RemedyGuru.com: Natural Remedies and Holistic Healing

As far as hostility is concerned, it is not clear which type is bad. Is it the overt hostility (all lawyers watch out— you may be at higher risk of coronary disease!) or is it the repressive type (the tendency not to express your emotions when angry)? There are contradictory studies, which favour the different viewpoints. One fascinating study seems to give a better picture. In that study, healthy volunteers were shown a film clip that evokes some strong emotions (like a surgical procedure with blood and all the internals).

Continue reading Stress Relief: Hostility and Risk of Cardiovascular Disease

In this article we will look at one particular personality type and see what the consequences are in terms of vulnerability to stress-related diseases. Though the picture is grim for such people, there is definite good news—the proverbial silver lining to the dark cloud. Such personality traits are not permanent and you can make an active effort to change, which reduces your vulnerability.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Personality Type and Temperament

First, we will take a look at the male reproductive system. Your average male has a pretty run of the mill system as compared to the complexity of the female reproductive system.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Stress and Reproduction

Inside our body there is an amazing protection mechanism called the immune system. It is designed to defend us against the millions of bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins and parasites that would love to invade our body. To understand the power of the immune system, all that we have to do is look at what happens to anything once it dies. That sounds vulgar, but it does show you something very important about the immune system. When something dies its immune system (along with everything else) shuts down.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Effect of Immune System

The preceding sections would convince any reader that the female reproductive system is quite complex and susceptible to disruption at many stages. Some of the villains include depletion of fat cells, secretions of endorphins, prolactin, glucocorticoids, lack of progesterone and excessive prolactin interfering with the progesterone. It seems likely that even mild stressors should disrupt the system. Now take a look around you—grinding poverty, families with nursing mothers living below flyovers and bridges.

Continue reading Stress Relief: High Risk Pregnancy?

Infertility! The dreaded malady has almost no match in terms of its ability to cause stress, disrupt relationship between husband and wife, high rates of depression, inability to concentrate at work and estrangement from family and friends. For those unfortunate enough to have to face this condition, it seems to be the worst thing that can happen! Typically, the most common problems faced are the damage to the relationships with friends and relatives who have children.

Continue reading Stress Relief: High-tech Pregnancy and High Failure Rates

The main function of the immune system is to fight infectious agents such as viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi. To get an idea of the enormous complexity of this task, first think about what the immune system should not do—attack the body’s own self. Somehow, the system should be able to distinguish between ‘self and ‘non-self. Every time it sees a non-self cell, the immune system has to attack it.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Functioning of the Immune System

Autoimmune diseases are caused by an overactive immune system attacking the body; it is logical that suppressing the immune system will reduce the disease. That is precisely what happens when such patients are given massive amounts of glucocorticoids. The net result is less damage from the au-toimmune disease but at the cost of a suppressed immune system. Such patients are obviously more at risk from other diseases and have to be vigilant.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Treatment of Autoimmune Diseases with Steroids

Recall the story of Selye and his ulcerated rats. There was brief mention of shrunken thymus gland. It turns out that the best documented way in which immune suppression occurs is via the glucocorticoids. These stress-response hormones have a pretty wide area of influence in the immune system. They cause the shrinkage of the thymus, inhibit the release of the messengers interleukin and interferons and they make circulating lymphocytes less sensitive to infectious alarms.

 

The glucocorticoids cause the lymphocytes to be pulled out of circulation and even worse can actually kill them. Some other stress-response hormones also suppress immunity (like beta-endorphins) though their role is far from clear and the effect is far less than that of glucocorticoids.

The alert reader at this point may ask why the immune system is suppressed during stress? All along, we have been emphasizing that the body’s stress response has evolved superbly to fight physical stressors. So, why has evolution favoured a system that seems to knock out the immune system when faced with a stressor? Logically, it does not make sense to lower your guard when faced with a stressor.

In fact, it seems the opposite should be true. One of the things we noted was that during a stressor, long-term tasks that involve expenditure of energy are shut off (digestion, ovulation and so on). In that light, consider what the body does to the immune system—it expends energy to actively dismantle the immune system when it ought to be spending energy to shore up the defences.

The story of the immune system and stress is actually pretty complicated. Newer techniques, particularly in developing extremely sensitive tests to determine levels of hormones have led to a nuanced picture of what happens to the immune system in response to stress. First, as expected, the immune system is enhanced at the onset of stress. For the first 30 minutes or so of a stressor, the immune system is enhanced. After about 60 minutes, with sustained release of glucocorticoids and the workings of the sympathetic system, the immune system starts to be suppressed.

If the stressor is of moderate duration, the net effect is that the immune system is brought back to the pre-stress level. No harm done. It is only in the face of chronic stress that the suppression of the immune system is such that it goes below the pre-stress level. Again, it reinforces the major theme of this book. It is the chronic stress and the body’s response to it that causes the problems. Alert readers will ask as to why the immune system should be brought down from the high level it had reached during stress?

Is it not good for the body to have the immune system working in top gear? The first obvious answer is that it would be too costly—the effort required to keep the immune system at an enhanced level will require a considerable expenditure of energy.5 The second explanation is that a chronically activated immune system becomes even more active, spiraling out of control and leading to autoimmune diseases.

To summarize—

• During stress, the stress-response hormones cause a transient activation of the immune system.

• Stress response enhances the immune defences and helps in redistributing them to the site of the infection.

• To avoid the danger of overshooting into autoimmunity, exposure to glucocorticoids brings the immune system back to the pre-stress level.

In the case of chronic stress and prolonged glucocorticoids release, the immune system is suppressed below normal levels. These findings help to explain some facets of the autoimmune disease and increased vulnerability to infections as will be discussed in subsequent sections.

In this section we will make a small detour from our general discussion on the topic of stress and the suppression of the immune system. Here, we will examine one particular aspect of the immune system with which we are all so familiar that we tend not to give it any thought—I am talking about the symptoms of feeling sick. Typically, when we get an infection, we have a fever, our joints and muscles hurt, we feel sleepy, lose our appetite and are generally lethargic.

Continue reading Stress Relief: Symptoms of an Infection