Mechanisms for Recovery
In today’s medical system, being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease can make you feel like your body has turned against you, like you are trapped inside a body you no longer recognise or control. Fatigue, pain, neurological symptoms, hormonal disruption and immune chaos create a feeling of living in a body that is failing you.
This project exists because I don’t believe anyone should feel powerless inside themselves.
Regaining any sense of agency in autoimmune disease starts with understanding the basics of biology:
How the body is designed to function in health.
What has gone wrong in autoimmune disease.
What natural mechanisms the body uses to restore balance.
And what inputs those mechanisms require.
When you understand those fundamentals, your symptoms stop feeling random, personal, or punitive. You start to see them as signals — logical downstream effects of systems under strain. And when you can see the system, you can finally see the leverage points: what helps, what harms, and what actually supports recovery at a biological level.
The body is an astonishingly complex, interconnected network. The goal here is not to master every biochemical pathway, but to understand the logic of the system well enough that you can stop guessing, stop fearing, and start making informed choices.
I’ve organised the information into systems so you can learn one piece at a time. Some sections are complete, others are still being built. This is a living project — you can sign up for updates, and feedback is always welcome. Contact page.
Find out how and why you got sick, and how to start turning things around...
Below, you’ll see a diagram showing two bodies. One reflects health, the other reflects autoimmune disease. In the healthy person, systems are in balance, communicating, adapting, self-repairing. In autoimmune disease, there is immune reactivity, disrupted communication, stressed metabolism, overwhelmed repair pathways and the environmental and biological factors that push systems toward breakdown.
You’ll quickly see why there is no cure for autoimmune disease - the problem isn't isolated, it’s a cascade across systems. There is no medication that can micromanage every pathway involved. But there are ways to change the biological terrain so that the body can move out of crisis mode and toward repair.
Modern life has conditioned us to expect that exhaustion, inflammation, pain, and burnout can be overridden or patched. That we can run ourselves ragged then go to the doctor for a sleeping pill. Autoimmune disease interrupts that illusion. This kind of recovery is not passive. It isn’t something that happens to you, it happens through you — with information, support, persistence, and time. It means stepping into a different relationship with your body, one that is curious, responsive, patient and evidence-based.
The question becomes "What does my body need in order to shift from surviving to repairing?"
This resource is here to help you answer that — not in theory, but in biology.
This is a work in progress, I have completed the description of how the Immune System works, how it breaks down in autoimmune disease and how it can recover. Other systems, symptoms and inputs are a work in progress.
Choose a system to learn about....
Immune System - The Peacekeeper
Nervous System - The Integrator
Circulatory System - The River
Digestive System - The Gateway
Metabolic System - The Power Generator
Musculoskeletal System - The Framework
Endocrine System - The Translator
Microbiome - The Garden
Integration System - The Web
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Contact
anna@autoimmunerecoveryproject.com
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