Can We CreateThem?
the Mayo clinic and popular medical writer for several decades, provided a personal perspective on food-mind interactions in his introduction to the text, “Allergy of the Nervous System.” Alvarez and other astute physicians knew about food allergy and its mental effects for many years. Food al- lergy was implicated in depression, anxiety, hyperactivity in children, epilepsy, migraine, Meniere’s syndrome, Multiple Sclerosis, and Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Unfortunately, this clinical wisdom, shared by prominent physicians for many years, has been lost to subsequent generations of physicians. Important disturbances of brain function occur during any immune activity in the body, with the strongest influences on the autonomic nervous system and mood- emotion circuits. Changes in arousal, mood, sleep-waking patterns, appetite, thirst, and temperature regulation are regularly reported by patients who have immune-mediated disease.
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But can it go in reverse? Can emotional arousal of the nervous system pre-program us to allergies? There is compelling evidence
ome old knowledge is valuable, but is forgotten. Many years ago, Walter Alvarez, a well-known physician of
that leads us to say yes. If emotions really do cause allergies, it means we can avoid damaging our health. Both immune and nervous systems
interact when things go wrong at the level of molecules and cells. The molecular-cellular mechanisms are monitored (but not con- trolled) at the level of consciousness. The presence of symptoms is the brain’s way of presenting to the conscience that there is a problem at the molecular level. Chaos con- fuses or interferes with a successful relation- ship with our environment. Molecular noise is the disorder created by substances flowing through our body-brain. At certain levels, information noise is equivalent to molecular noise. At the level of equivalence we can- not tell the difference between a molecular problem and a personal problem. As the noise increases, the system be- comes more unstable or hypersensitive. We feel this instability as emotional disturbance and physical symptoms. In reverse, our emo- tional disturbances, if the condition is right, can program our immune system, causing programming in the immune system that is trying to protect us from chaos. For example, let’s suppose you are eat- ing breakfast and the television is on. You
are watching the news and a horrific event is shown. You react with a strong emotional response such as panic and fear. While your intellectual mind registers that this is not happening to you, your visceral survival mechanism thinks the food you are ingest- ing is a physical assault. Your nervous system programs the immune system to protect itself from this substance upon exposure as it may be harmful. You have just created an allergy. This idea can affect every aspect of our
lives. We could develop food allergies by eating at stressful business meetings, yelling at our kids during dinner or watching TV during mealtimes. We could even develop pet allergies if our beloved family pet was ill or passed away violently. A number of years ago I worked on a severe case of dairy allergies in a 50-year-old woman. We were having difficulty desensitizing her allergy. It was not until after repeated testing and inquiry that she remembered this story about her childhood: When she was 5 years old, she was in the hospital for a tonsillectomy. Her parents had been with her and, even though she was frightened by the experience, she was comforted by the fact that they were there. Her parents then left shortly to get lunch.
38 Natural Nutmeg
Allergies:
Emotions and
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