Etherton Chiropractic

ALLERGIES

Your Immune System: Keeping You You

Your immune system keeps you 100% natural, organic, unadulterated you! It recognizes and destroys anything that's not supposed to be in you: bacteria, viri, pollutants, dust, pollen, drugs, tumors, dead pieces of your own cells, and even artificial hearts and donor organs. (Metal and plastic, however don't trigger an immune reaction.)

A healthy immune system means high resistance to disease and infection, better ability to deal with stress, and greater health and well-being.

Immunological Diseases

Many things influence how well your immune system functions: your nerves and hormones, your diet, your genes and your emotions. An unhealthy immune system may fail to recognize or remove abnormal cells (such as cancers) and may no protect you from infection. Conversely, it may overreact to foreign substances (bee stings, penicillin, foods or drugs) or become depressed (as in AIDS) or even attack you (as happens in autoimmune disorders)!

Allergens And Allergies

The most common immune system disorder is the allergy. allergies occur when the immune system overreacts to an allergen (dust, pollen, milk, dog, or cat dander, strawberries etc.) and produces too many neutralizing chemicals (especially histamines) to counteract it.

What Causes Allergies?

The incidence of allergies and related disorders (skin conditions and asthma) is rising all over the world. Yet the cause of this increase remains a mystery to most medical researchers.

There is mounting evidence that the cause of this rise is the increasing number of childhood vaccinations:

Vaccination lays the foundation for auto-immune disease and other disorders of the immune system such as rheumatoid arthritis, rheumatic fever, lupus erythematosus, scleroderma... Our contemporary 'epidemic' of allergies has at least some of its roots in the practice of vaccination.

Childhood vaccinations are responsible for allergies and immune system abnormalities: food allergies (wheat and milk especially), arthritis, lupus, celiac disease, pernicious anemia...Respiratiry problems: asthma and SIDS (due to vagus nerve palsy)....

The Medical Approach

Orthodox medicine has no cure for allergies, only treatment of symptoms. According to the late Robert Mendelsohn, MD: You can depend on most doctors to largely ignore the cause...unfortunately, their treatment is often worse than the disease, especially since the relatively safe folk-measures of yesteryear have been replaced by the sophisticated, dangerous drugs of modern medicine.

Since runny eyes, irritation, redness, fullness in the sinuses and other allergy symptoms are caused by histamines, antihistamines are often prescribed to dry mucus membranes. however, antihistamines can cause serious heart problems and should not be used with alcohol, sedatives or tranquilizers. also, steroid nasal sprays can damage the cilia in the nose and upper respiratory tract and affect the adrenal gland.

Breast-feeding

Clinical observations have shown that breast-fed babies have fewer allergy problems than formula-fed babies. Formula-fed babies also have a higher incidence of severe infections. Breast-fed babies appear to have healthier immune systems, healthier nervous systems and protections from many future health conditions. Study after study shows that breast milk is the perfect food for human infants.

The Chiropractic Approach

Allergy sufferers have praised chiropractic care for over a century. Chiropractic care is not a treatment for allergies however. The goal of chiropractic care is to locate and correct a serious type of spine and nervous system stress called the vertebral subluxation complex (VSC). By releasing stress on the nervous system, chiropractic permits the immune system to function more effectively--something all allergy sufferers need since a nervous system with less stress functions more efficiently.

Noted health researcher Dr. Kurt Donsback reflects the opinion of many natural healers: A healthy body is capable of neutralizing these toxic substances and a body which has malfunctioning defense mechanisms cannot. The emphasis on allergies must be on building a healthy body, not trying to use evasive tactics by eliminating all the allergens.

Research

One review of patients at a chiropractic college clinic found that pediatric patients commonly had complaints of allergy, ear infection, sinus problems, bed-wetting, respiratory problems and gastrointestinal problems. Complete or substantial improvement occurred in 61.6%

You nervous and immune system are interrelated and the health of one affects the health of the other. For over a hundred years chiropractors have, by reducing the nervous system stress caused by vertebral subluxations, helped people adapt better to all the stresses in their environment, including those relating to allergies.