The Autoimmune Spectrum.

Autoimmunity isn't a case of you have disease or you don't, it's a spectrum. There are different stages.

Do you know where you lie on the spectrum?

More importantly did you know that you can move both ways along the spectrum, forwards or backwards.

This is what people are talking about when they say reverse your autoimmunity. They are talking about pushing you back down the spectrum.

Stage 1: Healthy - The medical world tends to look at autoimmunity as you are either healthy or you have an autoimmune disease. In fact, autoimmunity is a spectrum, there are stages, it's not as black and white as you may believe.

Stage 2: Autoimmune activation - some event internal or external triggers your autoimmune processes in the body. This could be a trauma, virus, stress or many other things. At this time, you may have some inflammation in the body but no symptoms or damage to tissue or organ.

Stage 3: Silent Autoimmunity - Autoimmune disease lies hand in hand with inflammation in the body and this is something that is focused on in the spectrum as well as whether a person is symptomatic and whether there is any degeneration. Yes, you heard me right...read that again...whether a person is symptomatic or not. Silent autoimmunity is a stage where there are no symptoms, but autoantibodies will show up on tests (advanced tests not necessarily basic tests you get at the GP)

Stage 4: Symptomatic autoimmunity - now the symptoms start, maybe little niggles that you think are normal or just a sign of getting older that creep in slowly, or they could be more severe sudden symptoms.

Stage 5: Autoimmune disease - By the time you get to an autoimmune disease there is usually already some kind of degeneration or destruction in the body, but autoimmunity starts a long time before this, 3 of the 5 stages on my autoimmune spectrum show no symptoms. In fact, you can go 10 years or more with autoimmunity before you show symptoms.

Did you notice the direction of the arrow on the side of the spectrum?

Have another look which way does it go? Yes, you got it ... both ways.

As much as you can travel down the spectrum with the right interventions you can also travel back up it.

While autoimmune diseases are not able to be cured, you can heal from them.

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