On a hot summer day in 2012, allergies hit me very bad. I woke up on that Sunday morning and had bad bulges (not exactly rashes) all over my upper body. After the customary visit to the doctor, I was told that I had tree-nut, shell fish and no kidding.. dog/cat fur allergies. I was devastated for a moment and but become very skeptic after the doctor gave an abstract explanation for the cause - Our bodies change every 7 years, this "happens" and yeah, you can continue taking pills and/or shots for pretty much rest of your life.
Of-course, the smartass that I am - I just took pills for few days until the bulges faded and stopped eating tree-nuts. I was determined to "cure" these allergies without any pills or shots. I don't eat fish leave alone shell fish so that wasn't an issue. No matter what, I would continue to play, sleep, walk and do everything with Max with or without allergies, so that wasn't an issue either. But whenever I ate any kind of nuts, I started getting those allergies back. So I stayed away from them but also I changed my diet. I become a full time "born" again Indian. I started cooking every dish with all the ingredients that my grandmother and my mom used and I stayed away from processed food except eating out in the restaurants once or twice a month. And surprise, surprise , sometime in 2013 I could eat all kinds of nuts except peanuts without having those allergies. Which remains true to this day.
I can live without eating peanuts for rest of my life but I never had a proper answer on why I become allergic to peanuts in the first place. This week, I derived a hypothesis while listening to Moises Velasquez-Manoff talk about his new book An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.
What happened in Buenos Aires when their economy collapsed. So, the economy was in turmoil. Basically this was in the early 2000s. There was some sanitary backsliding--people stopped picking up trash, the sewer maybe stopped working. And what happened is, there was a neurology clinic there that served some of the poor neighborhoods, the people from poor neighborhoods. Lots of multiple sclerosis patients. And multiple sclerosis, for the listeners, is basically when your immune system attacks the fatty coating of your neurons and it sort of causes this creeping paralysis. And the coating is called myelin. So it's an autoimmune disease where you are attacking some aspect of your central nervous system. Some of those patients started showing up with parasite infections because of this sanitary backsliding that was occurring in this broader context of economic turmoil. And so these neurologist, Jorge Correale, he knew about Joel Weinstock's book; he knew also about this sort of revisionist thinking on parasites, that there was this evolutionary component, that maybe they'd always been there applying pressure to our immune system, and that they could strengthen your immune system's ability to not overreact. And so he gave his patients a choice.
He said: look, we can keep the worms--that is, I can deworm you or you can keep the worms and we'll see what happens. So, some of his patients decided to keep the worms. I think it was about 14. Yes, very small sample. Again, the reason that some of this stuff is even considered in humans of course is that it's first shown in animals. Animals are obviously far more conclusive. Again, though, rodents are not people, as we well know. And often what happens is that what seems to work in animals does not work in people. But at that point I think there were a number of rodent studies that showed that parasites could have this magical effect to stop a number of autoimmune diseases. And in that case they just used an extract of one of the parasite eggs for the multiple sclerosis animal animals. In any case, what happens essentially is that the multiple sclerosis, which is this kind of advancing disease, comes to an almost complete halt. It doesn't completely stop, but it almost completely stops. And this is viewable by objective measures, by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He also does blood work. And then he monitors them for about 5 years. And then some of the patients are sick of having parasites; they are sick of the side effects. And so he deworms some of the patients at their request. The whole time he's been taking blood samples, measuring immune system transmitters, immune system molecules that give you a gauge if you are in an inflamed state, if you are not in an inflamed state. In any case, what he sees is that the whole balance of the immune system shifts from pre-deworming to post-deworming, where those molecules that indicate strong anti-inflammatory capacity decline dramatically, immediately after you deworm. And then the disease started right back up again for those patients he dewormed. Now, again, this is not an experiment. This is something that occurred naturally. It's observational.
Growing up in India, my dad used to give me de-worming pills if I had tapeworms (which was common in India that time, I donna if its still common). I remember taking those pills once in a while until I was 10 or 12 years old. But after I went to college, started eating out often. My mind filled with new scientific knowledge and that arrogance made a self diagnosis and started talking de-worming pills twice a year. I kept that habit yearly until 2001/2002 even when there was no worms and I wasn't eating at any filthy restaurants. And that stupid habit of mine probably caused the allergy a decade later during the summer of 2012. I might be wrong but nevertheless the lesson is don't mess with nature. We know so little (remember the doc was so abstract giving me an answer) and its not prudent to disturb the body that took million years to evolve. Our minds cannot comprehend this complexity and that's probably our Achilles' heel.
Of-course, the smartass that I am - I just took pills for few days until the bulges faded and stopped eating tree-nuts. I was determined to "cure" these allergies without any pills or shots. I don't eat fish leave alone shell fish so that wasn't an issue. No matter what, I would continue to play, sleep, walk and do everything with Max with or without allergies, so that wasn't an issue either. But whenever I ate any kind of nuts, I started getting those allergies back. So I stayed away from them but also I changed my diet. I become a full time "born" again Indian. I started cooking every dish with all the ingredients that my grandmother and my mom used and I stayed away from processed food except eating out in the restaurants once or twice a month. And surprise, surprise , sometime in 2013 I could eat all kinds of nuts except peanuts without having those allergies. Which remains true to this day.
I can live without eating peanuts for rest of my life but I never had a proper answer on why I become allergic to peanuts in the first place. This week, I derived a hypothesis while listening to Moises Velasquez-Manoff talk about his new book An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases.
What happened in Buenos Aires when their economy collapsed. So, the economy was in turmoil. Basically this was in the early 2000s. There was some sanitary backsliding--people stopped picking up trash, the sewer maybe stopped working. And what happened is, there was a neurology clinic there that served some of the poor neighborhoods, the people from poor neighborhoods. Lots of multiple sclerosis patients. And multiple sclerosis, for the listeners, is basically when your immune system attacks the fatty coating of your neurons and it sort of causes this creeping paralysis. And the coating is called myelin. So it's an autoimmune disease where you are attacking some aspect of your central nervous system. Some of those patients started showing up with parasite infections because of this sanitary backsliding that was occurring in this broader context of economic turmoil. And so these neurologist, Jorge Correale, he knew about Joel Weinstock's book; he knew also about this sort of revisionist thinking on parasites, that there was this evolutionary component, that maybe they'd always been there applying pressure to our immune system, and that they could strengthen your immune system's ability to not overreact. And so he gave his patients a choice.
He said: look, we can keep the worms--that is, I can deworm you or you can keep the worms and we'll see what happens. So, some of his patients decided to keep the worms. I think it was about 14. Yes, very small sample. Again, the reason that some of this stuff is even considered in humans of course is that it's first shown in animals. Animals are obviously far more conclusive. Again, though, rodents are not people, as we well know. And often what happens is that what seems to work in animals does not work in people. But at that point I think there were a number of rodent studies that showed that parasites could have this magical effect to stop a number of autoimmune diseases. And in that case they just used an extract of one of the parasite eggs for the multiple sclerosis animal animals. In any case, what happens essentially is that the multiple sclerosis, which is this kind of advancing disease, comes to an almost complete halt. It doesn't completely stop, but it almost completely stops. And this is viewable by objective measures, by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). He also does blood work. And then he monitors them for about 5 years. And then some of the patients are sick of having parasites; they are sick of the side effects. And so he deworms some of the patients at their request. The whole time he's been taking blood samples, measuring immune system transmitters, immune system molecules that give you a gauge if you are in an inflamed state, if you are not in an inflamed state. In any case, what he sees is that the whole balance of the immune system shifts from pre-deworming to post-deworming, where those molecules that indicate strong anti-inflammatory capacity decline dramatically, immediately after you deworm. And then the disease started right back up again for those patients he dewormed. Now, again, this is not an experiment. This is something that occurred naturally. It's observational.
Growing up in India, my dad used to give me de-worming pills if I had tapeworms (which was common in India that time, I donna if its still common). I remember taking those pills once in a while until I was 10 or 12 years old. But after I went to college, started eating out often. My mind filled with new scientific knowledge and that arrogance made a self diagnosis and started talking de-worming pills twice a year. I kept that habit yearly until 2001/2002 even when there was no worms and I wasn't eating at any filthy restaurants. And that stupid habit of mine probably caused the allergy a decade later during the summer of 2012. I might be wrong but nevertheless the lesson is don't mess with nature. We know so little (remember the doc was so abstract giving me an answer) and its not prudent to disturb the body that took million years to evolve. Our minds cannot comprehend this complexity and that's probably our Achilles' heel.
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