The real take home here is that
it is possible to train your immune system to support specific therapies. If you ever wondered why shamans got things
to work for them, this is also a pretty good clue. Maybe the new protocol for applying immune
suppression should consist of the doctor dancing around with rattles after explaining
that this will work.
The brain does to some extent
mange the immune system and it is thus possible to influence that process. This is good news and it also demands that practitioners
do take expectations into account when they apply a method. I may also hugely explain the whole placebo
effect itself. Quite simply if taking a
pill provides you with the expectation of improvement, then the immune system
kicks in support of the protocol.
We need to inform patients taking
a medicine regime that they specifically are on a safe placebo to see what
happens to the placebo effect. Good luck
on that one. A true double blind test
needs to inform a random selection of patients that they are in fact receiving the
placebo and the others that they are receiving the real deal. It would all need to be attached to a
beneficial tablet like vitamin C in order to sell this scheme.
Unusual Flavors Can Dampen Immune Response
The brain can be taught to suppress the body's immune system
By Lauren
F. Friedman | January 8, 2012
More than 100 years ago Ivan Pavlov famously observed that a dog
salivated not only when fed but also on hearing a stimulus it associated with
food. Since then, scientists have discovered many other seemingly autonomous
processes that can be trained with sensory stimuli—including, most recently, our
immune system.
Researchers have long been able to train an animal’s immune system to
respond to a nonpathogen stimulus. Pavlov’s students even did so in the early
20th century, but the famous dogs overshadowed their work. Then, in the 1970s,
researchers trained rats and mice to associate a taste, such as sugar water, with an
immunosuppressive drug. They found that after repeated conditioning, ingest-ing
the sugar water alone could tamp down the animals’
immune response.
In 2002 a small study showed that the effect could be replicated in
humans—at least on a onetime basis. By then, this training had already been
used to prolong the survival of rats with heart transplants and slow the
progression of lupus, arthritis and
other autoimmune
disorders in lab animals. But could human immune systems be
trained to mimic a drug again and again?
“If it can be done only once, that’s a very nice phenomenon for
understanding the relation between the brain and the immune system,” says
Manfred Schedlowski, a medical psychologist at the University of Duisberg-Essen
in Germany
Thirty-two subjects were fed a green-colored, lavender-scented
strawberry milk—an odd concoction designed to taste unique. For three days in a
row, about half the subjects took an immunosuppressive drug along with the
drink, whereas the other half took a placebo pill. After five days and then
again another 11 days later, all the participants received a placebo pill along
with the strawberry milk. Both times the immune systems of the experimental
group were significantly inhibited after drinking the milk—as shown by levels
of immunoresponsive molecules in their blood—whereas the control group was practically
unchanged.
The study showed for the first time that learned immunosuppression can
be recalled more than once in human subjects—encouraging news for patients on
immunosuppressive regimens who must deal with the dangerous long-term side
effects, such as high blood pressure and kidney failure. Although the
researchers still need to figure out how to strengthen the conditioned effect
and determine how long it will last, they hope one day to significantly reduce
dosages of these drugs—and supplant them with harmless green milk and placebos.
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