If you remember my last article, I talked about a system of
describing immune system malfunction in four categories, the first three
being: constantly getting colds and flues by underreacting to external
threats, underreacting to internal threats (e.g., cancer), and
overreacting to internal threats categorized by autoimmune diseases.
Today we will explore the fourth category, overreacting to external
threats manifesting as allergies.
What is an allergy? We
experience allergy symptoms when our body encounters a substance that we
are sensitive to. These substances generally are innocuous to most
people and only cause problems to those with an allergy to that specific
substance. For example, you can be allergic to cat dander and not to
dog dander.
As I mentioned, the substances people are allergic to
usually are harmless. There is nothing inherently dangerous in ragweed
pollen or in dust. The problem occurs because of the immune systems
overreaction to the substance. The runny nose, red itchy eyes and
scratchy throat of a ragweed allergy sufferer do not occur because the
pollen is a noxious substance, but because the person's immune system
malfunctions.
When the allergy sufferer's immune system
recognizes the ragweed pollen in their nostrils, their immune system
immediately jumps into overdrive and reacts like it has encountered a
disease-causing pathogen that has to be eliminated immediately. All of
those uncomfortable runny and mucous symptoms are the body's attempt to
flush out the pathogens. The unfortunate part is that all of those alarm
bells are unnecessary in this case. Ragweed is not harmful; it's the
body's overreaction to the pollen that causes the problem. This
parallels TCM's view of external pathogen disease etiology, whereby the
external pathogen enters the body only because there is something wrong
with the zang/fu and wei or zheng qi is weak.
Another good example of the immune system overreacting to a
harmless
substance is athlete's foot. The fungus that causes athlete's foot does
not harm us at all, it only feeds on dead skin. The problem is that our
immune system recognizes that the fungus is a foreign substance and
mobilizes its resources, creating the red itchy immune reaction that is
athlete's foot.
Of course, allergic reactions come in all sorts
of shapes and sizes - not only the runny nose and red itchy eyes but
also hives, psoriasis and all sorts of other skin problems; digestive
symptoms if the allergy is something ingested; or even death, in the
case of the anaphylactic reaction to a bee sting or the fungus that
grows on peanuts.
In TCM, we are not surprised that there are so
many skin reactions to allergies. The organ in charge of the wei
or protective qi is the lung. The lung is the most external of
the zang organs and the only one in direct contact with the
outside world through the air. In parallel to this, the skin, the lungs
external manifestation, is the boundary between ourselves and the
outside world. When we have difficulty with our internal boundary
definer, the immune system, it's only natural that the problems occur
often on our most external boundary: the skin, eyes and nose. These
boundary problems also have other reflections besides the external
physical symptoms.
Looking at the problem from the mind/body
connection perspective, these boundary problems are often reflected in
an allergy sufferer's personality. This is true of all four of my
categories. You often can see this reflected in the language used to
describe the disease.
For example, the full name of the flu is
"influenza," the Latin root of which means "under the influence of."
Often, people who suffer from chronic colds and flu have difficulty
setting up their own personal boundaries. They are "under the influence"
of everyone but themselves and do what other people want more than they
follow their own inner compass. Behaviorally, this often manifests as a
difficulty in saying no or standing up for what they want or feel is
right. The consequence of doing this over and over again every day is
that we lose track of what we want and run ourselves empty in fulfilling
the desires of others. In my practice, I notice that people with cancer
also suffer from the same difficulty in saying no.
According to
my four-category system, cancer is an example of our immune system
under-recognizing internal threats. Looking at the above explanation,
this makes sense: If you think that someone is too busy trying to please
others, then they would not be aware of what is going on inside
themselves and miss the problems occurring there, because they are too
focused on problems outside of themselves.
Using this same mental
emotional approach, you can see that in autoimmune diseases, in which
we overreact to internal threats, a person might be overly harsh and
critical of themselves, attempting to dissect and purge themselves of
every little flaw until, in an unfortunate parallel, their body starts
to eat away at itself.
This brings me to another excellent point
about how the immune system works. I mentioned in the first article that
when the immune system recognizes a problem, it sends white blood cells
to the area, and they engulf and eat the problem cell, pathogen, etc.
This is very interesting. The immune system does not just kill the
problem; it eats and digests it. It treats these products very much like
our digestive system treats food - breaking the substance down, using
what is useful and excreting the waste. It's a considerable paradigm
shift to consider a serious immune system problem like cancer as food
for our system, but that is exactly how our body treats anything the
immune system deems as "not us."
If anyone has had the privilege
to work with cancer patients, you have seen that this attitude is
common. Many people with cancer get to a place where they say the cancer
was the best thing that ever happened to them. They often feel that
getting cancer was a big slap in the face. It made them realize that
what they thought was important was not really that important after all,
and that life is too short and precious to waste energy on things that
do not feed them.
Back to the point at hand about allergies: When
the immune system overreacts to external threats, the mind/body analogy
extends as well. Here, people often have their boundaries way too far
out. They are like the hypersensitive security light that turns on when a
squirrel runs by, an analogy I presented in my last article: They
overreact to the slightest hint of a possible threat. One of my patients
fits this mold exactly.
He suffered from adult-onset extreme
food allergies. If he were even in the same room as a chocolate bar, he
would break out in hives, get severe headaches and lose energy, like a
damaged dilithium crystal. The more harshly he tried to cut back and
restrict his diet, the worse his allergies got and the more things he
became allergic to. Interestingly enough, these problems started during
the time he belonged to a severe religious group in which the goal was
to restrict and cut back on every pleasure, including food, warm
clothes, sleep and any activity that was not a religious practice. In an
unfortunate symmetry, these practices also reflected his own behavioral
tendencies to purge himself of any habit that was "harmful." This also
included exercise. He was a long-distance runner and would keep pushing
himself farther and faster in hopes of becoming completely healthy. A
series of flu shots finally pushed him over the edge and he crashed,
able to eat only brown rice and a few vegetables.
When he came to
see me, we started to look at how critical he was of himself and see
the connection between his thought processes, behavior and his health.
He realized that if he let his symptoms master him, his life would keep
on shrinking until it was sucked dry of any pleasure at all. After a few
acupuncture treatments and the continued mind/body counseling work,
encouraging him to change his reaction to his symptoms, his allergies
started to ease off and he slowly started to add new things to his diet
and life.
This brings me to another important point: Clinically,
it always surprises me that even though TCM has a theoretic mind/body
approach built into its conceptual framework, little practical time is
devoted in school, in China and in texts to this aspect of the medicine.
The Inner Classic reflects this mind/body aspect in the quote,
"All good needling first addresses the spirit." This point was struck
home further when I was preparing a class on TCM diagnosis for my
students. In the workbook companion, Bob Flaws and Phillippe Soinneau
state that the major cause of all endogenous disease processes is the
seven emotional factors. We are missing a powerful tool for healing if
we do not heed this advice and reincorporate the mind/body back into
TCM.
I have found clinically that looking at the mind/body aspect
of a patient's problem often leads to a startlingly quick resolution of
the disease. More importantly, using the mind/body approach always
works best in the long run. There are two reasons for this. The first is
that if the cause of all endogenous diseases, which make up the
majority of our practices, is the seven emotional factors, then we are
missing a major causative factor if we do not address the mind/body
aspect. The second is that by showing patients how their thought
processes, behavior and emotional state are connected to their health,
we are helping to empower the patient to directly participate in the
maintenance of their own health. I am reminded here about the story of
the emperor's physician who stopped getting paid when the emperor or his
family got sick. Let us rekindle this spirit and fulfill the old
primary role of the TCM doctor, to help keep the patient from getting
sick in the first place.
allergy
