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One of the conditions that is indispensable to the existence of every living being is immune tolerance. Starting from fetal life, the immune system learns to avoid damaging the cells that make up the human being that is being formed and, in some rare cases, it learns to accept others that, while not belonging to its world, do not cause it particular harm.
In other words, cells of the immune system are ready to attack anything that is different from them, but during fetal life they learn to "bear" or better still "tolerate" the cells of other organs as well, as long as they pertain to the organism that is developing. After birth, by way of breastfeeding and weaning, they also learn to tolerate all of the food and respiratory substances with which they come into contact in certain ways. In the course of the following years, the immune system is responsible for maintaining a person's individuality.
During the first months of life a baby learns to tolerate the foods that he is given. It's not normal for an infant to eat a piece of bread, even though bread is always present on our table. In order for him to be able to eat bread without being harmed by it, his body must go through an arduous and delicate process that Man has been undergoing effectively for thousands of years, otherwise there wouldn't be so many of us on this earth. But let's take another example that expresses the idea even better: if a person has diarrhea, it comes naturally to give him puree of carrots, potatoes and rice, substances that usually have an astringent action or at any rate function as diarrhea-inhibitors. However, if we were to give a newborn the same puree of carrots, rice and potatoes, with all probability the youngster would develop a serious gastroenteritis. Thus there exists a period of time between birth until weaning in which a foreign substance such as potato or rice becomes tolerable for the body, but the body must "learn" how to manage it, and this learning process is indispensable for the survival of a human being.
What's surprising is that tolerance can be regained. When a body becomes intolerant or allergic (for example to dust mites), it can be aided in re-educating the immune system until it returns to complete tolerance. The only situation in which this recovery could be difficult is in the case of a specific IgE mediated allergic form involving very intense reactions. Generally, in this case re-education is not attempted, even though very recent studies, like the one performed by Italian researchers in 2007, led to the restoration of tolerance in children who were seriously allergic to milk by way of re-education techniques based on low dosages. In all of the other relatively numerous cases in which the allergy or intolerance brings about accumulation phenomena and not acute and explosive reactions, it's possible and advisable to undergo this sort of guided "renewed weaning process".
The hyposensitizing (i.e. "anti-allergy") "vaccine" is one of the useful instruments with which we can act upon the immune system from the outside to induce the body's tolerance to an allergen (and here we are particularly referring to respiratory type allergic reactions) that it no longer tolerates. Depending on the quantity of the allergen and the manner in which the allergen comes into contact with the immune system, different results are obtained. If high doses of the allergen create a sort of "drowning and paralysis" effect on the system, low doses create a different regulation of the cells that are in charge of launching the reaction. Everything that can be of help in regaining tolerance with regard for external substances, once it has been lost, should be put into action with healing in mind.
The threshold level is the discriminating element that determines whether a reaction occurs or not.
When the sum of the inflammatory elements induced by hypersensitive or pre-existing reactions within the body exceeds that level, the pathological symptom appears in a clear and decisive way. Below that point, the body tolerates the level of inflammation and specific symptoms do not manifest themselves. If a respiratory allergy is the "straw that breaks the camel's back" of an asthmatic reaction, a proper vaccination could be able to redirect the inflammation below the threshold level. At that point the body could even be able to tolerate contact with the pollen that was responsible for the reaction. At the same time, however, instead of acting against the pollen, we can modify the threshold level for that substance. We know that the availability of certain trace minerals (particularly Zinc, Copper, Magnesium and Lithium) raises the threshold level. For the same purpose, behavior and therapy geared towards psycho-emotional re-balance, and sometimes even just a simple vacation from the work routine can help raise the limit just enough to allow for a pause from the symptoms.
The instruments that help the body to regain balance are many, the important thing is to always remember that if it's true that many situations that are deemed impossible to cure can be helped with the use of "soft" and sensible therapy, it's also true that there are some allergic situations that are very difficult to manage, in which allergies are combined with intolerances, deep psychophysical phenomena and resistance to behavior modification. In this case the use of the classic drugs is obligatory and unfortunately, considering the limits of these medicines, sometimes even these are not able to cure the problem. In short, neither the doctors nor the patients are omnipotent, and sometimes we need to admit this to ourselves, but this doesn't stop us from putting together all of our possible resources to find a cure, to treat the sick person or even just keep his symptoms in check.
Doctor Attilio Speciani
Clinical allergist and Immunologist
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