I love looking into the relationship of cause with regard to different disorders. Let’s look at autoimmunity and its relationship to stress. Stress, in my experience, is always an underlying component related to an autoimmune disorder. Very commonly, when I see somebody who has experienced an autoimmune disorder, we can go back in time, and we can see that typically the first time, at its onset, that it was a time of high stress or there was a very big, triggering stressful event that pushed the body into an overactive stress response. That stress then led to the process of the immune system overreacting and going into autoimmune disorder.
The relationship of stress in this process can be confusing. Many people think, “Okay, well, this is stress, sure. I get tight muscles, and I’ll go get a massage.” Stress really has an impact on every cell and every system in your body. The tight muscle is just an outward expression of it.
When we look at the relationship of stress to the immune system, it is identified that stress triggers an immune response, an inflammatory immune response, that can potentially compromise the intestinal lining. That compromise of the intestinal lining can then, if it is combined with other dietary stressors, such as food sensitivities, or foods that you’re reactive to, or GMO foods, lead to leaky gut. The gut then allows protein complexes to leak into the system, causing the immune system to respond to that protein sequence associated with it, which is then similar to some of the tissues in the body, such as the thyroid, or the pancreas, or the cerbellum. This can then lead to that ultimate autoimmune response or autoimmune disorder that then gets named associated with the tissue that it is attacking.
That is what I find is the consistent underlying contribution of chronic stress in autoimmune disorders.
Dr. Greg Olsen at Olsen Chiropractic, APC can be reached at (949) 859-5192 and is located at 22691 Lambert St. #503, Lake Forest, CA 92630.
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