I’m often surprised by correspondence received from my subscribers. Some people even expect me to Google for them! Sometimes I get a very basic question and it causes me to wonder just how many of you out there have the same missing information.
Today a lady asked me “What is inflammation?” Aside from the fact that she could just look online for answers, it intrigued me that she felt ignorant. It’s one of the most fundamental processes in nature! It’s healing on steroids. You can’t really heal anything without inflammation; YET, you can’t heal anything in the presence of inflammation. OK, I’d better explain… Here goes.
Calor, rubor, tumor and dolor! No it’s not gobbledegook; it’s Latin. Every medical student learns these four words early on. They come from the observations of Aulus Cornelius Celsus, c. AD 25, and translate to heat, redness, swelling and pain. Those are the key characteristics of inflammation.
We all know what pain, swelling, redness and heat feel like!
All pain is caused by inflammation and if you think back to an infected cut, a sore joint or maybe a tooth abscess, you will remember that as well as pain, the part swells and goes red. It also feels HOT, hence inflammation (in flames = burning).
It’s our way of protecting ourselves. Suppose for example a bunch of Strep bacteria get going in your tonsils—the body will respond by pouring immune troops into the area. The ensuing battle is the root cause of the pain. It’s fiery hot because blood pours into the spot and the extra fluid leads to swelling and heat. If it’s a big enough deal, the body will add to its response by raising the body’s temperature (a fever); that helps the immune cells get the advantage, while slowing down the invader. Perfect!
Without this response, we would rapidly die; with it, we endure a few days of being unwell, which we call a sickness. Then it heals up and is all gone.
Trust me, you DO want the toothache, or sore throat. You need that fight back (interestingly, the word pain comes from the Greek ponos, meaning struggle or fight. Hippocrates this time).
You with me so far?
This wonderous healing response, one of nature’s finest, works well and works often. As I said, without it, we’d be dead. In fact that’s what happened to AIDS cases: they lost their immune T-cells and quickly aged and then died. It’s why we isolate immune-compromised cases: No fight back.
So how does it go wrong? If the inflammation is not resolved, it becomes chronic (Greek: chronos = time). This is very bad news because heat, pain, swelling and redness are not nice and we want them gone. PLUS there is one other negative aspect of inflammation: LOSS OF FUNCTION (Latin: functio laesa). This is obvious when you think of a sore throat—you don’t like to swallow; or with a dental abscess, you don’t want to bite on it; or you try not to use an inflamed joint. So with a body part out of action, you are at a disadvantage. I’m sure you can recall an instance that you once suffered.
Chronic inflammation is created when the problem faced by the body does not go away. If a person is unknowingly allergic to milk, for instance, and goes on drinking it day after day, the resulting eczema, colitis, arthritis or asthma won’t resolve and the person is chronically sick. This is great news for Big Pharma, who has the patient trapped in a vicious cycle. They don’t even WANT to find out what the case of chronic inflammation is and so get rid of it. They want to go on selling meds to that patient (via the doctor) for the rest of his or her life! The patient becomes a “cash cow”.
It Gets Worse
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the body part and the surroundings that get dragged into the chronic inflammation story. Healing cannot take place in the presence of chronic inflammation. DOCTORS DO NOT KNOW THIS! So they go on prescribing symptomatic treatment, instead of going further upstream and looking for real causes.
They are stuck on the so-called inflammatory cytokines model (IL-6, TNF-alpha, c-Reactive Protein and similar), which undoubtedly exist. But they are not the originators of inflammation, merely the biomarkers for it. Why are there inflammatory cytokines being produced in excess? That’s the real question.
Meanwhile, the fight goes on and on and on. Eventually, the body defence mechanisms begin to wear out and start misfiring. The adrenal response to stress continues on and on, releasing cortisol to help with the fight. Eventually the adrenal gland will get tired too, leading to adrenal exhaustion. But meanwhile chronically raised cortisol is very dangerous and starts to produce lasting damage, not limited to tissue loss and organ malfunction.
It is now many years since I wrote about the salmon run in this context, so here goes a reminder: we all know that the salmon “run” upriver, to spawn and then die. The reason they die is that they are hyper-stressed by battling upstream against the current and waterfall. Stress = cortisol. Measurements of the salmon cortisol showed levels up to 3,000 times the normal. That’s how deadly cortisol is and you should bear this story in mind!
Now don’t get me started on the psychological aspects of all this. Many patients are diagnosed as depressed and that’s the real “cause” of their symptoms, say the doctors. But as I’ve written for decades, that’s a result, not a cause; who wouldn’t be depressed while suffering years of misery which no doctor seems able to alleviate? What’s more the “treatment” is making you worse, because of the side-effects. It leaves me wondering why anyone would go to the doctor at all!
The Antibody Myth
One last (astonishing) surprise before we leave this immune response 101! A lot is written about antibodies and their role in beating off invasive pathogens. It’s even taught at high school and it has become so ingrained in normal thinking that even laypeople think they understand it.
Trust me, you don’t!
The story is that our B-cells and T-cells meet the invaders, identify them as foreign and produce anti-bodies against them. T-cells (especially the helper T-cells) remember the invader and so if they ever re-appear the attack response is fast and effective. This state is called “immunity”. In many circumstances it can last for life but that never happens with vaccine-induced immunity, which wears off, often very quickly. Life-long immunity only comes through natural infections and the appropriate response.
What’s wrong with this story? People UNABLE to produce antibodies still get immunity for life! It’s a condition called congenital agammaglobulinemia. In fact those who catch measles or whooping cough, for example, are immune for life… absent any antibodies! Now didn’t that startle you!
Surely individuals who can’t make antibodies will die of an infection, very soon? In fact the life expectancy of people with congenital agammaglobulinemia is normal, with occasional help – the same range as that for the general population!¹
Clearly lasting immunity is NOT totally dependent on antibodies. Their immune cells are capable of phagocytosis too (phagocytosis: Greek I’m afraid! It means eating up cells or pathogens).
Maybe it’s opsonins after all? Say what? Opsonins, you know… opsonins! Haha! Opsonins are extracellular proteins that, when bound to pathogens, induce certain white cells phagocytes to gobble up (phagocytose) the intruders. This is non-specific, meaning it works for any pathogen, whether met before or not! In 1904 researchers Wright and Douglas found that incubating bacteria with blood plasma enabled phagocytes to phagocytose (and thereby destroy) the bacteria. They concluded that: “We have here conclusive proof that the blood fluids modify the bacteria in a manner which renders them a ready prey to the phagocytes.”
No mention of antibodies back then!²
Probably too simple for modern medicine! But George Bernard Shaw, no less, in the preface to his play “The Doctors Dilemma” wrote about this phenomenon. It’s hard to tell whether he was being serious or sarcastic! But he seemed better clued in for the time than most doctors (and still does).
Here’s to your good health… and abundant opsonins!
Prof. Keith Scott-MumbyThe Official Alternative Doctor
For more information (much more than you need!) you can read the book: Charles N. Serhan, Peter A. Ward, Derek W. Gilroy, editors. Fundamentals of Inflammation. 2010. Cambridge University Press: New York. ISBN: (Hardcover) 978-0521887298. US $99. 488 p.
References:
- https://www.immunodeficiencyuk.org/x-linked-agammaglobulinemia-xla
- Wright, A. E.; Douglas, S. R.; Sanderson, J. B. (September 1989). “An experimental investigation of the rôle of the blood fluids in connection with phagocytosis. 1903”. Reviews of Infectious Diseases. 11 (5): 827–834. doi:10.1093/clinids/11.5.827. PMID 2682954
