbiome don’t get things wrong, they know exactly what they’re doing and it’s the doctor and the healer that have misunderstood what’s actually going on, misinterpreted helpful maneuvers for harmful mistakes, at every level including symptoms, labs, imaging, etc.

Both systems also usually work at a microscopic level of biological complexity that is impossible for human beings to make any sense of. It’s like trying to debug software exclusively in the base machine language of 1s and 0s. No human can do that. If they tried they would only create more problems. Which is what happens when physicians and functional medicine guys fumble around at the level of biochemistry. We actually understand even less about the way our biochemistry and biophysics work than we do about machine language. It’s far more complex than anything we’ve ever succeeded in building. It hasn’t been fully mapped and isn’t anywhere close to being modeled by computers. The pie in the sky promises of “personalized medicine” will likely never be achieved.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the biggest purveyors of mainstream medicine are ultimately owned and supported by the very same people who sell you alternative medicine. They are just two sides of the same coin.

The Vitamin D Autoimmune Disease Dialectic

The mainstream medical paradigm of Autoimmune Disease:

The cause of autoimmune disease is unknown, but we can manage it with immunosuppressants and whatever you do stay away from those whacky alternative medicine docs, theres no evidence for that approach!

Two Functional / Alternative Medical Views:

1. The cause of autoimmune disease is vitamin D deficiency (even if you spend plenty of time in the sun and for some reason your body just refuses to make enough vitamin D), and we can prevent or alleviate it with vitamin D supplementation, and whatever you do don’t accept harmful steroids or immunosuppressants from those misled conventional docs.

2. Another version prevalent in the alternative health space (I used to parrot this): autoimmune disease is due to leaky gut which allows undigested food particles to enter the body which via molecular mimicry activate the immune system to attack its own tissues. Avoiding those foods, healing and sealing the gut (with supplements), while once again supplementing vitamin D levels (even when natural means of getting or making it just don’t work) will eventually solve the problem.

The theory of autoimmunity was developed at a time when the human body was regarded as largely sterile. Antibodies in patients with chronic inflammatory disease could consequently not be tied to persistent human pathogens. The concept of the "autoantibody" was created to reconcile this phenomenon. Today, however, the discovery of the human microbiome has revolutionized our understanding of human biology. Humans are superorganisms that harbor trillions of persistent microbial cells. Indeed, vast human microbiomes have been detected in human tissue and blood (even the brain, long thought sterile, is suspected to harbor them now). These microbial ecosystems harbor thousands of newly identified bacteria, viruses, and other microorganisms -- most of which can act as pathogens under conditions of immunosuppression. The theory of autoimmunity must be revised to account for the human microbiome. Here, we propose a model in which "autoantibodies" (actually antibodies against microbes) are created in response to chronic, persistent microbiome pathogens.

Proal, et al 2018

So what’s the common denominator between the mainstream and alternative paradigms?

Your body’s doing something wrong so take this and you’ll get better.

This false dichotomy, fake dialectic is a 2D world. The answer isn’t on that plane. It’s in another dimension, at a right angle (orthogonal) to the other two. This opens up a whole new world to explore.

Going Orthogonal

Here's what your doctor didn't learn in med school about Vitamin D.

First to lay the groundwork: it’s not a vitamin, it’s a hormone (ironically for the sake of clarity we have to maintain the misnomer). Vitamins are just essential nutrients, while hormones are powerful intracellular signaling molecules.

Next, oral “vitamin” D supplements and “vitamin” D in food are unable to bind the vitamin D receptor (whether it's D2 in plants or D3 in animals/fish). Once oral D enters your body, there are two activation steps: First in the liver it turns into 25-D, then in the kidneys and elsewhere it turns into the "active" form of 1,25-D (it can also be made directly in your skin from sunlight and precursors derived from cholesterol - so eat your eggs and get outdoors).

So far so good, this is the standard textbook stuff.

But whether you look online or ask some fancy AI bot, available sources will claim 25-D doesn’t interact with the Vitamin D receptor (VDR) at all, and hence doesn't have any direct biological effects, but there’s good evidence that’s not true (Albert, 2009).

According to work done over the last 15 years by Paul Albert of Cornell and Trevor Marshall of the Autoimmunity Research Foundation, both 25-D and 1,25-D bind the VDR equally strongly, but to opposite effects. They are both, in a sense, biologically active forms of Vitamin D.

So how do we answer the question what does Vitamin D do? Well it depends on whether you’re talking about 25-D or 1,25 D.

When the VDR is active it has an immune system stimulating effect at least as far as bacteria are concerned, i.e. it is pro-inflammatory - killing the bacteria via inflammation (but I thought chronic inflammation was bad? No, it’s more complicated than that). When the VDR is less active, the opposite pertains: an immuno-suppressive effect, again as far as bacteria are concerned, i.e. it acts as an anti-inflammatory - not killing bacteria via inflammation (I thought anti-inflamamtories were good? Every thing the body does is for our good in it’s proper context, and often bad when it’s forced upon it exogenously).

The VDR is less active when bound to 25-D, and more active when bound to 1,25 D.

In addition 25-D specifically has other immuno-suppressive effects in the body:

Elevated concentrations of 25-D in the blood cause additional immuno- suppression by a number of mechanisms. Dickie et al. found that 25-D slows the activity of several toll-like receptors including TLR2, TLR4, and TLR9.56 A study of multiple sclerosis demonstrated that the supplement effectively slowed the immune activity of peripheral blood mononuclear cells.57 Indeed, Arnson et al. argued that vitamin D has multiple immuno-suppressant properties and that, on the whole, vitamin D confers an immu-nosuppressive (sic) effect.58 (Proal, et al Ch.10, Infection and Autoimmunity, p 173, 2015 edition)

The Alternative Hypothesis of Autoimmune Disease

Now the alternative hypothesis of autoimmune disease pathogenesis outlined by Waterhouse, et al in 2006, Marshall in 2008, and Albert, et al in 2009, is that chronic bacterial overgrowth both around and inside our cells triggers the immune system in a number of ways, including via raised 1,25-D levels causing activation of the VDR to help fight off the bacteria (this can include killing our own infected cells) and by feedback mechanisms suppressing 25-D levels. This creates inflammation and worsened autoimmune symptoms. At the same time the bacteria disrupt the VDR leading to decreased activity on the genome. Suppressing the symptoms is the usual course for mainstream and alternative practitioners, which only succeeds in allowing the underlying intra and extracellular bacterial overgrowth problem to get worse over time.

The catastrophic failure of human metabolism observed in autoimmune disease results from a common underlying pathogenesis – the successive accumulation of pathogens into the microbiome over time, and the ability of such pathogens to dysregulate gene transcription, translation, and human metabolic processes. Autoimmune diseases are more likely passed in families because of the inheritance of a familial microbiome, rather than Mendelian inheritance of genetic abnormalities. We can stimulate innate immune defenses and allow patients to target pathogens, but cell death results in immunopathology (i.e. killing the often intracellular pathogens will lead to death of our own cells and short term symptoms). (Proal, et al, 2013)

For half a century, medical science has been noting the association between vitamin D serum levels and disease. What developed has been a concept of ‘vitamin D deficiency’ based solely on the assumption that low vitamin D serum levels somehow cause disease processes. But this ignores the alternate hypothesis—that the disease processes them-selves regulate the vitamin D metabolism—that the observed low values of vitamin D (meaning 25-D) in disease are a result of the disease process, and not the cause. Molecular biology has now taught us that the body is capable of making its vitamin D directly from 7-dehydro-cholesterol,(10,11) and that the generation of the vitamin D metabolites is modulated by inflammatory disease processes.(11,12) Not only does the whole concept of vitamin D deficiency need reconsideration, one should question whether it is misleading to even use the word ‘vitamin’ when discussing this secosteroid. (Marshall, 2008)

Interestingly many common microbes including Mycobacteria, Cytomegalovirus, Borrellia, and Aspergillus mold, produce ligands (things that bind) to the VDR that also directly decrease the effects of the VDR on the genome in a similar way that 25-D does. This helps them persist in the body by tending to switch off the immune response created by activated 1,25 D, even while allowing 1,25-D levels to rise further (since the activated VDR has a feedback loop that usually lowers 1,25-D levels).

But, another effect on the body of bacterial overgrowth may help counteract that by interfering with the normal feedback loop that would otherwise curb rising 1,25-D levels. As 1,25-D rises above the normal range it inhibits levels of 25-D, so the VDR may be more active.

The net effect is that the body should enter a more pro-inflammatory state, at least from the perspective of fighting off invasive bacteria (the full story is more complex since there are antiinflamamtory effects in other areas that help balance the response), for example the activated VDR stimulates phagocytic activity of macrophages, which can consume bacterial invaders, it increases production of antibacterial peptides like beta-defensin and cathelicidin, and it expresses TLR2 which allows the immune system to recognize gram positive bacteria. All of this helps the body to beat back invasive bacteria (unless someone or something ties one hand behind its back).

However in practice the VDR may become dysfunctional, either due to being overwhelmed by the bacterial suppressive ligand side of the seesaw, or in other ways, e.g. due to environmental toxins that interact with it: There is evidence showing that many chemicals bind the VDR including the most studied PFAS forever chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), also various medications and hormones, various salts of the heavy metal cadmium, compounds produced by the body itself in kidney failure, etc.

Is it actually possible to avoid most of these? Yes. PFAS are also in the air and water, so filter them both.

Another means of VDR dysfunction is by altering the body’s ability to make activated vitamin D by subacute (not clinically apparent) damage or strain on the tissues that activate vitamin D, the kidneys and liver.

And there is one nearly ubiquitous toxin documented in the literature that most people consider utterly benign: “electrosmog” or non-native EMFs (bolding and parentheses my own):

Studies in mice have shown that environmental electromagnetic waves tend to suppress the murine immune system with a potency similar to NSAIDs, yet the nature of any Electrosmog effects upon humans remains controversial. Previously, we reported how the human Vitamin-D receptor (VDR) and its ligand, 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin-D (1,25-D), are associated with many chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. We have shown how olmesartan, a drug marketed for mild hypertension, acts as a high-affinity partial agonist for the VDR, and that it seems to reverse disease activity resulting from VDR dysfunction. We here report that structural instability of the activated VDR becomes apparent when observing hydrogen bond behavior with molecular dynamics, revealing that the VDR pathway exhibits a susceptibility to Electrosmog. Further, we note that characteristic modes of instability lie in the microwave frequency range, which is currently populated by cellphone and WiFi communication signals, and that the susceptibility is ligand dependent. A case series of 64 patient-reported outcomes subsequent to use of a silver-threaded cap designed to protect the brain and brain stem from microwave Electrosmog resulted in 90 % reporting “definite” or “strong” changes in their disease symptoms (unfortunately there are unpredictable edge effects when wearing EMF shielding that can create large EMF spikes in nearby unshielded tissues that make such an approach too risky in the medium to long term. The best approach is avoidance, and there is also a homemade cream we’ve developed based on published research). This is much higher than the 3–5 % rate reported for electromagnetic hypersensitivity in a healthy population and suggests that effective control of environmental Electrosmog immunomodulation may soon become necessary for successful therapy of autoimmune disease. (Marshall, et al 2016)

These toxins may either act as agonists, or antagonists of the VDR, in other words they may tip the scale in the same direction as 25-D, or 1,25-D.

Let’s assume for now that an “autoimmune disease” develops due to bacterial overgrowth/invasion in which 25-D is appropriately suppressed and 1,25-D is appropriately elevated. The VDR is relatively activated creating an inflammatory environment. Inflammation causes symptoms. Left entirely unobstructed these may persist short term and then the problem may just auto-correct.

But the mainstream medical response to these symptoms is corticosteroids or fancy (read new and expensive) targeted immunosuppressants.

And the functional / alternative medical response is to check 25-D levels, but not the more expensive 1,25-D since it’s (incorrectly) thought to be unnecessary and simply reflective of the precursor 25-D levels (not the case in some disease states as outlined above). Seeing 25-D low, it is assumed the patient is “deficient” in D, which must be contributing to their problem, so supplemental Vitamin D2/D3 is given orally.

The effect of supplementing D2 or D3 is to force a rise in 25-D levels, but not in 1,25 D levels, which are already high and feedback suppressed from going higher. The rise in 25-D would have the overall effect of decreasing VDR activity as increased amounts of 25-D, to some extent outcompete 1,25 D for binding spots (as mentioned above this is controversial), as well as by the other mechanisms on toll like receptors, etc that were outlined above (not controversial).

So in this situation the supplemental vitamin D has what most people think of as corticosteroid-like effects which are anti-inflammatory, i.e. suppressing the activity of the immune system, which is the opposite of what your body is trying to do in an autoimmune disease. Your body wants there to be inflammation to solve the underlying problem, which appears to be bacterial overgrowth/invasion in the case of autoimmune disease (but you also have to ask and answer why there’s bacterial overgrowth).

In the setting of immunosuppression from supplemental vitamin D, symptoms will improve short term, but longer term the bacterial overgrowth and invasiveness worsens, other pathogenic bacteria may join in, eventually you end up with one of the typical altered microbiomes documented in one or another chronic inflammatory disease state.

This can take years, even decades to play out as described by Albert, et al in 2009:

The Iowa Women's Health study showed vitamin D intake seemed to protect against breast cancer in the first 5 years after it was taken. However, the effect began to reverse between years 5 and 10 and was completely lost after year 10, trending towards an opposing effect [29]. Lappe et al published work, conducted over 4 years, that seemingly showed vitamin D might lower the incidence of colorectal cancer [30]. In a similar study looking at a larger cohort and over a longer period of time, Rossouw et al found no such effect [31].

The arc of feeling better and then worse in patients supplementing with vitamin D is one that seems to play – depending on the extent to which the VDR is already blocked by bacterial ligands – over the course of 20 years or more. After multivariate analysis, Payne et al found that long-term consumption of vitamin D was strongly associated with increased brain lesions in the elderly (p b 0.001) [32]. In another longitudinal study, Hyppönen et al found atopy and allergic rhinitis were higher in 31-year-old subjects whose parents gave them vitamin D as infants and children [33].

The other thing we see in chronic disease is that even with regular sun exposure 25-D levels and 1,25 D levels often refuse to budge. Perhaps the body knows what it wants and will work to maintain it, unless overwhelmed by pharmaceutical doses of supplemental vitamin D, or sometimes an activated vitamin D or analog of D (these don’t need to be activated in the body and are only available as prescription drugs, often used in renal failure).

Now, where both modern and alternative medicine and the alternative hypothesis of Albert and Marshall are likely entirely wrong is in assuming the body and the microbiome, rather than being perfect dancer partners, tearing up the dance floor for your benefit, are idiots that never know what they're doing when something goes wrong.

And it’s equally wrong to assume that we need an artificial pharmaceutical-type solution. Albert and Marshall propose reversing the presumed VDR suppression from pathogenic bacteria by giving another VDR disruptor, but one that stimulates the VDR, namely the ARB blood pressure drug olmesartan, while also giving a prolonged course of antibiotics (the Marshall Protocol).

Using olmesartan in this way is problematic because it has many other off-target biological effects including affecting the kidneys to force lower blood pressure, altering electrolyte balance, altering the gut microbiome, inflaming the gut, and altering the mucosal immune system of the gut. 

Using broad spectrum antibiotics is also problematic since they can indiscriminately kill off helpful and harmful microbes.

Many of the beneficial symbiotic microbes in our microbiome up regulate VDR activity, so it is possible that there may not actually be any VDR dysfunction attributable to pathogenic strains. Our microbial friends depend on us for survival and they strongly themselves oppose any inroads made by pathogenic bacteria.

The Marshall protocol also recommends avoiding sunlight as it could theoretically raise 25-D levels to further exacerbate the “problem” they see. We would argue that there is no problem to begin with and sunlight has so many far reaching effects on human biology and health that to avoid it is tantamount to (very) slow suicide.

The protocol also doesn’t address initial inciting events that may have begun the disease process or the loss of organ or tissue function due to prolonged stress that weaken the “terrain” of the body making it harder to root out the overgrown friendly bacteria and the pathogenic invaders.

The Human Superorganism

Just how important is the microbiome?

The same way you can view a rainforest as one gigantic ecological unit comprised of innumerable macroscopic and microscopic species that work perfectly together, we have to start viewing ourselves as a superorganism. The microbiome is functionally as much a part of us, as our own cells.

Microbial RNA has been detected even in healthy human blood.5 The lungs are now understood to harbor a microbiome as well, the composition of which differs in patients with chronic lung conditions.6 Even the biofilm removed from prosthetic hip joints during revision arthroplasties has been shown to harbor dozens of distinct bacterial phylotypes.7

The approximately 20,500 genes expressed by the human genome are vastly outnumbered by the millions of genes expressed by our microbial inhabi- tants. The human gut microbiome alone expresses at least 9 million unique genes.12 It follows that we cannot study disease by studying the human genome in isolation. The millions of proteins and metabolites expressed by the microbiome continually interact with the human genome, altering the manner in which human genes are subsequently expressed. For example, one analysis demonstrated that the expression of at least 463 human genes is changed during a single infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis.13

This new understanding redefines what it means to be human – human beings are now most accurately described as superorganisms. The metabo- lism of the human superorganism represents a combination of microbial and human attributes. For example, the human angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) has been associated with myocardial infarction, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes mellitus, and sarcoidosis.14 Yet the expression of ACE also has been shown to be downregulated by Lactobacillus and Bifdobacteria, microbes com- monly found in dairy products.15 The ability of these and other microbes to directly alter human gene expression significantly affects the pathogenesis of inflammatory conditions, albeit in ways not yet fully understood.

Proteins and metabolites generated by the microbiome permeate the body. Of the small molecules found in healthy human blood, 36% are created by the human gut microbiome.16 The myriad interactions between these foreign and host proteins in the body, referred to as the interactome, affect an array of human metabolic processes. For example, the presence or absence of particular microbial metabolites in the blood of any individual cause the medication acetaminophen to be metabolized differently from person to person.17

These alterations of the microbiome in health and disease involve entire microbial ecosystems. Thus, chronic disease processes driven by infection are likely due to changes in complex microbial communities rather than the acquisition of a single pathogen. It follows that Koch’s postulates, which dictate that a single infectious disease must be caused by a single pathogen, are no longer tenable in the current era of the metagenome. (Proal, et al Ch.10, Infection and Autoimmunity, p 173, 2015 edition)

Arguably making the mistake of always assuming functional stupidity of the body and microbiome is not an accident (at least in the case of the mainstream and functional medicine).

It’s the dialectical trap.

As for the alternate hypothesis of Albert and Marshall, they get it a lot right, and their theory points us in the right direction (the immune system is attacking our own cells because they are infected), they just don't go far enough. They’re still working within the mainstream paradigm, just taking a different tack - they have their own medications they recommend to correct what they view as the body simply being outsmarted. They may still create more problems than they solve by not realizing there is often something deeper that initiated the problem or that has developed due to the problem (terrain disruption), and itself must be corrected if the problem is to ever be fully resolved.

What’s Going on & Fixing the Mess

…and watch out for mosquitos (i.e. maybe don’t take the easy way out of your own Gordian knot situation)

The truth is that you're inflamed for good reason and the body isn’t usually making any mistakes, though it may be struggling to function as it should due to overwhelming toxicity - but all that means is we need to help it expel toxins, and prevent more from entering. The body is always doing the best it can while being dealt a bad hand (too much stress, poor diet, no sun, lights after sunset, poor sleep, various toxins, pathogens, etc).

The bacterial "dysbiosis" or mold growth is usually there for good reason. It's because of the toxic environment. Those microbes are helping out by binding excess toxins. Your immune system is activated, keeping them in check, but also wreaking havoc on surrounding tissues.

Why is all this happening instead of nothing (i.e. a healthy state)?

Chronic Stress

Chronic Stress is destructive.

There are many sources of stress, but perhaps the biggest, most pervasive stressor that's been with you from day one, and every day since, is one most people never even consider: artificial light at night (ALAN).

Light triggers cortisol which is the stress hormone.

Cortisol inhibits immune system function (and raises insulin, BP, body fat, etc). Obviously we need some cortisol, but like very good thing there is a Goldilocks sweet spot. Too much or too little are harmful, we need it just right. Too much light means too much cortisol means not enough immunity means invasion of pathogens means chronic inflammatory diseases, especially autoimmune diseases.

So stress of various kinds combines to create some imbalance (physical, emotional, traumatic, etc) some tissue is weakened or damaged and becomes less able to detoxify. Still your body tries to expel metabolic and environmental toxins in the usual way by having paroxysms of “illness” multiple times, e.g. a cold, flu, sinusitis, bronchitis, diarrheal illness, whatever, and you and/or your doctor decided to thwart them all to some degree or another by taking anti-nausea, anti-cough, anti-histamine, anti-diarrheal, etc (what they should really be called is anti-detox or anti-immunity drugs).

We've never seen anyone with autoimmune disease who hasn't been suppressing various symptoms, sometimes seemingly "unrelated" ones for many years. The body kept trying to expel (or fight off) what was building inside through normal avenues, and never could.

Eventually the situation becomes so dire it may need some help.

For example mold can bind and neutralize toxins. So mold may invade the affected tissues (as in Chronic Sinusitis). Binding up heavy metals, microplastics, pesticides, even soaking up excess electromagnetic radiation for you.

And as in any natural ecosystem you could also have an external purely pathogenic force introduced that may throw everything off, like CMV, EBV, borrelia, particular strains of e-coli, mycobateria, staph, or bioweapons like Lyme and COVID-19. These often become intracellular pathogens within various tissues and even our own immune cells.

This is where a full-blown autoimmune disease ends up since the immune system is no longer just in the area killing off microbes spreading between our cells and causing collateral damage, it is specifically targetting our own cells for destruction since they are infected.

Kudzu: the alien (to the US) vine that’s eating the South. Those humps in the middle ground used to be living trees, and are now scaffolding for kudzu while it continues to smother and consume them (growing a foot a day) until eventually they’ll be completely gone, so the middle ground will look just like the flat foreground, and the vines will have already moved on to the background trees still standing clear. The climate in the Southeastern US is particularly suited to Kudzu. One possible solution would be a. lot of manpower to physically destroy it, other might be introducing some organism that kills Kudzu without causing any more damage to the ecosystem, eg the fungus Myrothecium verrucaria has shown promise in laboratory and field trials for selectively targeting and killing kudzu without harming other plants.

The way out of the stalemate between your immune system and the helpful and harmful bugs, is the same way out of any stalemate - both sides have to slowly lay down their arms. The only way that can happen is if we stop preventing the body from expelling the toxins, and in fact help it do so (active detox and avoidance), while supporting involved tissues, detox organs and pathways, and the immune system in gradually culling our erstwhile microbial helpers and opportunistic foes (select natural antimicrobials like silver, CD, etc).

In order to illustrate the situation, we’ve made it appear as though there are opposing sides (and there may be in the case of pathogens), but in reality a better way to think of it in the case of our microbial helpers is as an incredibly complex dance between two intimate partners that can’t actually survive or thrive without each other.

What proof do we have that this is the reality of the situation?

Extensive clinical experience with unsuccessful, partially successful and completely successful treatment helps to map out the face of underlying reality. That along with an understanding of simple ecological principles points to a hypothesis that has a high likelihood of being correct (even deeper principles evident in ancient medical systems are the ultimate arbiters, but that’s a bigger story for another day).

There is also the confirmatory research and clinical experience from the authors of the alternative hypothesis of Vitamin D who conducted an open label trial on patients with autoimmune disease in which instead of inhibiting the VDR with supplemental vitamin D, they stimulated it with olmesartan while also giving antibiotics to address the underlying infections:

Strong support for the validity of the molecular data forming the backbone of the alternative model comes from an open-label clinical trial in which hundreds of patients with a variety of autoimmune diagnoses are reporting improvement and recovery after taking a VDR agonist and subinhibitory antibiotics over the course of several years [34]. Subjects in the trial avoid (supplemental) vitamin D in an effort to increase VDR activity and subsequently the innate immune response. The strength of their resulting immunopathology indicates that lowering vitamin D intake indeed allows the innate immune system to more effectively target chronic pathogens (Albert, 2009).

This approach is likely to be more beneficial than simply suppressing the symptoms as mainstream and most alternative medical approaches tend to do, however there will invariably be deeper issues left unresolved, which means the disease will still not fully resolve, or the disease process will simply shift towards another manifestation.

This is because there has to be an inciting or predisposing factor that allows most bacteria, even pathogenic strains, to take up residence in tissues in the first place (otherwise everyone would be similarly affected). This will usually be the result of some combination of external and internal “toxic” insults, perhaps even epigenetic ones left over from afflictions wrought upon patients’ ancestors.

External insults run the gamut from heavy metals. pesticides, forever chemicals, EMFs, nutrient deficiencies, other traumas and more. Internal insults include harmful negative emotions, beliefs (eg triggering nocebo effects), and habitual negative thoughts.

So really fixing autoimmune disease requires uncovering the individual reasons it first developed in each patient. Otherwise the “terrain” will always invite back the same invasive bacterial problem you’ve just eliminated.

What About Supplementing Vitamin D Without Autoimmune Disease?

25-D levels (again the only form commonly checked both in clinical practice and in research settings), may be suppressed in more situations that just autoimmune disease:

Just a few months ago, a commentary in Journal of Nutrition(34) was uncertain how to explain the results from a comprehensive clinical study(35) showing that at the end of their pregnancies, even though 90% were taking prenatal vitamins, ‘‘vitamin D deficiency’’ was still common in the cohort of pregnant women. The commentary suggested that maybe this might be due to lack of compliance on the part of women in the cohort, or perhaps they just needed even more supplementation than twice the daily reference intake (DRI), the amount they were being given.

Surely, when the model fails to describe the data, it is time to question the model, not the data. This study collected only the transcriptionally inactive metabolite, 25-D, as is still common in so many clinical studies. Consequently the ‘‘vitamin D deficiency’’ being observed may well be downregulation of the 25-D metabolite under the influence of the elevated levels of 1,25-D during pregnancy. In the absence of definitive 1,25-D data, it is not possible to draw valid conclusions from the lowered serum levels of 25-D that were observed.

Yet the knowledge that 1,25-D is overexpressed in pregnancy is not new. Placental conversion was demonstrated in-vitro in 1979,(36) overexpression of 1,25-D in vivo during 1980,(37) and the dysregulated D metabolism was described in 1981.(38) 25 years later, clinical researchers are still not measuring more than one of the D metabolites, and still do not comprehend that they are dealing with an expressed hormone, and not a vitamin.

(Marshall, 2008)

When in doubt about a lab level, trust the body is doing something for a very good reason.

But let’s say there were a situation where you weren’t getting enough sun, or fish. Would it be a good idea to use supplements in that case, or just get out in the sun and eat more fish?

In the specific case of supplemental vitamin D there is evidence of harm, that has been successfully suppressed by well meaning alternative health gurus who’ve been propagandized into thinking the mainstream establishment is against vitamin D supplementation.

It really depends on what you mean by mainstream.

Mainstream medical doctors aren’t always on board (they’re often firmly entrenched on the know-nothing side of the dialectic, i.e. we don’t know the cause), but our food supply is FDA fortified with vitamin D (since the 1930s!), it is now nearly impossible to buy milk unfortified with vitamin D. There is a tremendous corpus of research on vitamin D supplementation that presupposes it is beneficial. This has been used by vitamin companies to convince many that they should be taking hefty doses, especially if they are “inexplicably” showing “low” levels.

The Iowa Women's Health study showed vitamin D intake seemed to protect against breast cancer in the first 5 years after it was taken. However, the effect began to reverse between years 5 and 10 and was completely lost after year 10, trending towards an opposing effect [29]. Lappe et al published work, conducted over 4 years, that seemingly showed vitamin D might lower the incidence of colorectal cancer [30]. In a similar study looking at a larger cohort and over a longer period of time, Rossouw et al found no such effect [31].

The arc of feeling better and then worse in patients supplementing with vitamin D is one that seems to play – depending on the extent to which the VDR is already blocked by bacterial ligands – over the course of 20 years or more. After multivariate analysis, Payne et al found that long-term consumption of vitamin D was strongly associated with increased brain lesions in the elderly (p b 0.001) [32]. In another longitudinal study, Hyppönen et al found atopy and allergic rhinitis were higher in 31-year-old subjects whose parents gave them vitamin D as infants and children [33].

(Albert, et al, 2009)

Albert and Marshall have now been raising the alarm for over 15 years. In 2015 they ended the book chapter they co-athured with Proal with this warning:

We have subsequently argued, with increasing urgency, that any subjec-tive or objective improvements associated with vitamin D supplementation in the short term result from its ability to decrease the immunopathology (inflammation trying to root out the microbes) associated with an effective innate immune response to elements of a patient’s microbiome.61 Blood-borne 25-D likely provides symptomatic relief by acting in a manner similar to the immunosuppressive medications described earlier, the use of which has been associated with high rates of relapse and instability over time.

Thus, while we are accustomed to the hypothesis that high levels of vita-min D supplementation are necessary to curb the current epidemic of chronic disease, the opposite may instead be true. Vitamin D is added to an increasing variety of food products and is more frequently used in the clinic, but the incidence of nearly every chronic condition has, in fact, increased. To minimize potential harm, we believe that blood-borne 25-D must be kept below the consensus immunosuppressive level of approx- imately 50–60 nmol/L (20-25 ng/ml) to optimize innate immune function and overall health.

Fatty Fish

Food and sun sources of inactive vitamin D (hormone) always come with a package of "information" that balances the effects of the isolated “vitamin”. These molecules are either created by the sun along with vitamin D, or are present in food that contains vitamin D, which itself was stimulated by sunlight.

Food rich in vitamin D3 like fish also contains omega-3s with anti-inflammatory effects to balance the pro-inflammatory effects you usually get from fully activated 1,25-D. However I would only rely on fish for vitamin D if there isn’t adequate UV-B from sun. Recent research shows this is likely less of a problem at higher latitudes than people have been led to believe. On the other hand there are many other reasons to get your fatty fish, top of the list being the omega 3 fat DHA, iodine, and sulfate.

Sunlight

Full spectrum sunlight while raising 1,25-D levels in healthy people, also stimulates many anti-inflammatory effects from UV, IR and NIR as well as increasing "beneficial" gut bacteria levels.

UV far from being harmful, as your dermatologist and PCP and the media will insist, is absolutely essential for human health. It stimulates the production of POMC, which creates important cleavage products like alpha beta and gamma MSH that have powerful anti-inflammatory health promoting effects. UV-A stimulates nitric oxide which helps relax us and elevate our mood by increasing the levels of beta endorphins, as well as lowering blood pressure. UV-B can damage skin, but the effect is mitigated by eating right (no seed oils) preconditioning your skin with the protective wavelengths in morning sunlight, and further decreased by getting healing late afternoon sun, as well as by gradually allowing a healthy tan to develop (even people who don’t tan, can tan in this way). IR and NIR have been extensively studied for their “photobiomodulating” effects in the context of many chronic diseases. They are present in morning and late afternoon sun, so you don’t need to buy any expensive equipment to get them in their natural context (where they are likely to be most beneficial and least harmful).

So while higher 1,25 D levels have a pro-inflammatory effect, the anti-inflammatory effects of UV, and the photobiomodulating effects of IR and NIR and the increase in beneficial gut bacteria has an anti-inflammatory effect. These other effects of sunlight have been shown to be associated with lower chronic disease rates independent of vitamin D levels.

In any discussion of light it’s also important to mention that too much blue light, especially after sunset, but also throughout the day is quite inflammatory. You won’t get too much from sunlight, but inflammatory and stressful blue wavelengths are concentrated by our windows, sunglasses, contacts, and sometimes even intraocular lens implants which can block UV, IR and NIR, and blue light is usually produced in excess by our artificial lights that don’t produce the other beneficial, balancing wavelengths.

As mentioned earlier too much light at night will directly lead to higher cortisol levels, but it also does so indirectly via making less melatonin than you should at night, which means you’ll like develop a chronic serotonin excess (serotonin is the precursor to melatonin made during the day), which can cause a whole laundry list of severe chronic problems that can become their own diseases. Quoting from my last article, Why Sherpas and Billionaires Don’t Get Jet Lag Can Cure Chronic Disease:

Acute symptoms of higher serotonin include restlessness, agitation, confusion, hallucinations, tachycardia and arrhythmias, high blood pressure. tremors, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea. Chronically elevated serotonin will lead to increased cortisol production, prolactin excess, and altered levels of thyroid hormone, growth hormone, sex hormones, oxytocin, and insulin. 

Let’s trace out the further implications of just the first of those effects of higher serotonin: chronically elevated cortisol will lead to weight gain, insulin resistance, hypertension, heart disease, low immune function, muscle weakness, osteoporosis, mood disorders, cognitive impairment, reproductive hormone imbalances, skin and hair problems, and digestive upset. It does this by affecting the levels of insulin, thyroid hormones, sex hormones, growth hormone, prolactin, adrenaline, leptin and ghrelin. 

The upshot is if you really want to be healthy you have to submit to the call of nature. Wake up with the roosters, consume food, drink and information during the day, get ready for bed at sunset. Use less tech and none at night. Spend more time outdoors getting natural EMFs and sunlight, and develop intimacy not just with animals but with other humans.

Nature always provides a balanced, deeply meaningful source of biological information and modern medicine and vitaminology always provides inherently imbalanced or inscrutable forms of information to the body that are harmful.

Conclusion

It’s time we rethought both routine and therapeutic vitamin D supplementation. I for one will not be drinking steroid hormone D fortified milk any more, but will continue to eat fatty fish and get plenty of sunlight throughout the year.

It’s time we escaped the matrix of predefined conclusions we’ve been herded into by dark forces motivated not by human flourishing, but by ever increasing profit at all costs.

Autoimmune disease is usually due to microbial overgrowth in response to a damaged ecosystem. Your body is attacking your own tissues for a good reason, not by mistake. Cells have been infected with intracellular pathogens and need to be destroyed and replaced by uninfected healthy cells. Fix your ecosystem by obeying the laws of nature. If it didn’t exist 10,000 years ago there should be baseline distrust.

Get your sun, avoid light after dark, eat your fatty fish, and if you get inflamed count yourself lucky, because you still have an active immune system. Help it out by doing some detox and living right.