I wanted to share my opinion on what could be happening with the therapy's affect on the body. Maybe this will help everyone know why I did it this way and how to modify the therapy if you want to try it a different way. I see the immune system like a janitor/custodian/maintenance team of the body because the immune cells are responsible for fixing many problems. For example:
- Fighting pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi)
- Killing cancer cells and tumors
- Quickly removing toxins, poisons, allergens and pathogens from the body (sneeze, sweat, cough, vomit, diarrhea, swelling)
- Killing and recycling damaged or aged cells (anti-aging, youth promotion)
- Wound healing (cleaning wound and providing growth hormones for repair)
- Communicating problems in the body (pain, fatigue) and shifting the body towards healing (fever, sleep induction)
- etc...
The job of immune cells is to fix any of these problems that happen. I might try to get rid of POIS by boosting the immune system, but the immune system does not know that I am trying to treat POIS. There may be other problems in the body (arthritis, cancer cells, toxin build-up, etc...) that are not related to POIS. Because of limited resources, the immune system can only handle a certain number of problems at one time. When I boost my immune system, the first thing that will happen is that these cells will start trying to fix problems. The infection that is likely causing POIS is somewhere in the queue (or list) of problems that the immune system will try to solve.
But I do not know how to get the immune system to only focus on POIS (or put POIS first in line). There were two main stages of immune activation that I was focused on hacking: the
acute/novel and the
immunocompetence stage. When a pathogen/toxin/problem/etc... is first introduced to the body, many of the immune cells respond and the immune system tries to control the problem through a trial-and-error process. These cells use cytokines and hormones to communicate partly because they don't yet know what the best way is to deal with the pathogen. The communication (cytokines, hormones) involves positive and negative feedback loops that have the overall effect of reducing ineffective immune strategies while promoting the most efficient and effective immune cell types. This discovery process is very resource/energy/nutrient expensive for the body and usually involves a lot of symptoms (pain, fatigue, etc...).
Once the immune system finds an efficient solution to the problem using the fewest immune cells and the least resources, it memorizes this solution (
adaptive immunity).
This second stage is called immunocompetence, and it solves the problem (killing pathogens, kill cancer, etc...) efficiently, producing the fewest symptoms.As an example, when you get an acute infection with the flu virus many cell types activate (neutrophils, monocytes, lymphocytes, basophils, etc...). Most of these immune cells are not effective or efficient at stopping the virus. So there are many symptoms that occur while the immune system figures out how to fight the virus. Eventually, the immune system discovers that the best strategy (with the fewest symptoms) uses natural killer (NK) cells, CD8/CD4 memory T cells and B cell antibodies. The next time this flu virus infects, more resources are devoted to NK, T, and B cells which quickly remove the virus without causing symptoms. This is immunocompetence.
One goal I had with doing this therapy on myself was to force the immune system into immunocompetence. POIS may not be the first problem or the highest priority for the immune system to solve. But boosting the immune system over an extended period of time can give it
enough time to do trial-and-error and discover the most efficient strategy for solving each problem that it finds.