Beating Endo. Dr Iris Kerin Orbuch

of research—to identify and, when needed, to jettison dismissive assumptions masquerading as knowledge. And the research-driven, evidence-based fact is that any woman can get endo—without regard to race, creed, color, professional pursuit, or socioeconomic status. Period. That said, Ballweg’s research does suggest that it is more likely to occur in women whose families are prone to autoimmune diseases and/or allergies.

      Endo is a chronic illness, and that makes it very much a disease of our time. Up until the latter part of the last century, chronic illness was not top-of-mind when people worried about their health or the health of their families. What our grandparents and certainly our great-grandparents were concerned about was infectious disease. Back in the mid-twentieth century, polio was the scourge that led parents to deny their kids access to the public pool in the summer, and mumps, measles, rubella—the infectious, contagious diseases that could run like wildfire through a classroom or school playground—were the diseases that kept our parents and grandparents up at night. Yet now we rarely hear the words; here in the United States, thanks to the development of vaccines and the implementation of public health policies, these infectious diseases have been virtually eradicated.

      What afflicts us today is a whole new “class” of disease, the ailments we see dramatized in endless television commercials from the pharmaceutical industry hawking drugs for heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, digestive disorders, fibromyalgia, arthritis, bone loss, Alzheimer’s, depression, and—starting in 2018—endometriosis.

      Despite the fact that they manifest very differently, these ailments have a lot in common. For one thing, they never really go away. In many of them, the intensity fluctuates, so relief often seems temporary. And even the TV ads don’t yet promise a cure (and warn of many, many side effects of taking the drugs to keep these diseases at bay).

      What these diseases also have in common is that they are complex. They can exhibit numerous symptoms, and there seems to be no single cause you can identify for the existence or recurrence of your symptoms. They are the diseases we “just have to live with”—until there is a cure or they kill us. By 2011, the World Health Organization could report that what it calls NCDs, noncommunicable chronic diseases, cause more deaths worldwide than all other diseases combined.

      Chronic illnesses also tend to be systemic. Most affect multiple organ systems within the body. Look at endo: Its symptoms can range across the reproductive system, digestive system, nervous system, muscular system, skeletal system, urological system, and endocrine system. It is accompanied by the numerous different co-morbidities of body and mind that we have just catalogued. It certainly looks like the endo disease process encompasses a lot of interaction within and among the various organ systems executing their various biological functions.

      But how chronic diseases affect people is also highly individual. There are a lot of commonalities among women with endo, but each woman suffers it in her own way depending on her particular physical and biological profile—in effect, on her own genetic profile and environmental exposures.

      So it seems clear that to deal with chronic diseases like endo, we need systems thinking and the kind of integrated, multimodal approach we’ll be proposing in the following pages. To a great extent, however, the medical profession is still organized more or less around the infectious-diseases model. In that model, the aim was to find the organism causing the infection and develop a one-size-fits-all treatment—typically a drug—to zap it. This was a phenomenally successful approach, as the eradication of so many infectious diseases proves. But along the way, we got so specialized we stopped being able to see outside our specialty or to think in terms of systems or to look past the general to the highly individual.

      That is beginning to change, as we in the health profession try hard to emerge from our isolated silos and look both at the way the whole body works and at the context—the environment—in which it operates. But if you or someone you care about suffers from endo now, you can’t wait for that professional transformation to happen. That is why we will show you how to take charge of your particular endo by addressing its particular complexity—the symptoms you deal with, the co-conditions you experience, the tools your body provides you with not just to manage the disease, but to beat it.

      One thing that means is that we will show you how to read your symptoms in terms of your own genetic makeup. This is essential, because the path to diminishing symptoms is through nutritional, lifestyle, environmental actions—all the tools of genetic expression—along with proper endo treatment. The science here is complex, but the takeaway is hopeful and empowering: If exposure to a particular environmental situation or lifestyle circumstance ignites a genetic response that is deleterious or painful to you, no, you cannot change the genes, but you sure as shooting can change your environment, your dinner menu, your behavior.

      One of the very first clues to this came from the Endometriosis Association’s research registry. Alongside the finding about the allergic propensities among the families of endo patients was the statistic that 57 percent of women with endo also suffer from allergies—to pollen, plants, foods, perfumes, cleaning products, a whole palette of sensitivities. Moreover, the reactions to pollen, the incidence of asthma, and the presence of eczema were considerably higher among endo sufferers than in the population as a whole. Most significant of all, the research showed that when the allergies were addressed, the women’s endo symptoms also improved.

      Does that tell us something? You bet it does. It suggests that women with endo are women with highly responsive immune systems. So it is perhaps not surprising that in 1992, Ballweg herself brought about the research that uncovered the breakthrough connection between dioxin exposure and endometriosis. She had learned by chance about an experiment testing whether exposure to dioxins affected fertility in lab monkeys. There seemed to be a connection, but Ballweg was knocked off her feet when she discovered that two of the monkeys had died of endometriosis, a disease that until then had not been spontaneously created in a laboratory setting. Ballweg sought and procured funding for researchers to probe the connection more deeply. The study she put in motion, exposing a set of lab monkeys to varied doses of dioxins, proved the point. The monkeys developed endometriosis, and those given the highest doses of dioxin were correspondingly most seriously affected. The conclusion was inescapable that “dioxin and other toxic chemicals can cause the development of endometriosis and other health problems to which those with endometriosis are susceptible, including certain cancers, autoimmune diseases, and heart disease.”^5*

      * Adding to the sweetness of having been the prime mover of this important discovery, the icing on the cake for Ballweg was that it happened at her alma mater, the University of Wisconsin, in its Primate Laboratory on the Madison campus.

      This doesn’t just mean that endo sufferers might want to refrain from using herbicides on their lawns next spring—dioxins being a by-product of herbicides. It’s a reminder that the way we live, the things we ingest, the makeup and shampoo we use, the choices we make every day can shape the way we feel and the well-being we enjoy—or debase—every day. Beating the disease process of endo also has to happen every day, day after day.

       Women with endo have a higher than normal likelihood of developing these autoimmune conditions:

      Hashimoto’s thyroiditis

      Celiac disease

      Sjogren’s syndrome

      Multiple sclerosis

      Eczema

      Rheumatoid arthritis

      Systemic lupus erythematosus

      Ballweg was a teenager when she first felt the symptoms of what she later learned was endometriosis. She would undergo a number of surgeries for her endo, including excision. But Ballweg is also, by her own definition, “a health nut,” seriously committed to firm practices of nutrition, exercise, and the like—and she believes unreservedly that her own integrated and multimodal program made the difference. Once restored to full health, she formalized the content of that program by creating a protocol that she hoped would help protect her daughter from developing endo. In 2017, Mary Lou and her husband welcomed their first grandchild—a healthy baby girl, born of a healthy mother.