Roughly 10% of the population will have a positive ANA titer, so it’s good to know exactly what that means and what you should do about it.
This is diagnosed on bloodwork and detects antibodies targeting the nucleus of certain cells in your body. These antibodies are proteins that your immune system produces typically in response to foreign invaders, such as viruses and bacteria.
But sometimes, for reasons discussed here, your immune system might over-react which results in attacks being made to your body’s own cells, forming these antibodies as it does so. The higher the titer the more antibodies are present in your blood.
A positive ANA titer doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an autoimmune disease, but your doctor will recommend other tests just to make sure. So if the ANA titer is positive and there are no other indicators of an autoimmune disease present, you will be told to just watch it – and no further treatment will be given.
This is how modern medicine usually addresses it. However, we would take a different approach in Ayurveda, the ancient system of healing which comes from India that I use in my practice.
We recognize 6 stages of a disease process. In the first two stages some things could be out of balance in your body, but there are no symptoms yet.
Then in the third and fourth stages symptoms are present, such as a high ANA titer, but no disease can be detected. A frank pathology doesn’t show up until you reach the 5th and 6th stages, where these imbalances have been ignored for too long and will now manifest into a disease that you can name.
So the point here is that if the ANA titer is high, it is a signal that you are trending toward an autoimmune disease. It’s great that you don’t have a named disease just yet, but on the other hand you don’t want to ignore this finding and just watch and wait as is usually recommended by your doctor.
Instead, you want to get to work on reversing the trend towards an autoimmune disease, which means you have to see exactly what is out of balance in your body and fix it so it doesn’t continue to snowball toward a disease.
We are not used to identifying and treating imbalances in the Western world. Instead, these imbalances are usually left to fester and eventually turn into a disease. And then treatment is recommended once it can be detected on various bloodwork and other tests. This is actually an incorrect approach to the early diagnosis and treatment of disease, but it’s what we are used to doing, because doctors are trained to diagnose and treat diseases.
So, to treat imbalances, you first need to know exactly what the immune system is, and thoroughly check for imbalances in these areas.
The immune system can be divided into three basic parts: the gut microbiome, the liver and the bone marrow.
There is a saying that all diseases begin in the gut, so that’s where we begin our search. A thorough consultation would investigate if there was any disruption in the gut, usually through various pharmaceuticals, such as antibiotics, birth control pills, steroids, acid reflux medicines, and many others, as we are now finding out.
The friendly bacteria in the gut can also become depleted if you are under any stress. Which means that most of us are walking around with dysbiosis in the gut where the friendly bacteria have become depleted which allows the potentially bad guys in the gut to overgrow and actually become bad guys – candida albicans yeast, bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites, which can now grow out of control since their surveillance team, the friendly bacteria, are missing.
Also, the gut now becomes leaky, allowing toxins which should normally be sent off into the bowel movement for evacuation out of the body to now leak into the bloodstream, creating immune system attacks and inflammation.
Both the absorption of toxins into the bloodstream and the chronic infection resulting from lack of friendly bacteria can trigger autoimmune responses. Since 80% of the immune system resides in the gut, disrupting its normal function in this way can result in an autoimmune disease over time if left unchecked.
To replenish the gut microbiome we give probiotics which have a 100% potency guaranteed and are manufactured in a way that they can survive as they pass through the three barriers: the stomach acids, the bile acids and the pancreatic enzymes, all of which could kill them as they make their way to the intestines.
We also use a yogurt starter culture which results in an alkaline-tasting yogurt. If the yogurt tastes sour the acids in the yogurt could actually kill the friendly bacteria in the yogurt.
Then we address the liver. In this modern age where we have surrounded ourselves with over 80,000 chemicals. The liver is the main filter in the body, and as it filters all these toxins, it becomes overwhelmed because it was never designed to take on this high load in the first place. As it becomes toxic with chemicals it also becomes overheated, so any liver detox herbs you use must keep the liver cool or else it will push you into more autoimmune.
Look at my video on the herb we use in my practice called bhumi amla. It’s the only herb that can clean the liver and keep it cool at the same time, unlike milk thistle, dandelion root, burdock root and many others which heat up the liver as it cleans it out, thrusting you into more autoimmune reactions.
The third part of the immune system is the bone marrow. Many pharmaceuticals, chemicals, air pollution and pesticides make their way into the bone marrow, which can also trigger autoimmune diseases since this is where the immune system cells are born.
Again, we have to be mindful as we clean out the bone marrow that we don’t heat up the liver. There are various herbs and foods that can accomplish this task, such as guduchi satwa herb, coriander seed tea, moringa leaf tea and moringa stick soup.
Once we address these three areas then we also have to continue our investigation into the patient’s diet and daily routine.
If you skip or delay meals, it could heat up the liver, aggravating the autoimmune tendency. If you go to bed past 10:00, or rush through the day, or have an improper diet you could make autoimmune toxins, known as ama visha, in your digestive tract.
Ama visha is a toxin which develops if the food remains undigested in the gut and ferments. Ama visha, which is an inflammatory toxin, is also known as an autoimmune toxin due to its hot reactive nature which can trigger autoimmune diseases.
There is another autoimmune toxin known as gar visha. These are from the toxins made outside of our bodies, such as from pharmaceuticals, poor quality foods, pesticides, air pollution and other environmental chemicals.
Both of these vishas or poisons trigger autoimmune responses due to the heat and inflammation they create, and therefore care must be taken when removing them from the body. In ancient times the toxins were very cold and sticky so heat was used to melt them down and open up the channels for their removal. Therapies such as sweating, fasting and very hot herbal teas and formulas using ginger, peppers, hot spices and herbs were used to burn out these cold and clogging toxins.
However, today, the majority of the toxins are ama visha and gar visha, both of which are very hot so the practitioner needs to be mindful of this fact when implementing the various therapies that are needed to safely remove these toxins from the tissues and cells of the body. It’s unfortunate that many practitioners still implement these ancient methods of cleansing which are no longer relevant today. The problem is that there are no up to date manuals for cleansing which take into account these modern types of hot toxins, so the vast majority of people are cleansing in an incorrect way.
This is a general outline of what we need to look at if the ANA titer is high, so we can work on removing the imbalances that are creating this autoimmune tendency. Once we identify and treat all the imbalances, change the diet and daily routine and teach the patient the highly effective and revamped cleansing techniques, we then continue to watch the ANA titer to make sure it goes back down to normal.
I hope this video helps you as you look for the best way to treat your high ANA titer.