How does the immune system work? What are some of the causes of autoimmune diseases? Is it possible to prevent or even reverse autoimmune disorders?
Millions of people suffer from autoimmune diseases. Millions more are on an unhealthy trajectory to an autoimmune diagnosis. While genetics influence who develops autoimmunity and there’s no known cure, Amy Myers believes that those suffering are far from powerless.
Keep reading for an overview of The Autoimmune Solution by Amy Myers.
Overview of The Autoimmune Solution
Millions of people suffer from autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s disease, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. According to The Autoimmune Solution by Amy Myers, millions more are on an unhealthy trajectory to an autoimmune diagnosis. While genetics influence who develops autoimmunity and there’s no known cure, Myers believes that those suffering are far from powerless.
(Shortform note: Other researchers share Myers’s concern about the number of people already diagnosed or at risk of being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. A 2024 study found that almost 5% of the US population received an autoimmune diagnosis between 2011 and 2022. Of those, more than half were women, which might shed light on who is more likely to be on an unhealthy trajectory. However, some scientists believe we need more data to understand how factors like gender and genetics impact the risk of developing autoimmunity. These data will give patients the power to understand their risk factors and work toward preventing disease.)
In The Autoimmune Solution (2017), Myers argues that you can prevent or even reverse autoimmune conditions by making lifestyle changes that reduce inflammation and improve immune function. She recommends taking control of the environmental factors that trigger autoimmune symptoms: diet, stress, toxins, and infections.
(Shortform note: It’s possible that Myers is overly confident about the possibility of preventing or reversing autoimmunity. Lifestyle changes may help manage symptoms and prevent further progression, but they may not be able to fully restore health. For example, some autoimmune diseases make it difficult for your body to absorb nutrients, which limits the positive impact of a diet. Additionally, some people may have a strong genetic predisposition that outweighs the impact of lifestyle modifications.)
Myers is a functional medicine physician and former emergency room doctor with personal experience battling autoimmunity. She received a diagnosis of Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition, while studying medicine. After traditional medicine failed to improve her health, she turned to functional medicine, developed the method in The Autoimmune Solution, and reversed her condition. She has written several bestselling books, including The Thyroid Connection (2016) and The Autoimmune Solution Cookbook (2018). She also founded a wellness company, AMMD, that sells supplements and health programs.
(Shortform note: As a doctor and author who writes about her own diagnosis, Myers is in good company. Other examples include Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who writes in When Breath Becomes Air about being diagnosed with lung cancer during his last year of residency. Likewise, psychiatrist Kay Jamison writes in An Unquiet Mind about bipolar disorder, which she suffers from. Similar to how Myers hopes to help autoimmune sufferers, Jamison hopes to help psychiatrists understand bipolar disorder more deeply so they can better support their patients.)
In the first part of this guide, we’ll explore the basic concepts of autoimmunity, including how a healthy immune system works and how it can become autoimmune. Then, we’ll compare traditional medicine’s approach to autoimmune conditions with the approach of functional medicine, which Myers endorses. We’ll conclude with Myers’ advice for preventing or reversing autoimmunity by adopting an immunity-friendly lifestyle. Throughout the guide, we also offer further context for Myers’ claims and share perspectives from other health experts.
The Basics of Autoimmunity
Before learning how to prevent or reverse autoimmune diseases, it helps to first understand what they are and how they originate. Myers explains that autoimmune diseases are conditions where your immune system attacks your body as if it were a threat.
In this section, we’ll share Myers’ explanations of how your immune system works, how it can become dysregulated, and how that dysregulation can lead to autoimmunity. Finally, we’ll discuss how visualizing autoimmunity on a continuum can help you understand your autoimmune experience.
How a Healthy Immune System Works: Acute Inflammation
Your immune system protects your body from harmful invaders like bacteria, viruses, and parasites. Myers explains that your immune system uses physical barriers like the skin and mucus, as well as specialized cells and antibodies that identify and neutralize threats.
When your immune system identifies a threat, it launches a response: acute inflammation. This is a normal, healthy response to specific threats, like an injury or the flu. Myers says that it manifests as responses such as redness, swelling, fever, and pain, and the response stops once the threat is gone.
Myers describes the two main components of your immune system:
- The innate immune system activates immediately when it detects a threat. It launches an inflammatory response to flood the threat with blood and other fluids that neutralize it.
- The adaptive immune system “learns” from the threats your body has neutralized and creates targeted antibodies to defend against the same threats in the future.
According to Myers, your body needs both immune system components to protect you in the short and long term.
When Your Immune System Becomes Dysregulated: Chronic Inflammation
Although an active immune system is crucial for health, if it’s too active, it can lead to health problems. Myers argues that your immune system becomes overwhelmed when it faces constant challenges such as poor diet, environmental toxins, infections, and stress. Instead of responding to specific threats with acute inflammatory responses, your immune system is constantly activated, resulting in chronic inflammation.
Myers explains that chronic inflammation can set the stage for autoimmune conditions. Your innate immune system becomes exhausted from battling constant threats to your health. Your adaptive system gets overworked and “confused” as it begins creating antibodies for substances it doesn’t need to fight. This can cause your body to develop new sensitivities or allergies because your immune system overreacts and mounts full-blown defenses against harmless substances, such as lactose.
In extreme cases, your immune system can mistakenly identify your body’s organs or fluids as threats, leading to autoimmune conditions. For example, in people with Hashimoto’s disease, their immune system attacks the thyroid. In people with multiple sclerosis, the immune system targets the myelin around nerves.
The Autoimmune Continuum
Myers argues that there isn’t a specific point where a healthy immune system becomes so dysregulated that it creates an autoimmune condition. Instead, she believes people fall along an autoimmune continuum. This continuum includes those who experience mild to moderate symptoms and those with a full-blown autoimmune diagnosis. She describes the following parts of the continuum:
- At the lower end of the continuum are people who sporadically experience an individual symptom that might signal underlying inflammation, such as digestive issues or difficulty focusing. These people are at risk of developing autoimmunity.
- In the middle of the continuum are people who have around three symptoms that occur frequently, such as several times a week. Their risk of developing autoimmunity is higher.
- Near the higher end of the continuum are people who experience symptoms every day. They likely already have an autoimmune condition, but they haven’t received a diagnosis yet.
- At the higher end of the continuum are people who have an autoimmune diagnosis.
Although the continuum shows a worrying progression, Myers believes it’s a helpful way to frame autoimmunity. Why? It suggests that early intervention can make a difference in the evolution of a disease. Because autoimmunity develops gradually, there are opportunities to notice symptoms and take action to reverse the disease.
Traditional Medicine’s Narrow Approach to Autoimmune Disease
If you’re one of the millions of people suffering from an autoimmune condition, you’ve probably been to several doctors, hoping to find help. However, according to Myers, traditional medicine can’t help you reverse or prevent autoimmune conditions. It focuses too narrowly on genetics as the cause and medication as the treatment. In this section, we’ll outline traditional medicine’s narrow approach to autoimmune diseases.
The One-Dimensional Cause: Genetics
Myers explains that conventional medicine typically views autoimmune conditions as purely genetic in origin, suggesting that genes simply command your body to attack itself. This perspective leads doctors to tell patients their condition is inevitable and irreversible.
The One-Dimensional Answer: Medication to Manage Symptoms
As Myers explains, conventional medicine’s answer to autoimmunity offers little hope for reversing the disease because it focuses on managing symptoms through medication. Myers identifies three major problems with this approach:
- Medications can create a harmful cycle where the drug you use to treat one symptom leads to side effects requiring additional medications.
- Conventional medicine often treats autoimmune diseases with immunosuppressant drugs. However, these drugs leave you vulnerable to infections and limit your life experiences since you have to be extra vigilant about germs.
- Often, the medications stop working. This sends you and your doctors searching for ever more powerful—and potentially more harmful—medications to manage your symptoms.
The Functional Medicine Approach to Autoimmune Disease
As we’ve seen, Myers believes traditional medicine is ill-equipped to prevent or reverse autoimmune conditions. Instead, she argues that autoimmune sufferers need a functional medicine approach that holistically addresses the causes and treatments of autoimmune disease.
We’ll begin this section by explaining what functional medicine is, and then we’ll explore how it explains the causes of autoimmune diseases. We’ll also discuss why Myers believes these causes are behind an autoimmune epidemic in the US. Finally, we’ll explore functional medicine’s approach to preventing and healing autoimmunity.
What Is Functional Medicine?
Myers describes functional medicine as a whole-body approach to health that considers how all bodily systems interact, rather than treating different parts in isolation. Instead of addressing individual symptoms, it seeks to restore overall health by dealing with root causes. Functional medicine treatments include special diets and lifestyle changes while using medications only when necessary.
The Multi-Dimensional Cause: Much More Than Genetics
While traditional doctors often point to your genes as the cause of your autoimmune condition, Myers explains that autoimmunity has multiple causes beyond just genetics.
Myers believes that the genes predisposing you to develop an autoimmune condition activate when your immune system becomes chronically stressed and dysregulated. This means that while genetics play a role in causing autoimmunity, they’re not the sole cause.
Below, we’ll explore five immune system stressors that can lead to autoimmunity.
Stressor 1: An Unhealthy Digestive System
Myers argues that digestive health is crucial for immune function. She emphasizes that about 80% of your immune system overlaps with your digestive system. For example, the saliva in your mouth and the good bacteria in your stomach neutralize many of the germs that enter your body through food or water. However, many factors can disrupt gut health, including the following:
- Inflammatory foods (especially gluten, dairy, sugar, and processed foods)
- Medications (particularly antibiotics)
- Chronic stress
- Infections
According to Myers, an unhealthy digestive system can trigger autoimmunity by creating a leaky gut. Certain foods thin the lining of your intestines, allowing partially digested food particles, toxins, and bacteria to escape into your bloodstream. This triggers an immune response as your body attacks these invaders. Over time, this chronic inflammation and immune system stress can lead to autoimmune conditions.
Stressor 2: Toxins
Myers explains two ways that toxins can lead to autoimmunity. First, toxins can reduce the production of cells that regulate your immune system.
Second, toxins can confuse your immune system, weakening its ability to distinguish between foreign tissue and your own body. This happens when toxins overstimulate your immune system. It also happens when toxins alter or damage cells in your body so your immune system no longer recognizes them as part of your body.
Environmental toxins come from multiple sources—we’ll discuss four of them. The first source is water containing fluoride and chlorine.
Secondly, environmental toxins are found in toiletries. These products contain harmful ingredients like parabens, phthalates, and heavy metals.
Toxins are also found in a third source: food. For example, food can contain pesticides, heavy metals (especially fish), and chemicals leached from plastic containers and non-stick cookware.
Finally, indoor areas are sources of toxins. Homes can house toxins from building materials, furniture, carpeting, and mold growth. Indoor air can contain chemicals from cleaning products and building materials.
Stressor 3: Infections
In addition to facing toxins, our bodies also face environmental stressors in the form of germs that cause infections. Myers explains that there are two main ways infections can trigger autoimmunity. Your immune system might attack both the infection and similar-looking, healthy body tissues, or it might attack healthy tissue surrounding an infection. As a result, infections may not fully heal and the virus or bacteria may stay in your body, causing chronic inflammation. Some common infections researchers have linked to autoimmunity include the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and the E. coli bacteria.
Stressor 4: Emotional and Psychological Stress
Chronic stress that’s unresolved or continues escalating for months or years can lead to an overactive immune system. According to Myers, this shows that humans evolved to handle acute rather than chronic stress. In addition, emotional and psychological stress can depress your immune system, making it more susceptible to infections.
Stressor 5: Modern Hygiene Procedures
Myers adds that, although they’re lifesaving, modern sanitation and medical practices may contribute to autoimmune conditions by reducing exposure to beneficial bacteria. Factors like being born by C-section, drinking formula instead of breastmilk, and overusing antibiotics deprive children of microbes that help them develop healthy immune systems.
The Autoimmune Epidemic
According to Myers, these environmental and lifestyle stressors are driving an autoimmune epidemic in the United States. She points to the fact that autoimmune diagnoses have tripled in the US over the past half century. Myers argues that genetic changes occur too slowly to explain such a rapid and recent increase, which suggests that environmental and lifestyle factors are behind the epidemic.
Functional Medicine’s Multi-Dimensional Answer: Alter Your Lifestyle
According to Myers, a multi-dimensional understanding of autoimmunity opens up more opportunities for prevention and treatment because many of the risk factors are in your control. She recommends you reorganize your lifestyle to limit those risk factors. This includes eliminating problematic foods, healing your gut, reducing your exposure to toxins, addressing hidden infections that haven’t fully healed, and managing stress. Unlike conventional medicine’s symptom-focused approach, this method addresses the root causes of autoimmunity.
In the next section, we’ll explore Myers’ specific recommendations for dealing with each risk factor to improve your chances of preventing or reversing autoimmune conditions.
Myers’ Method to Prevent or Reverse Autoimmune Disease
Now that we’ve discussed why a holistic approach is an effective way to prevent or reverse an autoimmune disease, we’ll explore what that approach involves. Myers offers a method to prevent or reverse autoimmunity, which she refers to as The Myers Way. Her method has four prongs: improving gut health, eliminating inflammatory foods, reducing your exposure to toxins, and addressing hidden infections while managing stress. In addition, she advocates for several health-promoting strategies with a 30-day meal plan as the central element. Since these themes and strategies often overlap, we’ve reorganized Myers’ insights into one overarching goal, two guiding strategies, and lifestyle changes to support them.
Myers’ Goal: Support Your Immune System
According to Myers, supporting your immune system, rather than suppressing it, is central to preventing and reversing autoimmunity. Her method focuses on strengthening and balancing your immune system through diet, detoxification, and lifestyle changes. She argues that her method reduces the stress on your immune system, which in turn reduces autoimmune symptoms.
Myers’ method has two guiding strategies to achieve better health: restoring your body’s healthy digestion and avoiding unnecessary stress on your immune system. These strategies help you achieve the goal of supporting your immune system so it retains or regains balance. Below, we’ll explore each strategy and the lifestyle changes to implement them.
Strategy 1: Restore Your Body’s Healthy Digestion
Myers argues that because your digestive and immune systems overlap, healthy digestion helps balance your body’s immunity responses. In addition, a healthy digestive system helps your body absorb the nutrients from the food you’re eating, which supports your overall health. Below, we’ll explore the lifestyle changes she offers to help you restore your body’s healthy digestion.
Change 1: Implement a Strict 30-Day Diet
To restore healthy digestion, Myers recommends a strict 30-day diet where you don’t eat any toxic or inflammatory foods.
As we’ve discussed, toxic and inflammatory foods disrupt your digestive system, triggering or exacerbating autoimmune conditions. Eliminating these problematic foods and replacing them with nutrient-dense, healing foods will reduce inflammation, support digestive healing, and restore proper immune function—all crucial aspects of reversing autoimmune dysfunction.
Myers shares several toxic and inflammatory foods to avoid during the 30-day diet: corn products, dairy, gluten, grains, and soy. Myers also suggests eliminating some foods commonly thought to be healthy which are actually inflammatory, including legumes, nightshade vegetables, nuts, and seeds. She argues that these foods trigger inflammation because they have compounds that irritate the gut, similar to gluten.
The healthy foods to focus on eating are high-quality proteins, organic vegetables and fruits, and healthy fats.
- High-quality protein sources include grass-fed meats, wild-caught fish, and organic poultry.
- Healthy, organic fruits and vegetables include leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, squash varieties, berries, citrus, melons, and tree fruits.
- Sources of healthy fats include avocado, coconut oil, and olive oil.
After the initial 30 days, you can reintroduce some of the inflammatory foods you eliminated in small amounts. However, Myers argues you should never eat gluten and dairy because they cause major inflammation, even in very small amounts. In addition, the health-promoting foods she recommends eating should be the bulk of what you eat daily.
Finally, Myers advises avoiding all non-essential medications during the 30-day diet because they can interfere with liver detoxification. However, you should never stop taking essential medications without consulting a healthcare provider.
Change 2: Use Supplements
While a healthy diet is fundamental, Myers believes it’s not enough to ensure proper nutrition. Therefore, supplements are necessary for everyone. This is because the modern food system compromises food quality with industrial farming, pesticides, and GMOs. She explains that toxins are so ubiquitous that even foods marketed as healthy or natural are likely to contain some health-disrupting chemicals. In addition, leaky gut, environmental toxins, common infections, and high levels of stress hamper your body’s ability to absorb the nutrients it needs.
The specific supplements needed vary by individual, but Myers suggests some that can benefit everyone:
- Probiotics and L-glutamine to heal your gut lining
- Omega-3 to reduce inflammation
- Vitamin D to heal hidden infections
- Glutathione and vitamin C to support natural detoxification processes
Strategy 2: Avoid Unnecessary Stress on Your Immune System
Reducing your exposure to stressors like toxins or illnesses reduces the chances that acute inflammation will become chronic. Myers argues this will help moderate your body’s immune responses and prevent or reverse autoimmunity. Below, we’ll explore five lifestyle changes she suggests to help you avoid stressing your immune system.
1) Work with your doctor to identify and treat hidden viral or bacterial infections.
2) Get enough sleep: Aim for seven and a half to nine hours of sleep every night.
3) Exercise, but don’t overexert yourself: If you’re already on the autoimmune spectrum, Myers believes exercise can be beneficial up to a point. Since your body needs energy to heal, she argues this isn’t the time to exercise too intensely or frequently.
4) Manage your stress: Deal with stressors immediately without dwelling on them, and incorporate stress-relieving activities into your routine.
5) Avoid indoor toxins: Install HEPA air filters at home and work, and use water filters on all taps. Myers also recommends gradually replacing personal care products with toxin-free alternatives and eliminating any mold in your home.
Exercise: Reflect on Myers’ Approach to Autoimmunity
Myers argues that you can prevent or reverse autoimmune conditions by making significant lifestyle changes. In this exercise, you’ll reflect on what you’ve learned, to what extent you agree with Myers’ ideas, and how you might alter your lifestyle.
- What was your experience with or knowledge of autoimmunity before reading this guide? How familiar were you with the possible causes and treatments of autoimmune conditions?
- Myers argues that environmental and lifestyle factors such as diet and toxins contribute to autoimmune conditions. Which of the factors she points to surprised or intrigued you? How have your opinions on the link between these factors and autoimmunity changed?
- Myers argues that traditional medicine can’t reverse or prevent autoimmune conditions. To what extent do you agree, and why?
- Myers proposes a full revision of your lifestyle to prevent or reverse autoimmune conditions. Will you incorporate any or all of her suggestions? What are the positive impacts you hope to see as a result? What challenges do you anticipate?
