Not all inflammations are the same. If you hit your thumb with a hammer instead of the nail you want to hammer in to hang a picture, then a bruise occurs. The immune system reacts by releasing cytokines, which are messenger substances that activate various cells and other substances so that the bruised thumb heals as quickly as possible. This is a fantastic mechanism of our immune system that can be called self-healing.
To further accelerate the healing process, one can take so-called enzymes. These are catalysts that can greatly speed up a reaction. Enzymes have important functions within the processes that take place in the body so that we can react quickly enough to changes.
Enzymes are not only found in the body, they are almost everywhere. Enzymes were discovered in yeast when studying the fermentation process of beer. We have already informed you in our article that you can reduce acute inflammation more quickly by taking 2 plant enzymes, bromelain (from pineapple) and papain (from papaya). With DEGOZYM, the Network Globalhealth has developed a purely herbal enzyme preparation that is able to restore the immune balance in the body more quickly.
Everyone talks about the immune system – but how does it actually work?
Inflammations are reactions of the immune system to external attacks. This can be an attack with a hammer on the thumb, but in most cases we are harassed by some kind of attacker such as bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites.
But beware! We have kilos of bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites in and on our bodies. Not only are they not dangerous, but on the contrary, we could not live without them. Just think of the microbiome in the intestine, thousands of different bacteria, of which we don’t even know them all.
But there are also others that are or can become dangerous. For example, if you have an open wound and bacteria get in there, which is almost always the case. Then something has to happen, otherwise these bacteria can become a serious danger for you.
What happens then is called the immune system. These are very quick reactions of the body to deal with the attackers, to close the wound again, to stop the blood flow, to fight the bacteria and so on.
The immune system is a miracle of adaptation of all living beings to their environment, which has always been and still is dangerous. It does not have a single strategy, it has several different inherited weapons (innate immune defence, e.g. through mechanical barriers such as the skin, granulocytes, i.e. cells containing aggressive substances, and natural killer cells).
In addition to its innate weapons, it can adapt very quickly to new attackers to better fight them. Let’s take the coronavirus as an example of an adaptation. Many of us have had a cold in the past that was triggered by a (less dangerous) coronavirus. The cold, with all its symptoms, was the immune system’s response to the attacker. When we now have to deal with a similar but new virus, there is a reaction of the system. There are so-called memory T cells that can remember the attacker and then produce or activate other cells that have already adapted quite well to the attacker and can therefore fight it better. People’s reaction to the novel virus, which is deadly for some, is quite different. Some don’t even have symptoms, while others end up in intensive care. We haven’t yet understood all the virus’s strategies, and the virus certainly hasn’t understood us yet either, because viruses don’t actually want to kill their host, they want to reproduce in a host. If the host dies in the process, that is not good, neither for the host nor for the virus.
And yet it happens. Especially in older people whose immune system no longer functions well and who may have other illnesses that have weakened the immune system even more. In addition, there are other better or worse points of attack that the virus uses. That could be race, that could be gender, that could be blood type, that could be other factors that we don’t know yet. This shows us that although we humans all have the same structure, we are still individually very different, because we react differently to this attack of the virus, for example. And because we all live different lives and our own organism is highly individual.
As long as we still belonged entirely to the animals, that was it. Either the attacker is eradicated by the immune system, or the attacker eradicates the host. When we became humans and developed consciousness, that is, when we were able to duplicate our environment in our minds, we immediately began to think about how we could additionally support our immune system, even though we didn’t even know we had an immune system. We observed how different plants can reduce inflammation, some simply peed on an open wound, disinfecting it. For example, we discovered that certain fungi can kill bacteria. From this we then developed antibiotics, which were a blessing for us humans for a very long time and which today contribute to the fact that bacteria can arm themselves with resistance and make us more vulnerable to their attacks.
When we didn’t have antibiotics, it could easily happen that we could disinfect an open wound, but some bacteria had already migrated from the wound, e.g. had settled in the blood and thus spread throughout the body. The blood was poisoned and we could die from it. This is called sepsis or blood poisoning.
But inflammation can also occur without pathogens being present, e.g. due to wear and tear, tissue irritation, overuse, allergies and injuries. Examples are tendonitis, allergic skin rashes, injuries and burns.
And this brings us to the other part, that inflammations are permanently settled in us and that our immune system has to live permanently in battle mode. And also that our immune system goes after attackers that are not attackers at all, such as birch pollen. Or also that our immune system releases so many cytokines that its response to an attacker is oversized, as in the case of the coronavirus, because there we are dealing with a veritable cytokine storm, which is then ultimately responsible for death.
Silent or chronic inflammation – what is it?
Silent inflammation is not about healing an acute injury, as acute inflammation does. Rather, it is about our immune system either not being able to fight the cause of inflammation or fighting a non-existent cause because it has not learned to distinguish attackers from friends.
Silent inflammations are definitely long-lasting, they can be very dangerous and they are very difficult to fight. Because frankly, you don’t know exactly why the immune system is going crazy and therefore you can’t really fight it. What is clear is that all chronic inflammation and related illnesses, as well as the ever-increasing number of allergies to substances in our environment, have to do with our civilisation. In other words, the way we live together, how we produce, what we eat, the relationships we form and our social metabolism. That’s how you can define the causes of our immune system going crazy in general terms. But that doesn’t really help us when we suffer from and are affected by silent inflammation or when our allergies increase.
In chronic inflammation, not only the immune system is involved, but also the hormonal system and the neuronal system (nervous system). The immune system activates the so-called stress axis. Cortisol is released, we have to deal with oxidative stress and our immune system, which should actually react tolerantly to external influences (don’t make a mountain out of every molehill), is suddenly no longer tolerant at all, but shoots at everything that seems to disturb it. The mitochondria, the power stations in our cells, also become ill when this happens. Oxidative stress is caused by the fact that molecules containing oxygen take up additional electrons and thus react chemically much more strongly. This process leads to oxidative stress and is not healthy in the long run. Cortisol is a hormone that is produced more in the adrenal cortex during stress, which is why it is also called the stress hormone. Adrenalin, by the way, is also a stress hormone. Oxidative stress is countered by antioxidants, which you have probably heard of. They are able to take the additional electrons from the oxygen-containing molecules and thus reduce the strong reactions.
Here are three examples of chronic inflammation: Chronic bronchitis (lungs), chronic gastritis (stomach) and chronic hepatitis (liver).
Silent inflammation – What to do?
As you may remember, there are a lot of different inflammations that usually have the suffix -itis. Any inflammation of a chronic nature is always only one aspect of the whole disease, it does not usually exist on its own but is a reaction to an imbalance in the body.
Let’s take the disease ulcerative colitis as an example. This is a disease of the intestine that affects about 400,000 people in Germany. The symptoms are abdominal pain, frequent (bloody) diarrhoea, accompanied by fever and weight loss. And although this is permanent, it usually occurs in episodes. We don’t really know what causes the disease. But you can at least describe quite well what happens.
As you know, there are a lot of very different bacteria in the intestine that have the task of extracting the substances from the food that our body needs. Some of them are quite aggressive in order to be able to do this. Our microbiome is also different from that of all others. No two intestines have the same intestinal flora.
To ensure that the bacteria remain in the intestine and do not invade the rest of the body, the intestine has a protective layer called the intestinal mucosa. The mucosa is a complicated structure, because the substances extracted from food must pass through it and then be absorbed by the body, and at the same time the bacteria must not pass through it. The protective layer is largely formed from phosphatidylcholine (lecithin); we have already referred to this combination of molecules, which is important for our survival, in numerous articles. The protective layer is therefore also called surfactant, which means to be a border-protecting agent. And the mucosa is just that – a border.
This protective layer decreases more and more – why is not yet finally deciphered. Bacteria then invade the other regions of the body and what happens then? The immune system becomes active. There is an inflammation, which is then supposed to restore the normal balance. But as long as the protective layer is not rebuilt, the inflammation persists in the body. This is fatal, of course, because one then fights the inflammation, which, on the other hand, is necessary to destroy the invading bacteria. This is then called a vicious circle or circulus vitiosus, which is fuelled further and further.
Actually, one should fight the cause, why too little phosphatidylcholine is produced to protect the mucosa. But since this is not known, the inflammation is fought, and with drugs that have numerous additional side effects. In short, the patients are not doing very well.
In most cases, patients feel much worse without additional medication, so the side effects are accepted.
We had advised taking the two enzymes bromelain and papain for the acute inflammations so that the inflammation process can be shortened. Can the enzymes also be taken for the treatment of chronic diseases? Yes, this is definitely possible and also recommended. However, the doctors of the Network Globalhealth recommend taking phosphatidylcholine in addition to the degozyme (the enzyme preparation) in order to repair the protective layer. This is also somewhat plausible. The treatment protocol for colitis depends on how far the disease has progressed and how long the patient has been suffering from it. Usually, an infusion or injection treatment course is recommended (10-20 injections or infusions each 2-3 days apart, twice a year) to quickly reintroduce the amount of highly potent phosphatidylcholine, or PPC, into all the membranes of the body’s cells to stimulate the cells to produce phosphatidylcholine. At the same time and in addition to the intravenous therapy, the oral PPC, Memphosan recommended by the network, should be taken in order to introduce as much PPC as possible directly into the intestine and thus additionally stabilise the mucosal layer. In addition, PPC has the ability to improve the intestinal flora, which has also been proven by studies. PPC also has an anti-inflammatory effect. However, it is important to know that this is a long-term therapy; it cannot be used to treat an acute episode.
So much for this very concrete example. Similar examples can be developed for other chronic inflammations. All are similarly complicated, all cannot be simply treated and all also challenge us to learn more about inflammation and our immune system.
The immune system is going crazy – or is it?
Let’s move on to allergies and autoimmune diseases. All of you know about allergies, either have one yourself or have someone in your circle of acquaintances who has one. In simple terms, allergies are caused by the immune system identifying a certain substance, e.g. birch pollen, as harmful to the organism and therefore reacting with defence. Allergies are not easy to treat either. You take so-called antihistamines to weaken the immune response, but the reaction to the allergen – in our example the birch pollen – remains and the immune response comes every year when the pollen moves through the air. Antihistamines have side effects, of course, and if you actually have to take them whenever the time comes, this is certainly not conducive to good health. One of the lecturers of the Network Globalhealth/Extended Medicine, the pharmacist Dr. Dr. Matthias Trennheuser, has developed a new natural preparation (AllergieControl) to dampen the acute immune response, but without the side effects that antihistamines bring. Dermatologists offer desensitisation to the particular substance that triggers the reaction, but this is a more lengthy process.
The topic of why we develop allergies is also hotly debated, especially the question of why they are increasing suggests that their almost pandemic spread must have something to do with our lifestyle.
Autoimmune diseases are when the immune system is directed against substances that are present in one’s own body. Therefore, one can certainly say that the immune system is misguided. This also has to do with the tolerance that the immune system actually needs. When the normal tolerance decreases, the activity increases, because the immune system can no longer accurately recognise and “analyse” whether the substance or substances are really threatening or not. Here are two examples of autoimmune diseases that you may be familiar with: Thyroiditis (thyroid disease) Rheumatoid arthritis (joint disease).
The immune system and its misguided reactions can definitely tell us that there must be something wrong with our lives, with our society and with the way we deal with the world. Of course, this does not mean that we as individuals are responsible for it, but it is still a very important message and if we take it seriously and can determine for ourselves what we actually find wrong or right in our lives, then it has sent us a very important message.