Hi Dr. Cordain,
I'm not sure if you remember me- I was one of the women who interviewed you last August at the Ancestral Health Symposium in LA.
The reason I'm writing you today is 1) to thank you and 2) to ask you some questions. When we spoke, I asked you about Hidradenitis Suppurativa (HS). You told me that you suspected it had an autoimmune connection, but didn't have any more information to add. I suffered from HS for over 20 years, Stage II, so I was very motivated to get rid of it for good. Once you mentioned "autoimmunity," I went on an autoimmune Paleo protocol and my HS disappeared. With experimentation, I found my trigger- potatoes. I never would have known, or even tried the AlP, had you not mentioned autoimmunity. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. 3) I had a guest post on robbwolf.com about the issue (I've now been in clinical remission off medication for almost a YEAR) and am currently writing a book about it. My background is in Journalism, though, not science or any medical field, so I am quoting the hell out of your book, Robb Wolf's book, and others.
1. I can't find any documentation of HS being autoimmune in nature, except for what you told me in the hallway of the AHS building. Doctors currently treat it with antibiotics or don't treat it at all. You did say when we spoke that you were going to look into it. Do you know of any medical literature that suggests that HS is autoimmune in nature?
2. When I experimented on myself by removing nightshades and went into remission, and then flared up when I reintroduced potatoes, did I not prove the autoimmune nature of HS in myself? I have been talking to other people who have been also putting their HS into remission by removing nightshades and it seems to be working across the board. Some have diagnosed wheat as their trigger, but the overwhelming majority of us have found nightshades to be the offender. I did do my elimination and reintroduction quite scientifically, but I'm not a scientist, so do my results "count" or are they just anecdotal?
3. You say that the white blood cells in our guts have become sensitized to proteins from bacteria or food or both. For people who have become sensitized to the bacteria, what options are available to them? Obviously antibiotics don't work in this case, so would taking probiotics and something like Allimed (a garlic extract which has been shown to have antibacterial effects in the body) help? Since I didn't have this particular problem, I would like to present options in my new book and help those who do. Obviously I am putting the dietary changes at the forefront of the treatment, but if those fail, then I would like to have another line of treatment, unless the dietary changes plus probiotics are enough if kept up in the long run (long enough to allow the gut to fully heal)?
That's it! Thank you so much for your time and consideration. And thank you again for giving me the tools to change my life. I've had a few emails from people who say they want to kill themselves and I am driven to help them end their symptoms.
Cheers,
Tara Grant
