Inspired Living with Autoimmunity

Brad Pitzele was in his thirties when psoriatic arthritis took over, the biologics quit working, and a melanoma diagnosis closed off his last drug option. Sitting in a parking lot after his rheumatologist suggested trying another drug in the same class and hoping for a better outcome, he decided to find a third way. The engineer in him ended up building his own exercise with oxygen therapy device...

Most of us have heard EMFs are a problem. Almost nobody explains what that actually means or what to do about it. Brian Johnson does. He came up through construction and mold remediation, then got his own functional medicine testing back loaded with mycotoxins despite a dialed-in lifestyle — and his doctor told him to go build healthy homes instead. In this episode Brian breaks EMFs into four type...

Dr. Shivani Gupta spent years on antibiotics and doctor visits before she found her way to Ayurveda, healed her gut, and went on to earn a master's in Ayurvedic sciences and a PhD in turmeric. When I asked her for the single most important health habit, she didn't say diet and she didn't say exercise. She said sleep. We talk about the 10-to-2 sleep window and what your body is actually doing durin...

If you've ever been told your pain was all in your head, this one is for you. Dr. Anna Esparham developed polyglandular autoimmune disease and severe fibromyalgia while she was still getting through med school and residency, and she walks us through what is actually happening in the body — nervous system and immune inflammation, interleukin-8, small fiber neuropathy, and the study that points towa...

Heather Aardema woke up with terrible pain in her wrist and blamed her ski poles. It was rheumatoid arthritis. Her rheumatologist handed her brochure after brochure for drugs with side effects like liver damage, and when Heather asked about food, she was told there's no research and don't go looking. She went looking anyway, changed her diet, and around day 31 she woke up with no pain at all. She...

The root chakra is linked to the immune system and the adrenal glands. If you're living with autoimmunity, that's a strange thing to have never heard about. My guest Lisa Erickson is an energy healer and meditation teacher who spent a decade in corporate tech before her own health crises sent her in a different direction, and she has a gift for making this stuff plain. We walk through all seven en...

ER doctor turned cellular medicine expert Dr. Siobhan Newman spent years saving people in a busy LA emergency room — and watching none of them actually get better. Now she helps people rebuild health at the cellular level, and her approach challenges a lot of what we've been told. We get into why adding exercise when your mitochondria are already underwater just drives more inflammation, how the l...

I sat down with Johanna Dahlman, the Alopecia Angel, because she treats hair the same way I treat autoimmunity. The label on the scalp is not the disease. Johanna reversed her own alopecia areata after years of appointments that either piled on pharmaceuticals or told her to live with it. In this episode she names the blind spots even functional doctors miss, why minoxidil is a lifelong trap with...

Rheumatologist and integrative medicine specialist Dr. Aly Cohen has spent 15 years connecting the dots between everyday chemical exposures and chronic disease. In this conversation we get into what's actually in your tap water (and why bottled water isn't better), the foods that support your body's own detox pathways, and why US chemical regulation is decades behind. What I love about Aly's appro...

Dr. Casey Kelley got diagnosed with POTS in medical school after years of fatigue, dizziness, and a heart rate that wouldn't quit. She tried multiple medications — none of them fixed anything. It wasn't until she dug into functional medicine that she discovered her POTS was actually a symptom of adrenal burnout and chronic tick-borne infections. Once she addressed those, the POTS went away. In thi...

Dr. Cory Rice is a board-certified internal medicine physician who went from forensic science to running a functional medicine practice treating tens of thousands of patients in Dallas. In this conversation, we bust three autoimmune myths that keep people stuck — that autoimmune disease is rare, that there's one root cause to find, and that these conditions can't actually improve. We get into why...

Functional wellness practitioner Hali Laricey reads standard lab work through a functional lens — and she's really good at finding answers in the labs your doctor stamped "normal." In this episode, we zero in on the CBC with differential, one of the cheapest and most common blood tests out there, and how its five markers can reveal chronic infections, immune stress, and early signs of autoimmune f...

Tiffany Kaloustian was told lupus was basically the end of the life she expected. In her twenties that landed like a life sentence — heavy meds, little education, and a lot of grief. We talk about what changed when she stopped wearing the diagnosis as her identity and started treating healing like a dance: hard days included, mindset and nervous system first, and food and root-cause care that actu...

I'm talking with Dr. Anik St. Martin, a chiropractor and author of Skin on Fire: Healing Psoriasis Naturally, who spent over 12 years battling psoriasis before discovering the one piece she'd been missing — her mindset. After years of dialing in her nutrition, supplements, and gut healing, Anik's skin finally cleared completely after a self-directed 5-day intensive where she did nothing but walk,...

If you've been eating well, doing all the right things, and still not feeling better — this one's for you. I sat down with Stephanie Nelson, a trauma-informed somatic coach and founder of The Stress Healers, to talk about something most health conversations completely miss: what happens in the body when stress and trauma don't get processed. Stephanie was diagnosed with arthritis, bursitis, and te...

If you've been told your labs are fine but you still feel terrible, this episode is for you. Dr. Pamela Cipriano is an ILADS-trained nurse practitioner who spent ten years watching her own son deteriorate from undiagnosed Lyme disease — dismissed by doctor after doctor — before she finally figured out what was wrong and healed him herself. In this conversation, she breaks down why standard Lyme te...

I sat down with Natalie Novak, co-founder of Kindness Powered Skincare and certified oncology esthetician, who spent years battling debilitating symptoms — constant anxiety, RA-like joint pain, vision problems — while doctors told her nothing was wrong. The culprit turned out to be her breast implants, which were full of mold. After having them removed in 2018, her RA symptoms vanished almost imme...

I was diagnosed with IBS about 10 years before I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis — and I had no idea the two were connected. That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Izabella Wentz, pharmacist and founder of Thyroid Pharmacist. Izabella was told her IBS was just stress during pharmacy school. She ignored it — until Hashimoto's showed up years later and forced her to dig d...

My guest Nicole Bell is the CEO of Galaxy Diagnostics and author of What Lurks in the Woods. She came to this work after her husband's Lyme disease — along with co-infections Bartonella and Babesia — was misdiagnosed as early-onset Alzheimer's. He passed away in 2022. In this episode, we talk about why the standard Lyme test misses so many people (hint: it's 30-year-old technology that relies on a...

If you've heard of the Autoimmune Protocol but felt like it was too restrictive to even try — or you've done it and wondered if you were doing it right — this episode is worth your time. I sat down with Mickey Trescott, one of the key people behind AIP, to talk about her new book The New AIP. We get into the actual clinical research (IBD, Hashimoto's, and RA studies), what the results really showe...

If you've been doing everything right and still feel exhausted, anxious, and like your body just won't cooperate — this episode is for you. I sat down with Dr. Scott Sherr, a board-certified internal medicine physician and COO of Troscriptions, to talk about the sympathetic spiral: a chronic fight-or-flight loop most people don't even know they're in. And here's what surprised me most — you don't...

Could your home be the reason you're not getting better? I sat down with Paul Kealey, founder of EcoBuilt, to talk about something most of us never think to question — the air inside our homes. Paul has spent nearly 25 years in construction, and what he shares might change how you see your living space entirely. We get into why new homes aren't automatically healthier (studies suggest over 25% hav...

If you have autoimmune disease, you've probably been told to keep an eye on your bone density number. But here's the thing — that number only predicts fractures in about 44% of women with osteoporosis. Most of what's actually driving your fracture risk isn't showing up on that scan. I brought Dr. John Neustadt back to talk about his newly expanded book, Fracture-Proof Your Bones, and this conversa...

I sat down with Karen "ZuZu" Ziemer Armes — holistic health educator, author, and founder of Lilly Fields Retreat Center — who reversed her own epilepsy in her early 20s using food alone. In this conversation, we get into the four electrical systems your body runs on (and why most people have never heard of them), how mineral deficiencies silently drive chronic illness, why EMF exposure is one of...

I sat down with Dr. Alice Honican — naturopath, acupuncturist, and bioenergetic practitioner at Longevity Health Center in Roswell, Georgia — to talk about a diagnostic approach that's been quietly getting results for decades but most people have never come across. Dr. Honican grew up in a naturopathic household, has been working with chronic and autoimmune patients since 2003, and uses three spec...