Inflammation

In Latin, the word "inflammation" means "Ignite, set alight" and like gasoline, that's exactly what it does to diseases such as heart disease, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and most autoimmune diseases. A cellular environment of chronic inflammation can increase the risk of developing a major disease and other health problems.

Most importantly, inflammation promotes the ongoing pathogenesis of these diseases, causing major damage to various cells, tissues and organs throughout the body.

Unfortunately, inflammation and its signaling pathways are ignored by your doctors. Why? Because there is no drug for treating inflammation! But, there are a lot of drugs for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. So, your doctor waits until you develop one of these health problems or diseases that requires a drug.

Uncovering and treating the cause of inflammation, rather than just treating the symptoms, is an important key when preventing any of these chronic diseases. To get to the root of the inflammation, we have to learn what causes inflammation and how to deal with it.

What Causes Inflammation?
Inflammation is the body's response to tissue damage, caused by physical injury, ischemic injury (caused by an insufficient supply of blood to an organ), infection, exposure to toxins or other types of trauma. The body's inflammatory response causes cellular changes and immune responses that result in repair of the damaged tissue and cellular proliferation (growth) at the site of the injured tissue.

Inflammation can become chronic if the cause of the inflammation persists or certain control mechanisms in charge of shutting down the process fail. When these inflammatory responses become chronic, cell mutation and proliferation can result, often creating an environment that is conducive to the development of cancer. The so-called "perfect storm" is an extreme challenge that patients face.

This is true for the onset of most chronic diseases, but also even more important for advancement of the disease. The disease a patient begins with becomes very different in the later stages, becoming more complex and more difficult to treat. Various signaling pathways are key contributors to creating epigenetic changes on the outside of the cell, switching on these internal mechanisms. Therefore, treating the inflammatory causes is always important.

The following diagram depicts how inflammation develops in the human body and can lead to various diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

Note: You may be wondering why it's so important for us to understand how inflammation develops in your body. By understanding how the process of inflammation develops in your body, especially at the cellular level, we are able to "reverse engineer" the process and design effective wellness strategies and solutions that address inflammation before it triggers a major health problem and causes major damage to your cells and tissues.

FYI: Specific wellness strategies and solutions are addressed in our books such as the Death to Diabetes book, Power of Juicing book, DTD Cleanse & Detox book, Death to Obesity book, and Death to Cancer book. Wellness strategies and solutions are also addressed in our DTD Online Training for clients, health coaches, and other healthcare professionals.

The Link Between Disease and Inflammation
Despite popular belief, less than five percent of most chronic diseases is solely genetic (in the sense of being directly inherited by family members). Most chronic diseases have a cause and those causes bring about chronic inflammation as part of the process. New research suggests an emerging link between infection, epigenetics and chronic diseases. 

Many chronic diseases  are linked to viruses or bacteria that promote reversible, epigenetic changes in the body's cells. At minimum, 20 percent or more of chronic diseases are linked to infectious disease.

We are thought to only have fully recognized about 13% of infections worldwide, making infection a bigger contributor than typically reported. These infections bring about changes and chronic inflammation as well.

One thing anyone with chronic inflammation will tell you is that it causes heat. Abnormal body heat can also lead to thermogenesis and enhance metabolic spread of most chronic diseases.

Inflammation is known to cause other such changes in the microenvironment of cells. Cells often undergo adaptive changes to survive stressful or toxic environments. These adaptive changes can include: an increased expression of antioxidant enzymes; increased anaerobic respiration; and development of angiogenic factors. This adaptation is usually transient, however, and allows normal cells to survive only until the toxic condition is alleviated.

That means it's not enough to have a strategy to control the disease – chronic inflammation needs to be blocked and stopped at its roots to prevent the disease from  spreading.

How Does Inflammation Occur?
There are multiple ways, but one of the most common is when there is an injury to a group of cells or tissues that need to be repaired. The immune system recognizes and triggers a cascade of signals and inflammation markers that initiate the cellular repair process. Below is a flow diagram that depicts the 3 phases of the body's cellular repair process.

This process works great, but, if, for some reason, the cells/tissues cannot be repaired, the inflammation phase make continue, trying to repair the damaged cells/tissues.

This may not seem like a big problem, but, if this type of inflammation goes unchecked for several years, this can lead to diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Summary

Treating inflammation is only one part of a complete treatment plan – there are many other aspects to consider, including nutrition, building the immune system, targeting supplemental therapy and much more. However, if you can slow down the disease's progress, it makes it much easier to maintain and hopefully, overcome. 

Otherwise, if the disease continues to progress, the body can outgrow any treatment. It becomes a race to slow down the metabolic growth and spread of the disease enough for other therapies to do their job effectively. The best part about these nutritional therapies and other treatment strategies is they are helpful for most, if not all diseases.

Note: If you have any questions about your health, or would like to know more about natural treatment strategies, feel free to contact our office; or, get the author's Death to Diabetes book, Power of Juicing book, DTD Cleanse & Detox book, Death to Obesity book, Death to Cancer book, Death to Heart Disease or one of the other books in the DTD Online Store to get rid of your inflammation.