Imagine you are on a safari. It is a pitch black night outside and you are in a tent in Africa. A lion roars nearby and you are thinking about how flimsy the fabric is to keep that lion from coming in and eating you! Your sympathetic nervous system kicks into high gear! This is the "fight or flight" mode of your Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).
Your sympathetic nervous system is a built -in, automatic (autonomic) mechanism that increases your ability to survive, by either vigorously fighting the lion, or running away to fight another day! It is very predictable what your sympathetic nervous system will do in this stressful situation with the lion. All of your senses will go on maximum alert. The pupils in your eyes will dilate widely in order to see the slightest indication of the lion. Your ears will strain, to hear the slightest noise. Your muscles will ripple and tremble with tension as huge amounts of energy have been diverted to the muscles so that you have super-human reflexes and strength!
In the super stimulation of the sympathetic nervous response to the roaring lion, your bladder can empty without warning, in order for you to flee or fight unimpeded by a full bladder. It is a quick thing to urinate, something you could possibly do even while running or fighting, however a bowel movement takes too long. In the time it takes to have a BM the lion could pounce and you would be defenseless! So your sympathetic nervous system causes the colon to shutdown.
The meal you ate sits like a brick in your stomach. The sympathetic nervous system shut down digestion, diverting the energy to the muscles. After all, what is more important, digesting or fighting and/or running away from a hungry, man-eating lion?
Blood rushes to the head and the heart begins to increase its energy, beating hard and fast, to get ready for the upcoming fight or flight. The adrenal glands secrete cortisol to open up the cells to receiving more blood sugar and thyroid hormones, as adrenaline supercharges the entire body. The lion roars again, closer this time. The sympathetic nervous system causes the thyroid to crank out more T3 and brings more of its reserve T4 online to be converted to T3 as needed in order to increase overall cellular receptivity to blood glucose.
The skin tightens and every hair stands on end like little antennae, sensing the slightest change in the breeze. Every aspect of the body is on high alert. Your body is maximally sensitive to any change in its environment. You are jumpy and vigilant for any threat.
The night turns to day, you dare not leave your tent, since you can still hear the lion pacing...at least you think it’s still the lion...dare you stick your head out of the tent to check and see? No, it is too scary a thought, being eaten alive. So you stay in your tent, as still as possible, every sense still poised to address any sign of the lion tearing through the tent...
Get the picture? This story is what many of you are going through because your autonomic nervous system views the situations of prolonged stress in your life, such as chronic illness, work, or abusive people, just like the analogy of the roaring lion!
Now imagine what would happen if you never left the tent, or the perception of danger from infections or situations continued for months and years, and your sympathetic nervous system never relaxed?
All the same things we saw with the lion would be happening all the time. Your heart rate would stay too fast, and due to everything else going wrong in your body your heart might start skipping beats and palpitating. Your food never would seem to digest, and you would start seeing undigested food in your bowel movement. Your bladder would constantly feel like you need to go, so your mineral/electrolyte balance would be messed up, making your energy and brain clarity impossible to maintain.
Your colon would be constipated. Your muscles would be tight and painful from all the strain. You would suffer from light and sound sensitivity. You would become more sensitive to electromagnetic pollution and to other people's energy.
Your thyroid would begin to strain under the constant work and would weaken or start to have too much T3, and Reverse T3 would start to elevate to keep you from having too much thyroid hormone stimulation.
There would be too much cortisol and adrenaline so your anxiety and panic would be through the roof, for what seems to be no reason.
The cells of the body would become insensitive to the hormones and glucose, since you are just sitting there idle in the tent of your illness not really doing anything but waiting for the lion (illness) to go away.
Sleep would be impossible since you are too stimulated and overwhelmed, and never feel safe. You feel a little safer during the daytime, so you sleep all day.
The mind races thinking of all of the possibilities. Round and round your mind goes. You cannot turn it off now...it is stuck in a biochemical loop.
Do you see that all of these symptoms are connected? Every system of the body is affected so there are potentially dozens of symptoms. The symptoms are just as predictable as what goes on when a lion is outside of your tent!
Unfortunately, mainstream medicine is geared to treat the symptoms only and so they throw pharmaceutical drugs into this mess. They will give you symptom-treating drugs that unclog your constipation. Purple pill to stop the indigestion. Beta blockers for the heart. Anti-anxiety meds to calm you. Antidepressants to help with everything, since obviously you come across to them as being very depressed. Muscle relaxants are given to ease the tight, painful muscles, and tranquilizers to sedate you to sleep. You are given Synthroid to supposedly treat the low thyroid hormones. Blood sugar regulators to force the glucose out of the bloodstream.
Your body becomes more dysfunctional and toxic from all the drugs and disease. None of these pharmaceuticals are treating the functional causes. Almost 100% of pharmaceuticals are treating only the symptoms. Yes, your thyroid is fatigued and you are low in T3, but taking Synthroid or other thyroid hormone supplements are not treating the cause. And yes, you likely feel better with these pharmaceuticals than without them, but their effectiveness will only be short term, since the illness, the cause, remains untreated and continues to get worse.
As the saying goes, "The worse it gets, the worse it gets. The better it gets the better it gets." It is never, "The worse the cause of a problem gets the better it gets." Nor is it, "The better it gets the worse it gets!" If through proper treatment the dysfunctions can be nudged toward actually working better, then it gets progressively better.
The roaring lion is the illness, by whatever named diagnosis. The Autonomic Nervous System is an automatic mechanism that gets triggered by stress of any type. Structural stress, biochemical stress, mental/emotional stress, and/or environmental/bioenergetic stress.
Any stress puts stress on every aspect of the body, mind, and spirit. One cannot pluck one strand of a spider web without vibrating the entire web. The body, mind, and spirit are an intertwined web. Break a thread and the shape of the entire web changes.
True healing necessarily will ALWAYS need to repair the broken threads of the interconnected web of the Autonomic Nervous System and calm the Sympathetic nervous system before lasting health can be restored.
This is what Post-Traumatic Stress disorder is all about, whether the stress was from horrific war, such as with "Wounded Warriors", or the stress of profound illness and the horrifying life changes it causes.
People we have seen at the Hansa Center for Optimum Health, who have suffered for months and years with chronic infections, such as Lyme disease, mold/fungal infections, viral, pain syndrome, and other chronic illnesses, have PTSD, or a chronic stress disorder. They do have all of the conditions discussed in this article, even if the bacteria have been corrected through the heroic efforts of great doctors, effectively treating the infections.
The idea that the illness is just the microbes is misguided. It is a myth that you will be well, symptom-free, as soon as your doctor can finally figure out how to kill every single bacteria and pathological microbe. Helping the body kill the microbes through whatever method is fine, but with today's mutated, and exotic strains of bacteria, unless you can restore optimum function and integrity to the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) and convince it that there is no "lion" about to eat you, your body will continue wearing itself down, making you vulnerable to more infections and more dysfunction.
Nothing in my experience can more effectively repair the ANS and calm the sympathetic nervous system than the combination of healing philosophy of American Biological Medicine as practiced at the Hansa Center. No other healing philosophy is better designed and equipped to address everything that has gone wrong in the body, mind, and spirit all at the same time. Doctors specializing in the treatment philosophies of American Biological Medicine specialize in diagnosing and treating every tissue in the human body, and every system of the body, using the most advanced applications of natural medicine.
The goal is to respect the wisdom of the body. To determine what the body is striving to accomplish, and work to facilitate the body's ability to accomplish what it needs in order to heal, instead of forcing the body into drug-induced illusions of health.
If you have to take a drug forever in order to feel somewhat normal, then it is not fixing anything. If you are treating the cause, then the cause should eventually go away and you can stop taking the medicine. The conventional doctors convinced you that no one knows the cause and therefore you should just be happy that the drugs can mask the symptoms. If your body is too messed up, if organs and glands have been surgically removed, diseased beyond repair, or otherwise destroyed, then yes, take the symptom-masking drugs, however just because your lab tests are consistently bad, or your doctor is from the top medical school, or goes to the top conferences, or follows the top protocols in conventional medicine, it doesn't mean that their drugs are the best way in the long run.
If it is possible to restore optimum function, to treat the whole person at the levels of cause, to treat to get every system to work harmoniously together, great health can be finally realized...the lion will often rapidly evaporate into thin air!
It is difficult to find doctors who follow the treatment philosophies of American Biological Medicine. Of course, I feel that the doctors at the Hansa Center for Optimum Health are fantastic, and the best in the world at what we do, however in the spirit of cooperation instead of competition, you can go to these links to find more great clinics that implement various aspects of this powerful way of healing: marioninstitute.org and International Academy of Biological Dentistry and Medicine.
If you would like to receive our New Patient Packet with more information about Hansa Center, click here: New Patient Packet
For over 20 years the Hansa Center for Optimum Health, in Wichita, Kansas has specialized in the restoration of health for people with previously unresponsive and chronic illnesses of virtually all types. Over 85% of people come from other states and countries. If you have done everything you and your doctor know to do and are still struggling, contact our wonderful Patient Care Department at 316-686-5900 or by email patientcare@hansacenter.com, for information on the exciting new treatments we have developed at the Hansa Center for Optimum Health. For additional info including our New Patient Packet, visit our website at www.HansaCenter.com.
This article is for educational purposes. Before implementing any supplements/remedies always consult with your healthcare professional. Due to the complexity of the human condition there remains the possibility of symptoms getting worse. Again, discuss the ideas presented here with your health care professional before beginning, and stop, or get support, if your condition worsens. This information is not intended to treat, cure, diagnose, or mitigate any disease or illness, and has not been evaluated by the FDA. The Hansa Center does not treat named diseases, but seeks to restore the body's optimum structural and functional integrity so that the body can rapidly heal itself.
*Due to the exhaustive time spent per day with each patient, and poor repayment history of insurance companies, we unfortunately cannot accept insurance assignment. We do participate in Care Credit, and accept all major credit cards. We will gladly accept insurance when our elected officials revamp the health insurance industry to cover all results-based care. Please call 316-686-5900 ext. 1, for current pricing for our economically-priced, All-inclusive 2-3 weeks intensive packages of care.
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