positivity, because you’re worth it!

It’s been a kind of a busy season including the most recent piece in my health and wellbeing puzzle which involved a welcome shot of positivity… and an overnight stay in den Haag last month.

Most if not all the posts in this blog from the last year and more, address something in life which can be adapted or adjusted to make our life a little bit better.

Life hacks?

Hardly, as I lack the dedication to attach scientific rigour to things I’ve found out and chosen to share with anyone that’s interested.

Looking online; reporting on hacks would appear to be a mainly male pursuit, or perhaps they’re just the ones that better broadcast their results?

part of the integrative journey

Anyway, speaking to the dutch therapist and walking away with a stack of his handwritten notes has left me googling quite a lot!

…”And then I discovered the PADs.

Well, I didn’t discover them, of course — they’ve been known for decades — but what I learned in my little sabbatical from corporate science here at Atlas is that autoimmune disease is caused by autoantigens.

Duh, you say.

But that statement has more content than your typical tautology. Autoantigens are active participants in the initiation and development of autoimmunity. After all, breaking tolerance is not a trivial thing — we have elaborate mechanisms to make sure that it doesn’t happen. So you need to produce autoantigens in sufficient quantity and context to prompt your immune system into performing an unnatural act. Then, over subsequent years and decades, you have to continue to produce autoantigens to mature the immune response to the point that it becomes clinically relevant. Once disease gets going, autoantigens are the raw fuel for the inflammatory cycle that sets up in target organs, and they drive the formation and deposition of immune complexes, which account for much of the morbidity and mortality in patients.

So, yeah, autoantigens are kind of a big deal. What if you could stop the body from producing them? What if you could deprive the immune system of its inflammatory fuel?”

 

PAD inhibition, just one amongst a stack of other scribbles from the dutchman,

integrative to the max

led me to the quote above which is the most rational description I’ve seen for contracting a variety of chronic conditions and explains the relative lack of effectiveness of immunomodulators

I feel like I’ve been given a lifeline! Having a condition that people don’t seem able to treat effectively can ultimately be quite lonely. The consultation with a Dutchman left me feeling more optimistic than I have for a long time.

I believe that positivity, now bathing my body’s cells in place of state engineered defeatism is as much of a boost to my health as any amount of exercise and personalised physio. In the next few posts I’ll go further into what I’ve been told and found out, including breathing exercises and eating plenty of good fats, no stuff from packets and a little less than a kilo of veg a day!