In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview Palmer Kippola on how to beat autoimmune disease and her new book "Beat Autoimmune: The 6 Keys to Reverse Your Condition and Reclaim Your Health". We had a great talk walking through her F.I.G.H.T.S. protocol which includes food, infections, gut health, hormones, toxins, and stress.
Our focus in this interview was on practical strategies for those with autoimmune disease to implement right away into their lives. Palmer has dealt with autoimmune disease herself, so she offers a unique perspective.
Full Transcript on How to Beat Autoimmune Disease with Palmer Kippola
Dr. Hedberg: Greetings everyone, and welcome to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg, and I'm looking forward to my conversation today with Palmer Kippola. She's a best-selling author, speaker, and functional medicine certified health coach who specializes in helping people reverse and prevent autoimmune conditions. She developed a framework called F.I.G.H.T.S, which stands for food, infections, gut health, hormone balance, toxins, and stress to help others beat autoimmune conditions based on her two-decade battle to overcome multiple sclerosis. Her book is "Beat Autoimmune: The 6 Keys to Reverse Your Condition and Reclaim Your Health," with a foreword by Mark Hyman. And as she shares the science stories and strategies to help people heal and thrive, today she provides total health transformation programs for people who seek to heal from any autoimmune condition by addressing the root causes head-on with functional lab testing and comprehensive mind-body strategies. She also serves a growing community of people in a guided online membership program called Beat Autoimmune Academy. Palmer, welcome to the show.
Palmer: Thank you so much, Dr. Hedberg. It's such a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Hedberg: Right. So, as I mentioned in the bio, you dealt with multiple sclerosis. So, I'm sure there's a story there. So, why don't you walk us through your healing journey, what that was like, and that whole process?
Palmer: Sure, sure. I do need to take you back in time a little bit because I was diagnosed at 19. Let me tell you the story. I was a happy, healthy, well-adjusted 19-year-old, by all accounts. I was home for summer after my freshman year of college, and I was working as a hostess in a restaurant. And one day I woke up and the soles of my feet were tingling, like that feeling you have when you've slept on a limb too long, when the blood flows back, it gets all tingling. But this particular morning, the blood wasn't flowing back. But I thought it'll just go away, so I went off to work. And the tingling just continued to creep up my legs like a vine. It got to my knees and by that time, I knew something was really wrong. So, I called my parents who called the family doctor who said, "Get her over to the neurologist at UCLA today." And we did. That's where we were that afternoon. And this particular neurologist had me do really simple heel-toe walking across her floor and tapped my reflexes. And after about five or six minutes, pronounced that she was 99% certain that I had MS, multiple sclerosis. And if she was right, there was nothing I could do except take medication. And we were absolutely shocked. Remember, this was in the mid-80s, so there was no guidebook, there was nothing. We had never heard of MS.
And we just left that office completely confused, devastated, and with very little hope. But I was sent home and that night, my mom lay in bed with me and she was holding me and I was crying and she was crying and it turned out that all of the parts of my body that had been tingling, which by the time I got to the neurologist's office, it had reached right under my collarbone, so all the way up, full body. And then by the time we got into bed that night, all my body went completely numb from the neck down and I would stay numb for a full six weeks. So, an absolutely terrifying first experience, not having any information, not having any idea how this came on, or what my future was gonna look like. But that summer, the Olympics were on TV and I was really grateful because that's about all I could do is lie on the couch and watch the Olympics.
And I do have to say that I'm so grateful that my parents were so supportive and rocks and I had friends that came by and brought gifts, like, you know, 19-year-old friends do, books and watch movies with me. But this one family friend who was into things metaphysical came and asked me a question, which at the time I didn't think was a gift, but it turned out to be the guiding light for the rest of my life because she asked me the question, "Palmer, why do you think you've got the MS?" And I was incensed like, "How dare you? What do you mean why do I think I got this? Are you accusing me of doing something that brought this on?"
So, I lay there like a dog with a bone just chewing on that question. And it did come to me in a flash of insight as I lay on the couch. So, I'm 19, I'm on the couch, and I just need to take you a tiny bit farther back in time because I had been adopted at three days old by very loving parents. But my dad had been a fighter pilot and his way was proverbially the right way and so we butted heads quite a bit. He was verbally abusive, very judgmental. And the earliest memory that I had that came to me in that flash of insight lying on the couch was my dad is calling my mom names, she's locked herself in the bedroom, and I can't remember if I'm three or four, but whatever, I'm standing with my little dukes up with words to the effect of you call my mom names and I'll suck lights out. So, I had become this little child warrior. And that had meant that I wasn't sleeping through the night, I developed insomnia because I was always scanning the environment for safety. So, that initial hypothesis of why I got the MS of chronic stress still rings true for me today, even though I know there's much more to the story. So, I'll pause for a moment and see if you have any particular questions at this point.
Dr. Hedberg: Right. Well, we often see that strong adverse childhood experiences or some kind of ongoing stress or a stressful event as a major player in the triggering event and that could be a single event or like I said, something ongoing. And we're just so vulnerable as children as our immune systems and central nervous system is developing. And so, I'm sure you see it with the people you work with and we often see something like that that leads up to the development of an autoimmune condition. So, that must have been really scary, especially something like MS because I've seen MS patients in wheelchairs and there's some pretty devastating effects for some individuals who have MS as it progresses. So, did you do anything else other than focusing on nutrition and lifestyle to help you get through that?
Palmer: Sure. Well, I can address that. You're absolutely right. I do wanna add that after we left the neurologist's office, the neurologist held my parents back and said to them privately, "You better get ready for her life in a wheelchair because that's where she's heading," which just you know, makes me angry. But that's the best that some have to offer and that certainly at the time, the best that could be done. So, yeah, I did multiple experiments over the years. I was fortunate that the numbness faded enough for me to go back to my sophomore year of school. So, it didn't completely go away for a couple of years, but I was functional. I could walk and I had good cognition. So, off I went back to school and there was a period of denial, which is probably normal. But there was also no internet. I was really left to my own to figure out what to eat, you mentioned nutrition. And the only thing I had was the public library, and the only thing available on MS was the Swank diet, which purported that a low-fat vegetarian diet was the best for MS. So, I gave it a try. And that did not help me. In fact, it made my gut symptoms worse.
Now, for my entire life, I had symptoms of constipation. So, I kinda thought that was normal and I always felt a little tummy grumbling after eating, but I also chalked that up to being normal. I didn't think it was a problem. So, it would take more than two decades for me to address what was really going on. And I wanna really be clear to say this is something that now we have the science, we have the stories and the strategies, it doesn't need to take nearly the time that it took me because I was really going on my intuition that if stress was the big problem, I needed to figure out how to reduce the stress. So, that led me to meditation, that led me to yoga, started doing those in the late 80s, early 90s. And I did notice almost immediately that when I was able to bring the stress down, and as my yoga teacher would say let it go with this very long go, I would actually have a diminishment of symptoms.
It turned out that I had relapsing-remitting MS. So, that means it comes and goes, it's not necessarily progressively worsening. But it became really clear that the more stress I had in my life, whether that was conflict at home or exams at school, or whatever I perceived as being stressful, you could almost count on it that I would develop more MS symptoms, whether that was numbness and tingling or tightness or this symptom called Lhermitte's syndrome where you bend your head down and get this zapping energy down your back. All of these things got worse with stress and better with relaxation. So, that was a big win, but it wasn't complete.
Nutrition, as I said, I wouldn't learn for years what I was doing wrong. And finally in 2010, I decided to pay attention to what was going on with my gut after eating and that is when I went to a functional medicine nutritionist who did some tests and found out that I had non-celiac gluten sensitivity.
