Is this "Health" character for real?

The "Health" character on the Recovery Mechanisms page represents healthy biological function. But it sounds like a fantasy! Yes, when we have lived with pathology for so long in a society where it is the cultural norm, that normal, healthy function sounds like an extreme. Do you even know anyone who fits this description? I'm not sure I do.

My own body certainly felt so far from this that I was afraid to even work towards it. It felt unachievable. I've come to see “recovery” as a process not a destination.

What do I mean by "Autoimmune Recovery"?

Autoimmune recovery is the ongoing process of moving from autoimmune disease toward health, by supporting the body’s innate mechanisms for restoring balance while gradually leaving symptoms behind.

How difficult and time-consuming is it and how far we make it along the path depends on many factors. Personally, I have spent five years recovering and consider myself to be firmly out of the 'autoimmune disease' category and on my way towards 'health'. The goal is not perfection, it's direction - moving toward greater stability, resilience, capacity, and ease, one layer at a time.

Why did your doctor tell you that you have an incurable, chronic, degenerative disease?

When autoimmune disorders were first observed, nobody knew what they were, how they happened or how to make them go away. “Incurable” means that it can not be treated. When skurvy first emerged, it was incurable and its cause unknown. Now we know that skurvy develops without sufficient vitamin C and it can be treated with foods rich in vitamin C. Autoimmune disease was incurable when it was first encountered.

Modern medicine works like this… go to the doctors, get a pill / surgery / therapy, then feel better. This works brilliantly if you have a bacterial infection that you can't fight off, or a broken bone that needs mending. But now you've got a failure of the immune system to work correctly and this is super complicated, influenced by myriad factors. There is no pill for this. There is no therapy, no surgery. Nobody can fix you.

So autoimmune disorders are incurable by the definition of modern medicine. Yes. But that's a partial answer that invites more questions... Why does 5-8% of the western population have an autoimmune disease? This wasn't the case a few generations ago. Can we prevent them? Can we reverse them? Let's start by investigating the methods that the immune system has in place to prevent and reverse autoimmunity. The immune system is so fascinating and complicated. I have done my best to tell you what you need to know to understand what's going on in your body and how you can help your body work on returning to homeostasis. More on the immune system here.

Why isn't there a "How to recover" section?

Autoimmune conditions share underlying mechanisms, but the way they show up — and the combination of factors driving them — are highly individual.

The Autoimmune Recovery Project focuses on:

• Understanding healthy function,

• Understanding the pathology of autoimmune disease,

• Identifying the core mechanisms that support balance and repair,

• Explaining the inputs those mechanisms require.

The aim is to build literacy, not dependency — so you can understand why interventions work, not just copy what someone else did.

If there is a shortcut in recovery, it’s this: Learn the principles, then personalise the application. The Autoimmune Recovery Project is designed to give you the first part. There are many clinicians, practitioners, and coaches who are trained and qualified to do that second piece — the individual assessment, the tailored plan, the clinical guidance, the monitoring, the adjustments. I’m not one of them. My role here is to help make the underlying systems understandable so you can ask better questions, make informed decisions, and collaborate more effectively with the professionals who are qualified to guide your personal path.

Help! I'm overwhelmed!

Overwhelm isn’t a thinking failure — it’s a sign of a system at capacity. A body managing long-term imbalance is already directing a lot of energy toward internal stability, which can make processing new information and major changes feel impossible. This is not personal failure. It’s biology responding logically.

You are not meant to understand or apply all of this at once. I spent five years collecting pieces, testing what held up, noticing patterns, discarding noise, and building a systems view. You can stand on that map now — but you don’t have to walk every road today.

Start with one thing. Not ten. Not the perfect thing. Not the most impressive thing. Just one stabilising input you can actually sustain.

In complex systems, progress rarely comes from doing more. It comes from doing less, with clearer signal.

Instead of asking: “What should I do first?”
Try asking: “What feels most necessary and most possible right now?”

Begin with something you can maintain. Every small increase in stability makes the next step easier to meet with a little more capacity.

Pathology as our cultural norm

In modern Western culture, dysfunction has become our shared language. Chronic stress, exhaustion, inflammation, and distraction are no longer seen as warning signs; they are the background noise of ordinary life. Because art mirrors its culture, film and television have normalised pathology to the point that well-regulated physiology now looks implausible on screen.

We laugh with Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin, metabolic collapse played for comedy. We sympathise with Liz Lemon and Chandler Bing, whose anxiety, insomnia, and caffeine dependence are coded as “relatable.” We admire Selina Meyer and Don Draper, high performers burning on cortisol. Even supposed heroes—Gregory House, Carrie Mathison, BoJack Horseman—are defined by addiction, insomnia, or emotional volatility. The nervous system in overdrive is television’s default setting.

Pathology generates conflict, and conflict drives plot. Calm attention, stable energy, and emotional regulation rarely create drama; they end it. A character with balanced hormones and good sleep resolves problems too quickly to fill a season. So screenwriters keep the body in fight-or-flight: jittery, fatigued, reactive. Over time, this becomes what “normal” looks like.

Medicine follows the same drift. Instead of asking how to restore function, the system learns to manage symptoms indefinitely—hypertension controlled, reflux suppressed, anxiety medicated.

When nearly everyone is inflamed, tired, or anxious, reference ranges expand, and pathology becomes the mean rather than the deviation. Culture then reflects medicine, and medicine reflects culture: a feedback loop of managed dysfunction. But glimpses of genuine physiology still appear, and they stand out precisely because they are rare.

Fred Rogers regulated a generation’s nervous systems through voice, pacing, and kindness—televised parasympathetic tone. Atticus Finch breathed before speaking, showing how emotional steadiness can be strength. T’Challa (Black Panther) is physical power integrated with calm - strength without rage. In animation, Master Oogway (Kung Fu Panda) embodies coherence—presence without aggression. Moana displays curiosity, intuition and courage. Real-world figures like David Attenborough, Jacinda Ardern and LeBron James offer the same signal: focused, grounded, physiologically intact.

These characters are compelling in a different way. They don’t create chaos; they resolve it. They radiate safety, which allows others around them to regulate too. In biological terms, they broadcast healthy vagal tone—steady breath, controlled tempo, clear perception—and that, not heroism or dominance, is the foundation of resilience.

Who benefits from autoimmune diesase?

Many of our largest systems and markets are financially structured around long-term disease management rather than resolution. This creates powerful incentive patterns worth understanding.

The global autoimmune drug market is built on chronic therapy. Immunosuppressants, biologics, and JAK inhibitors are designed for ongoing use, often for life. This model generates sustained revenue: for example, Humira became one of the highest-grossing drugs in history, generating an estimated $187 billion in global sales over its patent lifetime. Even as older biologics lose exclusivity, new drugs are rapidly developed to replace them, with the global immunology portfolio remaining one of the most profitable sectors in pharmaceutical medicine.

Research funding mirrors this landscape. Most large grants, academic programs, and major disease foundations focus on understanding mechanisms and developing drug interventions, because those are the most fundable, scalable, and patentable outcomes. Lifestyle-based or systems-oriented approaches — nutrition, environmental impacts, stress physiology, circadian biology, metabolic therapy — receive comparatively little investment, not because they lack potential, but because they do not generate intellectual property in the same way.

Healthcare systems are also built around long-term clinical management: specialist appointments, diagnostic monitoring, repeat prescriptions, infusions, imaging, and ongoing care pathways. These structures can be lifesaving and stabilising, but they are not engineered to measure or reward disease reversal.

Meanwhile, patient advocacy groups, foundations, and research institutions do vital work for awareness and funding — but their growth and funding pipelines are often tied to disease prevalence, grant cycles, and pharmaceutical partnership models. Even well-intended systems can end up reinforcing the status quo when recovery, prevention, and remission fall outside the dominant funding framework.

This doesn’t mean anyone wants people to stay sick. It means the system makes illness a scalable long-term economic model, while making recovery a personal, largely self-funded project.

And that matters because more investment goes into controlling symptoms than restoring underlying balance, "Lifelong treatment” is a funded plan, while “recovery” is not, patients often have to become their own researchers, experimenters, and advocates. And true healing frequently involves lifestyle, environment, nervous system, metabolism, nourishment, community — areas that medicine acknowledges, but rarely prioritises structurally.

The result is that recovery is possible, but not system-designed. It is self-built.