If you were a child of the 80s and 90s like myself, you will remember this commercial. “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”
With the ever rising incidences and diagnoses for ADHD, Autism, Depression, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s and nothing to resolve them in the medical world, I think we can change the 80s drug slogan to make it more applicable for today. After all, the more we ‘early diagnose and manage/treat’ a condition, the more disability associated with that condition rises. The best case scenario your doctor provides is to ‘manage’ the symptoms.
But here’s the reality. Symptoms aren’t stupid. Your body never does anything stupid. Symptoms are nothing more than your attempts at buying time to escape what is potentially dangerous or harmful. That potential danger could be something you ate, a lack of movement, a poor relationship, or chemical influence. One of those symptoms is inflammation, regardless of the condition or disease process.
“This is your brain. This is inflammation. This is your brain on inflammation. Any questions?”
If there’s a commonality of brain inflammation to all these mental/emotional conditions, then how does the brain get inflamed? Don’t think of inflammation as an isolated event. Inflammation is a byproduct of an immune response due to trauma. And again, don’t look at trauma as just an event. Trauma is a persistent pattern of dysfunction. It could be physical, chemical, or emotional/social/spiritual.