When it comes to the subject of autoimmune disease, conventional medicine is largely at a loss. Our immune cells attack our own tissue, causing inflammation that costs us a lot of energy. Why do they do this? And what can I do for my health?
Hand on heart - this is where the thymus gland is located. More precisely, a little above the heart. It's where you intuitively point when you say "I" or pat your chest. The thymus gland is central to our immune system. It is where the immune cells are "trained", where - to put it simply - they learn to distinguish between the body's own and foreign tissue.
There are different types of immune cells. Some mark, others destroy. If the labelling cells mark the wrong tissue as foreign, then our immune system turns against ourselves. Wikipedia says that the thymus gland is only important for adolescents and atrophies in adulthood. This is wrong.
The thymus gland can be active throughout life. Because - I maintain this - we do not degenerate because we age. We age because we degenerate. The thymus gland is our "fountain of youth". When we experience rejection, disappointment, boundary violation, humiliation, fear, dissatisfaction or other forms of powerlessness, our adrenal glands release stress hormones that deactivate the thymus for 24 hours each time. Not a good idea! See also the article on Psychoneuroimmunology.
The nagging dilemma stress or selye stress - which we fail to manage - is what undermines our immune system over time. We can neither attack nor flee so we freeze. And we shut down the immune system. In the long run, with serious consequences for our health.
Why am I telling you this? Because my point is to provide context. I think health is a task, a learning task, an adaptation task. We have to change not ourselves but our lives if we want to move from victim to creator, to reali-tator.
Interestingly, alternative medicine locates the heart chakra in the thymus. Whether there is such a thing as a heart chakra, I don't know. But I do know that there is a thymus gland. And thymos in Greek means "seat of the mind and courage". So instead of just swallowing cortisol, which then loses its effectiveness over time anyway, the person affected could ask himself how he can take care of himself. Because we also know that courage, faith and optimism are factors that positively influence health.
This is the path of salutogenesis. It is uncomfortable but rewarding. Uncomfortable because you can no longer play the victim. Rewarding because no one knows what will come out when you start taking yourself seriously, respecting and developing yourself in the sense of thymos!
Now to conclude.
Now, finally, a few words about the rockrose. In the last three posts I have looked at different aspects of this wonderful plant. i have presented the dozens of scientific studies that are available. I have touched on aromatherapy and I have asked the question of what distinguishes wild plants from cultivated plants and why the former might be relevant to a healthy diet.
So my first summary is as follows:
Cistus is a food - not a remedy. And there are many studies that deal with the potential healing power of rockrose. There are studies on different viruses, from HIV to influenza, there is a study on Lyme disease and one on cancer. Furthermore, there are studies that deal with the possible anti-ageing effect of rockrose, which could be based on its antioxidant effect. Antioxidants, according to alternative medical theory, bind so-called "free radicals" that can damage our genetic material. And they probably inhibit inflammatory processes in the body, which is particularly relevant when these inflammations would actually be superfluous because they are based on a deregulated immune system that attacks the body's own cells.
All of this needs to be done in order to be successful.
All of this needs more research and I'm excited to see what's to come. Now, by chance, after making the video, I found another interesting article in Tagesthemen. This year's Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to researchers of the immune system, which they say has the ability to heal itself. The researchers try to do this by chemically intervening by deactivating certain proteins. That's a good line of thinking. I think we can also achieve the same thing through thorough salutogenetic training, as is being researched at the Centro Eridanos in Tenerife.
