Medical disclaimer
This is education, not medical advice
The Holistic Rheumatologist publishes general information about autoimmune and rheumatic disease, and that is the whole of what it does. It isn't medical advice, it isn't a diagnosis, and it isn't a treatment recommendation for any particular person. This disclaimer was last updated on 10 September 2026.
Reading this site doesn't make you a patient of Dr. Luebker's, and it doesn't create a doctor and patient relationship of any kind. Sending a message through this site doesn't create one either, and neither does anything else you can do here. Your own clinicians know your history, your medications, your other conditions, and your test results, and not one of those is knowable from a web page.
This site is separate from Dr. Luebker's practice
This website is independent of the clinical practice that Dr. Luebker is at White River Health, and the two are deliberately kept apart from one another. Nothing you read here forms part of any medical record at all. If you're a patient of hers, please raise clinical questions through the practice rather than through this site, because nothing you send here reaches your care team.
Don't change your treatment because of something you read here
The single most important thing on this page is simple, which is that you shouldn't stop, start, or adjust any medication because of something you read on this site. That includes disease-modifying drugs, biologics, corticosteroids, and psychiatric medication. Stopping a disease-modifying drug can allow permanent joint damage that no later treatment reverses, and stopping some medications abruptly is dangerous in itself.
Bring what you read here to the clinician who prescribes for you instead of acting on it alone. A good rheumatologist would rather answer a question prompted by something you read than discover months later that you stopped taking something. Bring the page with you if that helps the conversation along.
Individual results vary and content ages
Autoimmune diseases behave differently in different people, and treatment that works well for one person may be wrong for another. General information can't account for that variation, which is what a consultation is for. Nothing on this site predicts what will happen in your own particular case.
Medical understanding also changes over the years, sometimes quickly. Pages on this site show the date they were reviewed, and a page reviewed some time ago may not reflect current guidance. Where a page hasn't been reviewed yet, it says so at the top and it isn't indexed by search engines.
Supplements, diet, and products
Where this site discusses supplements, diets, or products, that discussion is educational and nothing more. Supplements interact with prescription medication, and several of the ones commonly recommended for autoimmune disease do so in ways that count, including fish oil and its effect on platelet function. Tell your clinician and your pharmacist everything you take, including anything bought without a prescription.
Emergencies
This site isn't monitored by anybody and it can't help you in an emergency. If you think you're having a medical emergency, call 911 or go to your nearest emergency department. If you're in mental health crisis or thinking about harming yourself, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Please don't use this website's contact form for anything urgent at all.