Autoimmune Conditions
Autoimmune disorders are characterised by the body producing an inappropriate immune response against its own tissues. Sometimes the immune system will cease to recognise one or more of the body’s normal constituents as ‘self’ and will create autoantibodies – antibodies that attack its own cells, tissues or organs. The resulting inflammation and cell damage are both key markers in autoimmune disorders.
You may have been given a diagnosis like Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), Hashimoto’s or Grave’s disease and may be taking Western Pharmaceutical drugs. The autoimmune disorder may be impacting fertility, or it may be causing other concomitant symptoms like poor sleep, headaches, anxiety or depression, and thus affecting your quality of life. Often pharmaceutical drugs may assist with some problems but cause other issues, or be helpful for some symptoms but not other. This is the difficult balance in autoimmune disease and one that Chinese Medicine does extremely well.
As A Chinese Medicine practitioner, I only ever diagnose and target your set of symptoms based on Chinese Medicine understanding in order to bring ‘You’, the whole person, back into balance. I assist people, not their diseases!
So what is the Chinese Medicine View of Autoimmune disease?
Whilst we acknowledge the biomedical processes that occur in autoimmune dysfunction, we see these processes in terms of Qi and blood, Yin and Yang. In terms of the causes of disease from a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) point of view, there are a few main factors –
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- Lifestyle
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- Diet
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- Environment
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- Emotions
To this end, autoimmune disorders will often have a very high correlation with what we know in Chinese Medicine as ‘stress disorders’.
We know that life-stress affects cellular health. Cells involved in immunity can alter with prolonged stress. The immune system – antibodies, allergies and immune cells and their responses- are fundamentally the result of the brain and nervous system, and their responses to acute stressors
So why/how does this happen?
Essentially, changes in our stress response affect changes in the supply and release of neurotransmitters, hormones and immune factors that leads to changes in physiology such as reduced cell-mediated immune function.
Of course we do not see you as a bunch of neurotransmitters, but rather through concepts such as Qi, Blood, Yin and Yang. So our diagnosis will not sound familiar to you most likely – we use ideas such as ‘stagnant blood’ and ‘stagnant Qi’ to express our ideas on why pathological change may have occurred.
The end result, in Chinese Medicine terms, is pathological changes that may present as depressed mood, dry mouth or eyes, disturbed sleep, aching joints or muscles etc.
Chinese medicine and Acupuncture are excellent tools to help return your body to homeostasis – its natural happy healing place. This helps you, help you ( body, brain, and everything connected and in between) to heal and return to a heathy balance.
How is this important to the way Traditional Chinese Medicine views stress and the progression of disease?
Essentially we know that the stress response triggers ‘functional’ changes in the way neurotransmitters, hormones etc. are released For example, Cortisol is one of those stress-substances that can be elevated when someone is under or in a prolonged period of stress.