2 Health Fallacies That Aren't Deconstructed Properly For The Layperson.
And it's not necessarily going to be deconstructed by the medical professionals because it can be a long and tedious path to explain - it's just easier to prescribe medication.
Many of us are familiar with common medical terms that are used in today’s health conversations, whether it be with friends or in a medical consultation.
We know (or we think we do know) what a cancer means, and we can give a vague description of what we think it is.
But we don’t really know or understand the mechanisms behind how cancer develops. When we don’t really understand the mechanism, we can’t really understand what’s going on within our bodies to trigger that mechanism, can we?
Bearing that in mind, let’s look at it (as well as some other common health terms) to see what sense we can make out of our bodies (and our health!).
Cancer
The National Cancer Institute defines cancer as:
Cancer is a disease in which some of the body’s cells grow uncontrollably and spread to other parts of the body.
A perfunctory glance at that statement will tell us that there is an uncontrolled growth of cells within our body, and an uncontrolled growth of these cells is never good.
See, rabbits have prolific breeding rates. Too many of them around would spell disaster — how many plants are they going to chomp up and destroy?
And that’s what the live cells in the cancer can do as well. They’re going to compete with the other live cells in the body for nutrients to grow. And if they have their own defensive mechanisms to keep themselves alive and not die, they’re going to increase in numbers and overthrow the body’s other systems eventually. That’s the stuff of political revolutions right there.
What we do need to understand (and which a medical doctor rarely explains) is that we do have specific defensive mechanisms in our body that operate normally in a healthy human being. One of these mechanisms is autophagy, which earmarks unproductive cells for destruction and decomposition.
When autophagy isn’t working well, we won’t be able to control a cell’s population that well, and that can lead to the uncontrolled growth of those cells.
Artery blockages
One with a cholesterol issue or a heart disease issue may go for an angiogram to see how badly their arteries are blocked with atherosclerotic plaques.
At the back of their minds, the common assumption is that these plaques are inanimate.
Unfortunately, there are living foam cells within the plaques.
The more foam cells there are deposited within the plaques, the bigger the blockage grows — that is for sure.
Some foam cells will die and turn necrotic, which results in the surviving foam cells creating more pro-inflammatory cytokines and turning the environment within the plaque into a highly pro-inflammatory environment.
We need to consider that these foam cells are macrophages that have ingested too many fatty molecules and have turned obese. Macrophages are able to produce matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) enzymes in a pro-inflammatory environment, which digests away at the collagen cap that covers the atherosclerotic plaque to eventually force a plaque rupture.
So when one has an artery blockage, the insertion of a stent will keep the artery open.
But the stent isn’t going to influence the activity of the live macrophages producing more MMPs in the pro-inflammatory environment. Neither is it going to influence the pro-inflammatory environment within the plaque.
Meaning that one with a stent is still at risk of facing the plaque rupture.
As a side note, a statin isn’t influence the macrophage activity or the pro-inflammatory activity of the plaque by much, either.
And of course, the doctors won’t be commenting much on the slow efferocytosis process that the immune system can perform to reduce plaque sizes from within, either.
The isolation of health conditions
We tend to have this compartmentalised view of our health.
When we’ve got a health condition related to our bones, for instance, we tend to assume that it’s only going to affect our bones.
Unfortunately, that assumption is pretty fallacious.
Because when the root cause of one pathway goes wrong, it triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that can result in the overproduction or underproduction of other necessary biochemicals to maintain that state of equilibrium or balance in our body.
For instance, I did mention earlier that MMPs are essential for forcing plaque ruptures. Now, MMPs, too, are essential for joint degradation.
When one has heart disease, then, and is at risk of plaque rupture from an overproduction of MMPs, would that not eventually affect their joints as well?
It’s not that isolated now, is it?
And that’s why we always hear bad news of people who, after experiencing one chronic health condition, will end up piling more and more health conditions along the way, leading to a poorer quality of life in the process.
Which is also why people with Type 2 diabetes have a higher risk of eventually getting Alzheimer’s disease, too. (And heart disease and osteoarthritis.)
It would be easier if doctors were to provide all this information to better educate their patients — if only they could understand it better.
But most of you who read this might still end up being confused by many of the different pathways and mechanisms in the body even as I discuss these here.
And if you are — do leave a comment below, and we can discuss it further.
And if you are — how likely is it that other people would get confused to no end, too?
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