it would be a great plus if they have a good working knowledge of Eastern herbalism, because my hypothesis stems from transcribing Eastern medicine concepts into Western problems. For instance, in ayurvedic medicine a strong digestive fire called “agni” is necessary in order to properly digest food so that it doesn’t become what is called “ama”, which is a mucoid matter that is thought to be the cause of most diseases. I have found a correlation between this and Western medical research because for almost every autoimmune disease you find that there are chronic infections involved that can’t be addressed by antibiotics because of incessant biofilm communities. I translate biofilm to ama. But more important, what is Agni in Western medical terms? I would translate a strong digestive fire as having adequate HCL production in the stomach, which triggers the proper amount of enzymes from the pancreas and the release of bile, etc. Essentially, having an appropriate amount of stomach acid is the most important factor, and whenever people suffer from hypochlorhydria, they can no longer sterilize food in the stomach and they develope small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, by not allowing the sterilization you allow pathogenic bacterial colonies to create biofilm within parts of the body that are normally close to sterile. hypochlorhydria has been shown to be associated with almost every autoimmune disease in the medical literature, and so has intestinal permeability which can be caused by biofilm communities within the small intestine, which would have the root cause in hypochlorhydria. Once the intestine has become permeable, lipopolysaccharides and bacteria can find their way too many different places in the body and manifest and different kinds of diseases. But the cause is the same. and we don’t have reliable drugs to be able to dissolve biofilm, but there is literature on herbs that have been shown to stop the formation of biofilm and they should be brought up as something that could be used alongside Western medicine to address autoimmune disease, along with dietary and lifestyle changes that can address gastritis and hypothetically, bring proper HCL production back. in the 1920s there were a lot of studies using HCL for many conditions with great success, but for some reason they stopped and that should be brought up as well. So looking at Western Civilization, stress, alcohol, smoking, refined carbohydrates in high sugar diets can all cause inflammation within the stomach, and when gastritis develops the glands start to secrete less acid, and this is the start of all of these problems as my hypothesis.
