In this fascinating short film, Dr Sarah Myhill, a world-leader in the field of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, discusses metabolic energy expenditure, and what can affect it.
Two thirds of the energy we produce physiologically is taken up by basal metabolic processes. These keep our brains working, our hearts beating, our liver, kidneys and gut doing their essential jobs. This leaves one third left for us to achieve everything else we need to – work, parent our children, exercise, create – everything our lifestyle requires. We can spend this energy physically, mentally or emotionally.
Dr Myhill’s career in this field began with a focus on allergy, and this put the immune system at the forefront of her thinking. Our immune systems are remarkable multi-systemic meta-processes, that in many ways are still are poorly understood. But it is clear that sometimes, for a variety of reasons, our immune systems begin to misidentify their targets and begin attacking healthy tissue.
Allergic responses are the immune system offering a magnified or inappropriate response to a substance we ingest, and autoimmune responses are a ‘civil war’ in which the immune system trains its bullets on our own bodies.
Inflammatory responses can be useful in the body’s response to acute disease, but when inflammation becomes chronic, it can damage us in a myriad of ways. Inflammation in the gut often presents with conditions such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome, inflammation in the joints as arthritis, in the lungs as asthma, and in the brain as the brain fog familiar to so many CFS/ME sufferers.
Both allergy and autoimmunity result in significant ‘immune wastage’, energy that is spent on futile or mistaken immune responses. There has also been a significant rise in the number of allergy sufferers, and it is now estimated that one in twenty people will develop an autoimmune condition in their lifetime.
Dr Myhill has asked the question of why we are seeing such a marked increase in autoimmunity. She identifies a number of factors that she believes may hold the answer. Firstly, in the West, we tend to eat poor diets high in processed carbohydrates and sugars. Bacteria, parasites, and fungi such as candida flourish on fermenting such foods in our gut, and they are given an unfair advantage over our own immunity. Life is an arms race!
Secondly, the food we eat is often devitalised and deficient in elements necessary for our bodies to maintain a healthy immune system. Our soils are depleted, and the movement of minerals and other trace elements out of them, into plants, animals and ultimately into us, is all one way. We use crude methods to bolster production, but we do not revivify the soil itself. This means you can be eating a spotless, well-rounded, organic diet and still end up deficient in key minerals.
Dr Myhill has created a solution to this for her patients with her Sunshine Minerals, mineral salts that contain the basics of nutrition, including frequently deficient Vitamins D and B12.
Thirdly, with the greatly increased schedule of vaccination, we run the risk of immune dysregulation from the effects of live and dead pathogens administered in such a way as to bypass the usual defences of the immune system. This is in addition to the presence of adjuvants that are designed to ‘switch on’ our immunity, and are often directly toxic themselves, containing aluminium or mercury.
We are also seeing a significant increase in the incidence of insect vector-borne diseases such as Lyme disease, Babesia, Bartonella, and a host of others. We live in a changing world, and a warmer wetter climate, more human intrusion into previously wild habitats, and more international travel means we are exposed to an increasing number tick and insect transmitted diseases.
When the above trend meets a weakened immune system, often the product of a modern lifestyle, the stage is set for long-term, chronic inflammatory disease. Dr Myhill treats many patients whose experience of illness is characterised by this complex mix of factors, and while there may be no one ‘magic bullet’, with hard work and determination, people can and do recover.
To learn more about Dr Myhill’s work, please see
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