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Understanding
Immune Modulators
There
ar every few effective "natural" immune modulators.
A true modulator will effectively regulate an underactive
or overactive
immune system back into normalization. It will do very
little for those in perfect working order. The key is to
adjust the balances between all the respective components
that make up the immune system. Before nutrients, enzymes,
EFA's etc.. start to play a role, the electrical communication
between molecules has to be corrected ensuring that signals
or information between cells, is transmitted and received
accurately.
There are no true immune modulating pharmaceutical drugs due
to their low efficacy and adverse side effects. The modern
allopathic approach therefore favours immune suppressing or
immune stimulating drugs, which they classify as immunomodulators.
An immune suppressing drug will be utilized in diseases where
there is an over reactive response by the immune system. This
is found in diseases as lupus, arthritis, chrohns disease,
coliitis, eczema, asthma to name a few. the problem with this
approach is that this treats the symptoms and never addresses
the cause. When you continually suppress the immune system
you are opening yourself up to a multitude of other illnesses.
In
diseases where there is an under active immune response
as found
in AIDS
and
cancer
patients an immune stimulant will be given in the form of
ARV's with AIDS patients. ARV's are known to be toxic,
hence the high rate of abandonment, but simply put this
toxicity invokes the immune system to produce more markers
and thereby "improve" the immune response. Once
again the problem with this approach is the long terms
toxic collateral
damage that is caused. These synthetic molecules are not
supposed to be in our systems over long periods.
Examples
of incorrect balances within the immune structure, for
instance: the macrophage cannot destroy the mycobacterium
in
the intracellular medium without the presence of IFN-alpha
cytokine that is produced by the organism. In its absence,
the macrophage
will serve as a reservoir for the mycobacterium spreading
the
infection. In this case the presence of IFN-alpha would
act
as an immunomodulator, correcting the immunological defect.
Another example is
in bacterial meningitis, that it is responsible for an intense
inflammatory response of the organism, causing neuronal lesions,
sometimes irreversible, that can be moderate in the presence
of steroids, reducing the intensity of the inflammatory response
of the host. We can observe that the role of the drug is to
stimulate a function in the first case and to discourage another
one in the second. Both are considered immunomodulators.
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