Myth #2 - Inflammation is bad

Myth #2 - Inflammation is bad

Ask any doctor what to do about inflammation and the answer will be a uniform, "Take an anti-inflammatory." While it is true that taking medication to suppress inflammation can certainly lead to increased comfort, should we be doing that in the first place? Is inflammation bad? Is it something that occurs by freak accident, some physiologic aberration, that occurs and causes great distress and suffering amongst mankind? We have been conditioned to think of inflammation as something bad because it causes pain and makes us miserable, therefore it should be medicated and suppressed. Right? Wrong.

Inflammation is a directed response by the immune system designed to detoxify, repair and protect tissues under any form of functional or metabolic stress. It is important to understand the purpose of inflammation in order to see why we should not work to suppress it, but rather to support it.

Whenever there are tissues in our body under any form of functional or metabolic stress, the problem will be immediately identified by the immune system. It first recruits a pathway called primary inflammation. This pathway is employed by the body in order to detoxify the tissues under stress (as tissues under stress increase their metabolic rate and produce more toxic by-products) as well as facilitate the repair of any injured cells. A primary inflammatory response will produce no symptoms in low-level stress situations, as long as it is efficient in managing the problem. You would not even know that this process is going on because there are no identifiable symptoms such as pain, swelling, redness and heat. Cardinal signs of inflammation will occur only when there is rapid, high level stress in an area such as in acute trauma, repetitive stress episodes, allergic/toxic reactions and metabolic disease.

In situations where the stress on the tissues is beyond the capability of the primary pathway, or in situations where there is an inefficient inflammatory response (we will discuss this later in the treatise), the immune system will then incorporate the secondary, or chronic, inflammatory pathway. This pathway is a protective pathway. It prevents rapid tissue destruction by allowing for cellular adaptation to the stress as well as the release of pain-causing chemicals to prevent continued "overuse and abuse" of the involved part. Therefore, the patient becomes aware that there is a problem because they are in pain.

Now that you understand this simplified explanation of inflammation, you can see that inflammation is actually a good thing. It is the body's way of trying to help itself deal with these kinds of issues. It should be obvious then, that anti-inflammatory medications actually impair the body's ability to detoxify, repair and protect itself. Additionally, these medications add toxic load to the body and are responsible for many varied side effects.

What makes more sense, empirically, is to treat these problems mechanistically and supportively. In other words, we want to work to help make the pathway of primary inflammation more efficient, with supportive, rather than suppressive, protocols. There are many natural medicines that can help accomplish the task of supporting our bodies, be they homeopathic, nutritional or herbal. Additionally, we want to be able to identify the reason(s) that this pathway is not functioning efficiently.

It is imperative that we look more comprehensively into our patient's physiology in order to detect reasons why the immune system is not up to the task it is being called upon to perform. To do this, we need to understand our patient's lifestyle, diet, adrenal health, the presence of food sensitivities, free-radical levels (free-radicals being compounds that essentially are responsible for cellular damage and degeneration over time), metabolic function analysis and perhaps other tests. In other words, we must work to comprehensively understand our patient's total health picture and not just concentrate on the body part involved in the pathology.

Dr. Stephen Kelly  is located at Family First Chiropractic and Wellness, 142 Erickson Dr. Red Deer, T4R 2X3 403-347-3261

www.family1stchiro.ca