TM
"Inflammation is—very generally speaking—the body's immune system's response to stimulus." -Matt Richtel An Elegant Defense Page 111
Reference:
Richtel. M. (2019). An Elegant Defense: the Extraordinary New Science of The Immune System: a Tale in Four Lives. HarperCollins.
SimplyRheumatoid.com is your #1 Resource for Living with Rheumatoid Disease.
This site is a resource. I built it to help you choose which books might resonate with you. Each person is different and has different needs, so one book is not a cure-all. There is no cure currently for Rheumatoid Disease. Many people with and without Rheumatoid are facing financial hardships and lack access to quality books. I understand paying for books is a luxury for some. Therefore, I am sharing a few key quotes from the books I have found insightful so you can decide which books to spend your hard-earned money on. Furthermore, I advocate for issues, books, movies, and organizations I care about on this site. Please consider supporting the authors, shows, movies, and organizations I feature on this website. Lastly, I am self-funding this website. I am not asking for or accepting donations at this time. Your money is better spent on the books I highlight on this site and my social media feeds. I hope you find value in having one website you can use for your research.
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Wishing healing and strength to all.
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Lidia Page
Recommened Reading: New Book Release
The Autoimmune Cure: Healing the Trauma and Other Triggers That Have Turned Your Body Against You.
By Sara Szal Gottfried, MD
Recommended Reading
Book Quotes
Top Back Left to Right. (Not that I have them in this order for any reason other than just trying to fit as many books as I could in the picture.)
“It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter what generation we’re in, there’s always going to be people from the old group telling the people from the new group they don’t belong while the rich exploit us and we fight among ourselves. This is one of the reasons the ultrarich love culture wars to this day. If we’re busy fighting each other, we can’t get it together to fight them.”
-Leigh McGowan 2024, p.100.
McGowan, L. (2024). A Return to Common Sense: How to Fix America Before We Really Blow It: The Creator of PoliticsGirl. Simon & Schuster, LLC.
“Conventional psychiatry—designed to help people adapt to their environments—was not only impossible but undesirable, because ‘colonization in its every essence’ creates psychiatric hospitals, and fills them with those it has driven mad.”
-Jonathan Rosen 2023, p.222.
“Even if both your parents had schizophrenia, the increased risk of getting the disease was estimated at 36 percent, which gave you a better than 60 percent chance of not getting it.”
-Jonathan Rosen 2023, p.231
Rosen. J. (2023). The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and The Tragedy of Good Intentions. Penguin Press.
“SNAP beneficiaries cut across all races and age groups. Roughly 36 percent of them are white, 25 percent are African American (though they make up only 12 percent of the population), 17 percent are Hispanic, about 4 percent are Asian or Native American, and the rest are unknown. Millions are veterans, seniors, or people with disabilities.”
-Mark Hyman MD 2020, P. 94
Hyman, M. (2020). FoodFix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet—One Bite at a Time. Little, Brown Spark.
“In Filipino, Maganda means ‘beautiful.”
“The president has called many things beautiful.”
Patricia Evangelista 2023, pp. 168-169
Evangelista, P. (2023). Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country. Random House.
“Each of us has a unique hormonal fingerprint, a unique reproductive system, and a unique brain.”
Lisa Mosconi 2024, p. 34
Mosconi, L. (2024). The Menopause Brain. Penguin Random House, LLC.
“The uninsured are disproportionately Latinos, but there are over a million white non-Hispanic Texans without any healthcare coverage. The benefits of Medicaid expansion would be widespread, the cost, minimal.”
Heather McGhee p.58
McGhee. H. (2022). The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. One World.
“Together, raw, living, and vegan diets are believed to have lower inflammatory potential and a less immune-provocative state. A plant-based living raw diet may thus be able to calm autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.”
William Li, MD. 2019, p. 241
Li, W. (2019). Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. Grand Central Publishing.
“It would be immoral and impractical to try to stop people who are lower down on the economic ladder from climbing up. We can’t expect poor people to stay poor because rich countries emitted too many greenhouse gases, and even if we wanted to, there would be no way to accomplish it. Instead, we need to make it possible for low-income people to climb the ladder without making climate change worse.”
Bill Gates 2021, pp. 41-42
“We need the premiums to be so low that everyone will be able to decarbonize.”
Bill Gates, 2021, p.60
Gates. B. (2021). How to Avoid A Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need. Alfred A. Knopf.
“The theme of the unsung hero continues in the American construction industry, where one out of three workers is Hispanic.”
Marie Arana, 2024, p. 302
“The prevailing American myth holds that the whites who flooded Ellis Island at the turn of the twentieth century and went on to settle the prairies or propel the Industrial Revolution are the heroes of America’s success story, while today’s nonwhite immigrants arrive without skills, looking for handouts, and burdening the country’s socioeconomic infrastructure. Recent genealogical research shatters that racist notion.”
Marie Arana, 2024, p. 163
Arana. M. (2024). LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority. Simon & Schuster, LLC.
“Discrimination against Black and LatinX populations is so severe that a 2017 Institute for Policy Studies report predicts that median Black household wealth will zero out by 2053, and that Latinx wealth will follow suit a couple of decades later.”
-Garrett Neiman 2023, P. 94
“When rich white men hold up their winning lottery tickets and say they got lucky, society needs to call bullshit—because whenever any of us buy into that, we forget that tens of millions of people have to suffer in poverty, dilapidated schools, and overcrowded prisons so that guys like me could draw that card.”
-Garrett Neiman 2023, P. 130
Neiman, G. (2023). Rich White Men: What it Takes to Uproot the Old Boys’ Club and Transform America. Legacy Lit.
“The history of resistance is also the history of what people of all ages don’t do. In societies predicated on compliance, refusing to act sends a powerful message.”
-Ruth Ben-Ghiat 2021, p.196
Ben-Ghiat, R. (2021). Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
“Airborne viruses do not operate according to the Law of the Few. They operate according to the Law of the Very, Very, Very Few.”
- Malcom Gladwell 2024, p. 194.
“Yet the idea that there is a magic moment somewhere between a quarter and a third is different. It practically begs us to intervene.”
-Malcom Gladwell 2024, p.128
Gladwell, M. (2024). Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering. Hatchett Book Group.
“Scarcity pits issue against issue, and neighbor against neighbor.”
“First, allow elites to hoard a resource like money or land.”
-Matthew Desmond 2023, p.174
Desmond. M. (2023). Poverty By America. Crown.
“Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you.”
Timothy Snyder, 2017. p. 72
Snyder. T. (2017). On Tyranny. Lessons From The Twentieth Century. Crown.
“Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader, the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself; indeed, he may not realize he is using them at all.”
-Rachel Carson 1962, p.174
“Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
-Rachel Carson, 1962, p.12
Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. The Riverside Press.
“I was told more than a few times that girls don’t do chemistry or girls don’t do science. Fortunately, I ignored that.”
-Jennifer Doudna, 2021, p.471
Isaacson, W. (2021). The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race. Simon and Schuster.
“Although arthritis means a disease of the joints, rheumatoid is fundamentally a disease of the immune system.”
“Stress is both one of the most well-known, and one of the least understood, causes of depression.”
-Edward Bullmore 2018, p.150
Bullmore, E. (2018). The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression. Picador.
“If people fighting for a living wage, could link up with people fighting for voting rights; if young folks fighting for climate action could link up with folks trying to pass common sense gun control; if immigrants struggling to keep their families together could connect with unhoused people fighting for a place to be; if Native elders and youth protecting our water could link up with people in cities who can buy unleaded gas but can’t get unleaded water; if people who don’t think of themselves as political but are fed up with the way things are could link up with the movements that have been pushing for policies that could change the daily reality for most of us—if all of us could get together, that would be a mighty force for change.”
Reverend Dr. William J, Barber II & Jonathan Wilson-Hartsgrove 2024, p.106
Barber II, W. & Wilson-Hartsgrove, J. (2024). White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class can Reconstruct American Democracy. Liveright.
“And it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.”
-Matthew Desmond, 2016, p.300
Desmond. M. (2016). Evicted. Poverty and Profit in the American City. Broadway Books.
“And yet, somehow, there are people like Einstein, who seem immune to the toxins of caste in the air we breathe, who manage to transcend what most people are susceptible to. From the abolitionists who risked personal ruin to end slavery to the white civil rights workers who gave their lives to help end Jim Crow and the political leaders who outlawed it, these all-too-rare people are a testament to the human spirit, that humans can break free of the hierarchy’s hold on them.”
-Isabel Wilkerson 2020 p.384
Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House.
'“Andrew was white. His family had access to education, resources, computers. For generations, while his people were preparing to go to university, my people were crowded into thatched huts singing, ‘Two times to is four. Three times two is six, La la la la la.’ My family had been denied the things his family had taken for granted.”
-Trevor Noah p.190
Noah, T. (2019). Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood. Spiegel &Grau.
“There are four primary ways that you can connect the dots between trauma and autoimmunity: through your psychology, immune system, nervous system, and endocrine (PINE) system.”
-Sara Szal Gottfried, MD, 2024, p. 24
“Trauma, big T or little t, can make it difficult to sleep acutely (short term) and chronically (long term).”
-Sara Szal Gottfried, MD, 2024, p.135
Gottfried, S. 2024. The Autoimmune Cure: Healing the Trauma and Other Triggers That Have Turned Your Body Against You. Harper Collins.
“No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American. The Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican, and Salvadorian cooks I’ve worked with over the years make most CIA-educated white boys look like clumsy, sniveling little punks.”
-Anthony Bourdain 2007, p.63
Bourdain, A. (2007). Kitchen Confidential. Harper Collins.
“However, twin studies have shown that autoimmunity is only 25 percent heritable, which means that the environment is a far more significant part of the picture: 75 percent to be exact.”
-Amy Myers, MD. 2015, p.34
Myers, A. (2015). The Autoimmune Solution: Prevent and Reverse the Full Spectrum of Inflammatory Symptoms and Diseases. Harper One.
“The message for me was that a key aspect of What happened to you? Is What didn’t happen to you? What attention, nurturing touch, reassurance—basically, what love—didn’t you get? I realized that neglect is as toxic as trauma.”
-Dr. Bruce Perry, 2021, p. 159
Perry, B., & Winfrey, O. (2021). What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing. Flatiron Books.
“America holds 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of the world's prisoners, who are disproportionately Black.”
In the context of the quote below, Mr. Henry discusses the social view of power on page 186.
“People provide these services to the ruler through a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule.”
Andre Henry 2022, p. 186
Henry. A. (2022). All The White Friends I Couldn’t Keep. Convergent Books.
“We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum. We keep powwowing because there aren’t very many places where we can all be together, where we can see and hear each other.”
-Tommy Orange 2018, p.135
Orange. T. (2018). There There. Penguin Random House, LLC.
“Nationally, about one out of six public school teachers works a second job during the school year. But for younger teachers, those who are just getting started, that rate is much higher: one in three is working a second job.”
-Elizabeth Warren 2021, p. 66
“In addition to providing money for childcare and pre-k, a two-cent wealth tax would provide enough money to improve public education for every child and every educator in America.”
-Elizabeth Warren 2021, p. 63
Warren. E. (2021). Persist. Metropolitan Books.
A MUST-READ ARTICLE
“If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step,” she wrote, “how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”
Bartley estimates that between one and five per cent of people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia actually have an autoimmune condition—a figure he based on his own lab’s research, which has not yet been published, and also on a German study of a thousand patients, the most extensive study of autoimmune psychosis so far.
The S.N.F. Center is embarking on a project, beginning this fall, to screen all the patients hospitalized in the New York State mental-health system for autoimmune, metabolic, and genetic disorders, to see if there are people whose symptoms can be traced to a distinct biological mechanism.
-Rachel Aviv, July 21, 2025
Read the article here:
Reference:
Aviv, R. (2025, July 21). Mary had Schizophrenia-- Then Suddenly She Didn't. The New Yoker.com
Mr. Richtel's book An Elegant Defense is an insightful and informative read about the human body’s remarkable ability to fight off disease. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the body’s incredible defense mechanisms and the science behind them. Richtel’s writing style is engaging and easy to read, and he provides interesting quotes throughout the book that really bring the material to life. A great quote from the book is “The body is constantly striving to maintain health. It’s a remarkable story of defense and resilience.” This thought-provoking quote highlights the powerful nature of the body’s defenses and its ability to heal itself. An Elegant Defense is a must-read for anyone looking to learn more about the body’s incredible defense mechanisms.
Richtel, M. (2019). An Elegant Defense: the Extraordinary New Science of The Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives. Harper Collins.
This review was written with the assistance of WIX AI.
" The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will instruct his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
-Thomas Edison
"Only one in five medical schools in the United States requires medical students to take a nutrition course."
-Dr. William W. Li, MD Author of Eat To Beat Disease (page XViii)
Li, W. (2019). Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. Grand Central Publishing.
I stumbled across Guy Finley's book while shopping at Barnes and Noble. I hope he doesn't mind me sharing these quotes with you since I think his book is packed with sage advice and wisdom. If you are struggling, feeling stuck, lost, hopeless, or down, please consider buying his book and reading some parts that resonate with you over and over like affirmations. It helps me. I am not religious, but didn't mind the few religious notes in the book. I've purchased two copies of this book one to keep, and one I gifted. I selected these quotes because they should give you a reason to buy his book. Most pages offer inspiration and challenge your pre-set beliefs. This book is vital for exercising your critical thinking skills.
"Nothing in the universe can stop you from letting go and starting over..."
"And until you really get something different from your life, you cannot know what you have missed and how much more there is to understand."
-Guy Finley-
Author of The International Bestseller
The Secret Of Letting Go
Page 101
"Suffering doesn't prove that you are all alone in life. What it does prove is you prefer the company of unfriendly thoughts and feelings whose very nature is to isolate you from everything good."
-Guy Finley-
Author of The International Bestseller
The Secret of Letting Go
Page 167
Discover More Insights On My Mental Wellbeing Page
Reference:
Finley, G. (2007). The Secret of Letting Go. Llewellyn Publications.
Self Care &
Wellbeing
I recommend reading this book ASAP.
What Happened To You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, And Healing
By Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D. & Oprah Winfrey
The below quote I dedicate to display on my site for my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers around the world, who worked or still work in the fields putting food on our tables. Thank you!
"For those who work on a farm—there are 1 million farmworkers in our country—they have one of the most dangerous jobs in America."
Page 17 Food Fix by Mark Hyman, MD
Hyman, M. (2020). Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet--One Bite at A Time. Little, Brown Spark.
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