Hello again! So far in Chapter 4 we have postulated that movement affects all 12 systems of the human body. Here in chapter 4.3 we are establishing evidence on how movement can improve your immune system.
The seed or the soil?
The human immune system is quite complex. Most scientists would agree that there is more that we don’t know about the human body than we do know. Our current approach in “treating” the immune system is a perfect example of our arrogant ignorance. Instead of strengthening the body from the inside out naturally, we attempt to reduce symptoms of a normal functioning human physiology as if we completely understand all physiological aspects of the human body. As if we created it.
What’s the difference between God and an orthopedic surgeon?
God doesn’t think he’s an orthopedic surgeon.
The current healthcare paradigm is aimed at protecting a fragile, unsophisticated body from an unruly environment. We, in all our worldly wisdom, interrupt our body’s natural, “naive” physiology with new, state of the art lotions, potions and surgeries to remove “unnecessary” parts for the betterment of our health.
This paradigm is old and outdated. It comes from a time before modern sanitation practices were well implemented. It comes from a time when living conditions were that of a third world country today. The short term results seemed to be effective against widespread infections, while the long term results of such interventions were and still are largely unknown. We can undoubtedly acknowledge a few of these long-term failures such as Antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Today we continue to approach our health care with many of the same critical medical practices we did in the early 20th century. The long term, over-use of these practices have created new, but equally damning chronic conditions for our society today. Our society today is not only more sanitary but also uses more drugs and surgeries than any other society in history yet our health status is continuing to decline. We spend more money than any other country on healthcare, but we are consistently at the bottom of the pile with respect to our health. Is it that we are too weak a species to survive the natural environment or is our cultural environment making us weaker, more dependent?
Fast Food Immunity
So, what am I getting at? We live in one of the most amazing times in history, with all our advancements and amazing technologies, yet we fail to acknowledge the significance of our animal nature. We think we can outsmart mother nature with our ingenuity. We are willfully blind to the innate essentials of a healthy life, all the while arrogantly concocting innovations to make quick fixes or magic pills to remedy our neglect. Crackerjacks or jacks of all trades?!
I think we can do better. I think we can continue to advance our civilization with our ingenuity, but also respect and maintain our ancient genetic code. The Innate Essentials that I have outlined is an attempt to secure this balance of healthy living with our unending quest to dominate and control our world. Creating a strong healthy body as the primary defense and integrating critical care technologies as needed. As I have related earlier, our microwave culture is leading us further from our natural state of food, movement, posture, reality, sleep, stress and other essentials towards a state of necessary protective dependence of medical intervention for our seemingly fragile systems. A pill for every weakness and shortcoming. These conveniences that remedy our symptoms often ignore the cause and only make us weaker and sicker in the long term.
Do what's right, not what's easy
One of my favorite rules from Jordan Petersons 12 rules for life book is number 7 – “Pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient.” – Culture today seems obsessed with expediently integrating our latest technologies, inventions, and gadgets without assessing any of the consequences of implementation. Fast-tracking a product before we can derive what meaning it will have on the world. Mainstream implementation of the telephone took about 85 years while in contrast, the smartphone was a mainstream phenomenon in only 13 years.
Undoubtedly some of our innovations have increased our life span and reduced our child mortality rate in the world and for that, I am grateful, but still cautious. Admittedly antibiotics played a large role in fighting early 20th-century infectious diseases but touted as the infallible miracle drug they have been overused to our detriment. Antimicrobial Resistance(AMR) and microbiome dysbiosis have been attributed to and are linked with an inordinate amount of 21st-century chronic conditions. We culturally understand that there has become an imbalance with grave consequences, yet we continue with the status quo. When did we fall out of balance and how do we remodel this system?
“If the germ theory of disease were correct, there’d be no one living to believe it.”
-B.J. Palmer
This question has been posited scientifically in other ways with similar topics. The Hygiene Hypothesis, for example, relates that our sanitation practices have gone too far and have created a multitude of atopic diseases. Is this possible? Sanitation practices in most developed countries have been regarded as crucial components in decreasing the spread of infectious diseases. Can we be too sanitary? Some evidence suggests that our human ecosystem lives in a symbiotic relationship within the world’s ecosystem. It’s not sanitation itself that is wrong but upsetting the balance of our earthly ecosystems that can truly produce undesired effects.
How do we know what's right?
In my humble opinion, we need to reinvent our paradigm or write our new reality based upon humility and respect for our ability to create a strong natural immunity as well as implement some of our human ingenuity. Question the dogma of our outdated healthcare practices, especially when the evidence exposes flaws that have been covered up in the name of business. What if instead of protecting our weak bodies from our scary environment, we strengthen our body’s potential from the inside out to defend itself from the natural world. Now, here again, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As I have stated, we have made many great advancements in our hygiene practices, as well as critical medical procedures. I am not advocating that we scrap the entire system, but allow for civil discourse in remodeling a new system. Allow for hard conversations to be had and stop the censorship and bullying.
Did evolution fail us?
Here is one way we can look at our immune system. Our immune system has developed along with the development of our species. The Immune system has propagated itself throughout history adapting to its ever-changing environment. A simplistic way to relate the incredible ability of the human body is to look at the breastfed newborn and its mother. As foreign pathogens are introduced into its environment, the present mother’s immune system detects and responds to the pathogen with antibody production and is passed on to the infants otherwise inexperienced immune system. Miraculous!
If we over-sanitize, over-medicate and over-stimulate our immune system with our scientific innovations, we will have undesired effects in the form of man-made chronic diseases and in some cases death. Yet, if we fail to practice basic hygiene principles and not address critical medical emergencies when they arise, then some will be left maimed or devoured by mother nature and natural selection. So which is right? Man’s latest cultural ingenuities or the world’s natural laws?
Nature or Nurture? Balance is the Key
In a previous blog, I relate the idea of Hormesis and it’s benefits. Hormesis is a testament to balance and the negative effects of too much or too little of an environmental agent. Balance is key. Without these ingenuities, we are often at the mercy of mother nature. With these ingenuities, we are at an advantage over mother nature. At some point the dosage may become too much, thus creating a disadvantage and isolating us from our natural animalistic physiology. We should celebrate our achievements, take stock in our failures, recognize our pitfalls and converge our sophisticated culture with the natural world by maximizing our basic necessities for well-being.
There are No Safe Spaces
Providing our bodies with safe spaces will only deprive and stunt the growth of our uneducated immune systems. The goal of the pupil should be to try and obtain as much universal, diverse (university) knowledge he or she can obtain. This acquisition can prepare it for the biggest of challenges life may throw at it. The challenges are there to make you stronger and more resilient. Strange, the correlation this has in life with our university students, right?
In my experience, incorporating the Innate Essentials with rituals and routines that lead to a strong and resilient body should be the baseline for a balanced healthy population. I have explained my viewpoints on some of the other essentials in previous blog posts and will continue to delve into these. The Immune system is affected by a multitude of factors related to the Innate Essentials. For this chapter, I intend to focus on the Innate Essential of movement and its ability to help transform your immune system.
Movement and prolonged movement like exercise has been shown to improve all kinds of health objectives. So how does it impact the health of your immune system? Since I have related that science doesn’t fully understand the body’s ideal physiological conditions, here are a few theories on how and why movement is beneficial to the immune system.
5 Ways Exercise Increases your Immune System Response
1.) Movement aids your body to help expel foreign pathogens. This can be performed by the act of respiration. The deeper and more forceful the respiratory movement, the better the lungs are able to expel any invaders in the respiratory system. The act of sneezing or coughing is reflexive in nature so that the body can eliminate intruders from the respiratory system. The ability to perform deep inspiration and expiration depends largely on the mobility of your joints, in particular, your rib cage and thorax, but also the strength of muscles such as the intercostals and diaphragm. Therefore stiffness and decreased neurolgical output can decrease your body’s ability to perform respiration.
2.) Movement allows for greater lymph and blood flow. Transportation of blood in the body is largely the responsibility of the heart as it is a pump. Prolonged movement (exercise) of the body acts as a vascular training system that expands and contracts blood vessels for maximum flow potential. Transportation of blood allows for greater distribution of healing nutrients as well as removal of toxins. Transportation of lymph in the body is performed solely by the act of bodily movement. This is to say that lymphatic drainage requires movement to act as its pump. Your lymphatic system helps rid the body of toxins, waste and other unwanted materials. The primary function of the lymphatic system is to transport lymph, a fluid containing infection-fighting white blood cells throughout the body.
3.) Movement has been shown to decrease the sympathetic stress response. A body chronically dominated by the sympathetic nervous system will function as if it were in survival mode constantly. This chronic sympathetic state will decrease the immune system response due to its diffuse systemic reaction to its environment. This may increase your vulnerability to many pathologies including cancer. The immune system actively seeks to eliminate cancer cells on a daily basis. Cancerous cells can begin to replicate and take hold of an overwhelmed immune system. This may also be the case when the body is expending the largest amount of energy running other systems including the musculoskeletal system (overtraining, see number 5 below), the digestive system (overeating, eating toxins or more complicated GI distress) or even the neurological system (Emotional stress). In any case, the elevated stress loads to the body will result in a cascade of chemicals reducing the effectiveness of the immune system. Moderate exercise has been shown to help reduce and regulate the cascade of stress chemicals so the body may function optimally.
4.) Movement may increase body temperature. This is my least favorite example of how movement helps your immune system, but it still plays a role, however small, in fighting off pathologies and opportunistic pathogens. This increase in body temperature may kill off some less than beneficial pathogens.
5.) Movement changes the makeup of the white blood cells. Exercise will initially induce an immune response in an otherwise healthy individual. This increase in white blood cells will search out and destroy the invaders before they have a chance to disrupt the entire system. Overtraining with exercise will often have the opposite effect. Overtraining or too much movement will suppress the immune response. This relates back to the hormetic effect I’ve talked about previously.
Chiropractic Soapbox
It’s obvious to me that movement is essential to a healthy lifestyle. It’s more than just gross movement though. Proper movement is crucial for the well-being of your structure. Proper posture(form) and proper alignment of the joints is needed for proper movement of the body(function). This is discussed at great lengths in Chapter 2, Posture. Below are links to a few studies showing the immunity benefits of a Chiropractic adjustment and the movement it creates.
“While other professions are concerned with changing the environment to suit the weakened body, chiropractic is concerned with strengthening the body to suit the environment.”
-BJ Palmer
Chiropractic and Immunity
There are countless anecdotal stories of improved immunity promoted by patients of Chiropractic. I have related in past blogs that these kinds of espoused benefits of Chiropractic originally created an uneasy feeling for me as to what the true benefits of Chiropractic care were in regard to well-being. If I had not seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears, I would probably not be writing this manifesto of health. Nevertheless, even when they are talked about in my own clinic it is hard not to brush these beneficial findings under the rug as they are not part of the current cultural medical paradigm. I do have to testify that I see its benefits in my own family and I see them in my patient population. Here is one anecdotal story I saved from an article in Psychology Today. Chiropractic does truly benefit all systems of the human body and other scientists have seen it as well.
Dr. Pero, chief of cancer prevention at New York’s Preventive Medicine Institute and professor of medicine at New York University, found in his 3-year study that chiropractic patients had a 200% greater immune competence than people who had not received chiropractic care, and in fact a 400% greater immune competence than other people who had cancer or other serious disease.
In a study done at Life Chiropractic University, AIDS patients showed an increase in immune cell counts by 48% while under chiropractic care. The control group who did not receive any Chiropractic care showed the immune cell counts actually fell 8%.
Here is a link that provides more sources of research as related to Chiropractic care and the Immune system.
One Adjustment Action Step
- Movement is life. So, move! Move throughout your day. Get up regularly. We sit far too much! I suggest about every 20 minutes.
- Keep a good exercise plan to help balance out your daily sedentary life. 30 minutes is the minimum as you will see here in 12 Reasons Your Entire Body Needs Exercise.
- Fix your Posture for optimal movement and maximum longevity of your musculoskeletal system.
- Boost your immune system by Eating Real Food. Here’s a list of foods that are high in vitamins and minerals to help boost the immune system.
- Avoid or decrease unnecessary stress that contributes to a state of Dis-ease. Read 3 Ways Chronic Stress Kills You Faster.
- Reduce toxins and foreign pathogens by practicing good hygiene and eliminating environmental hazards.
- Give your system time to reset and re-energize. Sleep, along with movement, are the most underestimated and underutilized heroes of a well functioning immune system.
As I have related to you in previous articles the lack of movement or poor movement form creates stress on the musculoskeletal system (arthritis) as well as the nervous system (subluxation). As you can see, this simple yet powerful stressor can wreak havoc on your immune system. A great supplement for movement in our current times is Chiropractic. I am however of the opinion that a routine of daily movement and exercise is essential to your well-being.
I hope all is well and that you are enjoying this process as much as I am.
Nick the DC
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