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Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

rachel.fast.ai

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Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#41

Post by viraptor »

Mistletoe wrote: post #24
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #8

>We can see that not all obstacles make you stronger. Destroy the cartilage in your knee, and it may never fully recover, since cartilage doesn’t grow back. // I'm not a medic but I recall this being disproven or shown to be at least partially a myth a few years ago - https://physicians.dukehealth.org/articles/humans-have-salam... from 2020, for example. Researchers showed that ankle cartilage is younger than knee- a…

Also runners have great knee cartilage compared to sedentary people, despite the myth. >Using motion capture and sophisticated computer modeling, the study confirms that running pummels knees more than walking does. But in the process, the authors conclude, running likely also fortifies and bulks up the cartilage, the rubbery tissue that cushions the ends of bones. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/well/move/why-run…

That's mixing up repeated increased stress from running and "destroyed" from the parent comment. Those are different things.

Same situation with resistance training lightly damaging and rebuilding muscles over time and actually tearing a large part of a muscle which leaves lasting damage.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#42

Post by iLoveOncall »

newaccount74 wrote: post #28
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hypothesis based on my own experiences that this can happen from accumulating something in the body faster than it can be cleared. Could you have been continuously ingesting yellow 6 for a while, to the point that it crossed some threshold?

Allergies seem to come and go. My partner developed allergies against many local fruits in her early twenties, to the point where she could barely eat any fresh fruits without her lips and throat swelling up; but most of them subsided in her 30ies and she can now eat almost all fruits again with only minor irritations for some.

Fruit allergies can actually be pollen allergies because the pollen contaminates the fruit. If your partner moved to a different areas which has trees she's not allergic to, or just eats fruits produced from somewhere else than she used to, that may simply be the reason.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#43

Post by alecst »

I guess I'm cool coming out and saying it. Out of curiosity I bought some helminths online and infected myself. I was inspired to do it after reading a book called An Epidemic of Absence.

I can't say a whole lot -- positive or negative -- came from it, but it was easy to do and inexpensive. So even though the article says you shouldn't try it at home, I did. I consider it safe. I'm not a doctor, I just read a lot of PubMed, so take that for what it's worth.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#45

Post by Terretta »

darby_nine wrote: post #34
kens wrote: post #22

My "unpopular opinion" is that in 100 years, people will consider it very strange that most of the population was permanently infected with a bunch of viruses like EBV/HSV/CMV/HPV and nobody cared or did anything about it.

No governments cared or did anything about it, you mean.

Governments were doing something about it until all the fifth dentists* got amplified by “journalists” in the “media” we now recognize are mostly just wannabe influencers playing pundit drumming up clicks.

* "4 out of 5 dentists agree" except it's more like the 50th dentist, given research consensus

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#46

Post by DontchaKnowit »

ransom1538 wrote: post #9
Xcelerate wrote: post #4

I don’t know enough to comment on the Hygiene / Old Friends hypothesis, but anecdotally it seems like almost everyone I know now has an allergy or autoimmune disorder of some sort. After giving birth, my sister suddenly developed something similar to celiac disease (but not quite the same; I don’t think doctors ever figured out exactly what it is) to where she can’t eat grains and a few other types of food as well. I…

IHMO An old myth, I believe: Your immune system needs something to fight, otherwise, it starts finding problems that aren't.

I had an allergist tell me about a study that supported this idea recently : Introduction of pig whipworm eggs into the digestive tract of IBS patients reduced symptoms for a some patients. Pretty fascinating actually.

I was seeing the allergist for my eczema and he asked me if I experienced symptom relief when traveling abroad, which I did in Honduras. He thought I may have been exposed to a parasite there that diverted my overactive immune response. go figure.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1856386/

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#47

Post by pazimzadeh »

The Old Friends hypothesis doesn't make a ton of sense to me. Viruses did not come around much later than bacteria and parasites, and definitely before the adaptive immune system.

Bacterial viruses may have been involved in the evolution of nuclei https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j....

The adaptive immune system of jawed vertebrates itself probably wouldn't be around if a virus hadn't infected the gametes of our fishy ancestors https://www.nature.com/articles/29457 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686171/

More likely is that there is a critical time window during the development of the immune system when it is trained not to react to most bacteria (which are passed on from the mother's vaginal microbiota and harmed by cesarian sections and early antibiotic use). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6904599/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4464665/

There's more and more evidence that one person's commensal bacteria can be someone else's pathogen, and that we should really think about it as a "lock and key" with your immune system rather than categorizing bacteria as inherently good or bad. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5300855/

Another rarely mentioned complication though is that the successful immune response itself likely selects for more pathogenic microbes. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15539148/

Removing selective pressure from pathogens can actually lead to less virulent strains. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30100182/

That may be why the body spends considerable resources feeding the microbiota at a slow pace using by secreting mucus which contains a large amount of sugars, but which are attached using an extreme amount of diverse linkages so that one bacteria cannot sweep the field and take over. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1134114/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41522-023-00468-3

You cannot really withhold food from bacteria, they will just eat you. But if you give them a slow trickle of sugar, you remove their reason to invade you (which is is at a risk to themselves). I personally think this concept can be applied to wars and immigration, but anyway..

Why are viruses more likely to cause autoimmune diseases than parasites? Probably because viruses go inside us and set of (Th1) intracellular responses , whereas parasites set of extracellular responses (Th2). You're probably more likely to be tricked into attacking yourself when you are fighting off something inside yourself than something outside your cells.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#48

Post by randomdata »

lukan wrote: post #37
randomdata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Addictive amounts of sugar in a lot of food. Realistically, this and seed oils are the only place you are going to really encounter GMOs. If you are avoiding such processed food anyway... > GMOs everywhere unless you can pay extra for organic. If you really must binge on the junk food and are concerned about any GMO content, why are you paying extra for organic? Why not just buy non-GMO products?

"Why not just buy non-GMO products?" I think that is hard, since non-GMO can still contain GMO. Organic is a bit stricter, but I think also not 100% GMO free. (Personally, I don't care about GMO, but organic)

The US does not appear define a specific threshold – best effort only, but I believe the EU allows 0.9% contamination in organic crops. The identity preserved program only allows 0.5%, so that's theoretically a better bet than organic, if you had some reason to care.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#49

Post by TeaBrain »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #33
Mistletoe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also runners have great knee cartilage compared to sedentary people, despite the myth. >Using motion capture and sophisticated computer modeling, the study confirms that running pummels knees more than walking does. But in the process, the authors conclude, running likely also fortifies and bulks up the cartilage, the rubbery tissue that cushions the ends of bones. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/well/move/why-run…

Is that causative though? Or do people with great cartilage simply enjoy running more because it isn't as painful?

Why this way of looking at cartilage is a misconception is explained in the study cited by the top level comment. Cartilage in different parts of the body has been shown to be different ages, indicating that it rejuvenates and that there there isn't just a single set of good or bad cartilage.

Re: Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle

#50

Post by cjbgkagh »

Very much disagree with the implication that helminths will help very much for these conditions. While not a commonly known treatment in the 'medical sphere' it's is very commonly known in the 'patient community spheres' and from the patient run studies it does not appear to have a particularly strong effect. It does appear to help some people so it's hard to rule it out but that could easily be noise. Those who did report a benefit were most often in the less impaired category and those same people tend to benefit from a wide variety of treatments that are generally ineffective on those of use who are more impaired.

This post reads like someone who has just discovered the world of ME/CFS/LongCovid (post viral) /ToxicMold/POTs/SIBO/IBS/Lymes/hEDS/Graves/Hashimotos/MS/Lupus etc. etc. As a lifer I have seen many people enter the space and go through this exact same early stage of discovery.

What I really think it is; it's genetic, various types of generalized anxiety disorders with their associated auto-immune conditions with the most common being Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos. These genetic predispositions are made worse by diet and lifestyles and triggered by all manner of stressors.

On how to treat it, Low Dose Naltrexone is a good step one, then meds for dysautonomia, TUDCA, 3,3′-diindolylmethane (DIM), and then finally I think Low Dose Semaglutide Helminths did not work for me the several times I tried it and have not worked for anyone that I have personally known that has tried it which to date is around ~10pp. But I do believe the people who do say it has worked for them but I don't count them unless I knew them prior due to the issue of selection criteria biases.

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