The endocrine responds with an increased secretion of catecholamines especially epinephrine, glucagon, cortisol, growth hormone and vasopressin, which contributes to the symptoms you feel, like palpitations, hyperglycemia, weakness, dizziness, food intolerance, pain and digestive symptoms. (1)
The immune system responds by releasing inflammatory cytokines that exacerbate the stress response. The immune system has both the innate system and the adaptive immune system. It is this adaptive immune system that both works in our favor, but also causes difficulty as its continuously assessing, and adapting to the stressors in the environement. This is why we have difficulty, thinking we're on track to recovery, but the original and underlying insult hasn't been resolved and adaptations are being made and we morph into different symptoms or symptom variation. (1)
In the case of Lyme, for example, the outer cell membrane has the ability to alter the proteins on their surface as well as coat themselves in a biofilm that helps them avoid detection by the immune system. (2)
All of this cascade process affects normal digestion and functioning and so symptoms arise.
Listen to the podcast on this information here.
1 Gropper, S. S., Smith, J. L., & Carr, T. P. (2016). Advanced nutrition and human metabolism (7th ed.). Cengage Learning.
2 Holt, L. (2021, February 3). The Lyme Client and Borrelia Pathology. Retrieved from . https://trinityschool.instructure.com/courses/980/pages/week-2-lecture-the-lyme-client-and-borrelia-pathology
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
Go to program: www.autoimmune.center
Salutogenesis is a concept derived by Aaron Antonovsky in 1979 in his book, Health, Stress, and Coping. When using a salutogenic model, the approach of identifying contributions that support human health is the key focus as well as factors that impede health, but the main energy is put on returning to a state of cohesion and alignment with oneself and life ,studying and applying what causes health. (2) Pathogenesis is fear based based on disease as an inevitability. Salutogenesis strives to create an environment conducive to health. Our COPP Theory and subsequent program, Retrain the Allergy Brain, is based on a salutogenesis model.
Primary to his theory also is the concept of Sense of Coherence. This theory posits that life experiences help shape one’s positioning in the world; that each experience, whether good or bad, has meaning and function. Multiple other theories have discussed the memorization or recording on the part of the cells of all experiences that then engender the programming from which to follow. We talk about concept genesis and concept therapy in upcoming sections of this blog and in the Retrain the Allergy Brain program. Sense of Coherence could be said to be our “6th sense” intuitive guidance that originated initially for the survival of our species and evolutionarily adapted to health preservation. Aaron Antonovsky’s salutogenic model identifies this Sense of Coherence as key in health preservation and identifies three sub-areas that must be acknowledged in any successful undertaking of dysfunctional resolution:
It’s all about coping and manageability, which in a chronic illness can be fleeting and decline the longer the disease persists. When one understands what’s happening, and has the right resources and sees that there is a purpose and a reason for the suffering, there can be a compassion for the body, the fight and force of will to make it happen as we believe it should can end, and we can see meaning and accept our own growth. A sense of natural cohesion to one’s global positioning manifests. “But the key issue is, not what resources are existing but whether the person is able to use and reuse them appropriately for the envisioned purpose. When a person experiences the obtainability of (resources), a solid SOC cultivates in them.(3) These resources may be:
The Retrain the Allergy Brain program, we address all of these five categories for the success of each individual.
Going beyond that, we look at the cause of stressors/trauma/cellular memory to get an idea of the programmed cell and then work to create a new program combining cognitive exercises with cellular memory through vibration and increased ability to utilize nutrients. Chronic inflammatory and autoimmune is a repeated injury, a repeated stress, thus it is our theory that a continuous re-injury is a faulty programming of cellular activity. They will keep doing what they do until told to do something differently.
How does Salutogenesis and Sense of Coherence apply to our discussion of autoimmune resolution?
We want it to be clearly understood that our undertaking follows the salutogenic model, that we apply all that “causes health”, rather than chasing the numerous avenues in an attempt to identify the one cause, and then “cure” it. In this model we are honoring and respecting the body’s sense of provision and in turn providing all that will enable health, and removing all that impedes health. It is a program with its foundation in effective coping and the right resources for its delivery.
As far as the application and applicability of Antonovsky’s State of Coherence concept, you will soon see as you read further into our new conversation, that a key principle is the perceived state of threat and the trauma adaptive cell response. We will be getting into that in future chapters, but for now and in relationship to Sense of Coherence and its role in health preservation, we know that SOC is a way of perceiving life to manage successfully through the infinite number of stressors faced in one’s lifetime, that we have the sense that we can manage and cope no matter what is happening in our lives. Often times it is the loss of hope and continuous fight that prolongs the condition. Research studies have shown SOC to consistently correlate to good health, and a greater sense of wellbeing.(3)
SOC has also been found to be associated with a decrease in anxiety, depression and rheumatic disorder(an autoimmune condition). (3) Finally, studies show a positive association between health and SOC as well as an inverse association between SOC and symptoms, disease, disabilities, dysfunction and distress, and self-rated health.(3)
These studies back up one of the main tenets of the COPP theory: that autoimmune is an individual attack, a disease of separation and rejection based on trauma either experienced, perceived, or physiologically through maladaptive systems that induce physical stress, and the resulting cellular trauma adaptive stress response.
1 Porges, S. W. (2017). The pocket guide to the Polyvagal theory: The transformative power of feeling safe (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company, p.174.
2 Mittelmark MB, Bauer GF. The Meanings of Salutogenesis. 2016 Sep 3. In: Mittelmark MB, Sagy S, Eriksson M, et al., editors. The Handbook of Salutogenesis [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2017. Chapter 2. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435854/ doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-04600-6_2
3 Bhattacharya S, Pradhan KB, Bashar MA, et al. Salutogenesis: A bona fide guide towards health preservation. J Family Med Prim Care. 2020;9(1):16-19. Published 2020 Jan 28. doi:10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_260_19
Listen to our Podcast on this topic here.
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
To learn more, or set a strategy session, go to program: www.autoimmune.center
]]>Psychoneuroimmunology is the combined modalities of psychology (thoughts a person has), plus neurology (physical paths traveled in the brain), plus the immune system, with the capability to combine to create one interactive feedback loop. This discipline has conceded that “Stress taps into the very same circuit (the sympathetic nervous system) as infection, but starting in the brain rather than the immune system.” (1)
The American Psychological Association says that Dr Steven Maier and his colleagues whom have been studying psychoneuroimmunology for some time, have been exploring a stress induced “sickness response’. Dr. Maier concludes that, “Stress is actually another form of infection, and the consequences of stress are...activation of circuits that actually evolved to defend against infection”.(1)
This was an important milestone on my path towards understanding what I saw now as allergy and inflammation as a brain dysfunction. Stress being communicated through the nervous system indicates a circuitry outside of the immune system’s process. Could the stress be signalled from internal adaptive protection mechanisms in the cells themselves and cause a circuit of infection defense strategy? In this case, and just as in the process of an external stress initiation, stress in the cells would send chemical messages along the afferent fibers of the vagus nerve to the brain to produce the same response as a life threat. The efferent message back to the organs would then be one to defend against infection. With Dr. Maier’s conclusion, I found initial footing for my hypothesis: that adaptive cellular defense strategies can trigger a sympathetic dominant response of fight or flight in response to mis-metabolized chemical neurotransmitters and hormone metabolites, using infection mechanisms beyond and bypassing an antibody generating defense. Then, and equally important to note, cellular memory then stores this response just as it does a vaccine modulated response in order to defend itself in the presence of the same offender in the future. This dysfunctional, or perhaps better termed “Defensive Metabolism” is a trauma that can present both physically and mentally, and can appear difficult to down-regulate once initiated. Through interoception, we can understand that if we listen to our body, seek to understand its adaptations, and adjust accordingly, we stand to repair homeostasis in quick order. If not, our nervous systems will seem to fail us by not self-soothing and “act out”,(2) as seen through symptomatology. The functional balancing action to these defensive adaptations would be a holistic recovery management plan including an awareness of and activation towards a parasympathetic environment, understanding the cells’ adaptive responses, and re-training the imprinted recording code in the brain’s programming.
What does this mean for you facing autoimmune or chronic illness?
Could it be that stress, trauma, adaptation, pessimism, etc can turn off the immune system? Can the cells perceive a threat and put up their own defense outside of the immune system?
What it means is that stress engages not only a "fight or flight" responsible nervous system, but could be engaging an OLDER memorized nervous system that shuts down key immune functions just like a reptile "plays dead". Dr. Martin Seligman agrees with my position as he states in his book, "Learned Optimism" that stress, depression, trauma, pessimism can, in fact, turn off the immune system.(3) So what if it's NOT overactive immune, but a cellular defense response?
Stress, both internal and external, WHY the cells are putting up a defense needs to be looked at in order to construct an environment conducive to healing, or all the physical methods, drugs, and supplements that you are trying won't quite be enough.
1 Porges, M. (2019). Daily vagus nerve exercises: Self-help exercises to stimulate vagal tone. Relieve anxiety, prevent inflammation, reduce chronic illness, anxiety, depression, trauma, PTSD and lots more. Independently Published, P.38.
2 Porges, S. W. (2017). The pocket guide to the Polyvagal theory: The transformative power of feeling safe (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company, p.149.
3 Seligman, M. E. (2011). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. Vintage.
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
Go to program: www.autoimmune.center
Once I observed the individual differences in responses to stress, my work took on a new agenda. I started directing my attention to figuring out why often times these differences seemed to be related to needs that went beyond the physical, including limiting conceptual beliefs, and diet change and what the connection was, knowing they all played a part. Why could some people balance easily back into function with one or the other method or protocol, but the “feedback loop” of inflammation was not completely severed and illness manifestations returned? Why did some have difficulty getting to that “pause” in the first place? With anatomy and physiology, then concept and the science of thought, then quantum theory and metaphysics, the introduction of function and the role of functional nourishment, and finally cellular biochemistry stored in the library of my brain, my research started to include discovering how neural regulation of physiological states influences the metabolic occupation of cells and the resulting influence on disease state. Again this brought me back to basics of function and the simple, common necessary actions of the physical body: processing nourishment, establishing elimination, and breath.
From my perspective, the role of Functional Diet in the cognitive sciences has essentially and historically been either lacking or underdeveloped. The importance of not only food intake, but of how the cells react, respond, and interrelate to food as it is brought in still stands to be seen in higher regard, and hopefully this work will encourage that. For those professionals that have seen the benefit of nutrition as a viable and necessary foundational component to a healing paradigm, the integration of nutrition with the cognitive sciences unfortunately hasn’t changed the science, it has merely added a “supportive” component. The now common theory of “Leaky Gut” was groundbreaking at its introduction, a first widely accepted “alternative” explanation to what was really going on when it came to deciphering the function of the gut and its diseases and has created a massive shift in the understanding and therefore the treatment protocols for those with intestinal variabilities, allergies, and the efforts of dietary mediation.
Still to be employed for me to be sufficiently appeased in my curiosity was a missing link of why again some of the leaky gut theory would work, while others had continued display of symptoms, despite gut rehabilitation efforts and diet alterations. It became important to me to clarify what exactly happens in the entire metabolic process, not only how digestion happens functionally, but how our cells respond to a post-digested substance as a whole or in parts, how it interplays with which stress response mechanism is dominant and how all of this is recorded into a memory that now makes up part of the “cellular code”.
My discoveries continued to bring more questions to examine. As I worked with clients to learn from their particular “code” that included all the parts I had learned so far, my focus inevitably returned time and again to nutrition, or more truly, “nourishment”, relating to the importance of nutrition as it’s function. Through impedance testing measurement devices, we were able to look at digestive imbalances and imbalances of functional metabolic processes as a whole system. We could see inflammation produced by non-antibody allergy type responses. I saw more participants that were non-antibody producing, however were responding intolerantly to food wavelength patterns despite this. Current thought maintains this as being the occurrence of leaky gut due to large undigested food particles as the causative factor and not much progress has been made beyond that.
While the theory of food intolerances or food sensitivities is nothing new, I wanted to examine that if it wasn’t a whole particular food itself that produced a provable diagnostic through the form of conventional allergy testing, but if symptoms were present, then why were those symptoms present? How could a person have noticeable and obvious manifestations when they hadn’t even ingested the food, other than through the accepted explanation of being “psychosomatic”? Did an intolerance or sensitivity present in a way that was testable and measurable? What was the whole metabolic process and at what stages could rejection be caused? This approach led me to the discoveries that make up a large part of the COPP Theory. I surmised that the cells could defend themselves and presented the possibility that it was the phytochemical metabolite rather than large offending food particles as the only causative factor. In leaky gut theory, it is the large food particle slipping through overstretched and weakened fissures in the intestinal lining net that allows large and foreign particles into the bloodstream, thereby attracting the body’s immune system to fight the particles as if they were a virus. Taking this further, current autoimmune theory purports that this leads to the body’s fighting of its own tissues, which is understood to involve an overactivity in the immune system. Both of these thoughts involved the understanding that it is an activation of or an exaggeration of the immune system. Conceptualizing that this response could occur long before the particles got into the bloodstream, that could in fact, occur through cellular defense mechanisms as the food itself was being metabolized offered another source of inquiry as to which point of food processing could there be cause for error.
Turning my attention to the metabolites: that being, the phytochemical chemical messengers that the food breaks down into, and the body’s response, became my new agenda. I perceived that just as the autonomic nervous system’s sympathetic branch can produce a fight or flight reaction, changing the physiology of the major organ systems, the cells could be another beacon alerting the body systems of offenders and producing the same fight or flight response. In short, the cells are sensitive to the emotional variation between stress, and the feeling of being “safe” and will trigger their own defense alerts even if antibodies are not produced by the immune system, giving rise to a possible reason why some individuals experiencing IBD, for example, can have symptoms simply by being in the presence of, smelling, touching or otherwise sensing an individual reactive offender. At the same time, this pointed a finger towards the cells themselves being the initiator of a bodily stress pattern, aside from the authority of the immune system. While it is now known that stress can trigger any type of symptomatic response, we can see that stress as identified through the cells is just as adaptive.
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
Go to program: www.autoimmune.center
The Copp Theory and the corresponding program, Retrain the Allergy Brain is a research and resolution program based on the salutogenic model of creating health, designed to begin a new conversation on Autoimmune and Inflammatory Disease resolution by understanding key components of stress and trauma cellular responses and how they impact the genesis, healing and recovery of autoimmune.
We are not victims, we are creators. In every second, with every input and response, we are creating the cell and the program with which it will operate from. We are not passive bystanders but active participants in the direction and quality of our health.
We have not been taught this, in fact, the large majority of us have been trained out of inherent knowledge and gut instinct, teaching trust instead in establishments. Our idea of needing an “answer” and a “name” or “label” for our symptoms has a tendency to bring us the other direction, through suggestive therapy, rather than towards a direction of healing. We are now focused on the victimized state our disease brings us to, the “attack” we must wage, and/or the “courage” we must have to “fight” and “survive”, which you will see through this reading that this is counterintuitive to true and actual healing.
Also, this work serves to bridge a gap between conventional diagnostics and functional health. I served a client who initially came to me saying “I have esophagitis.” Yes, do you know why? “Because I have GERD.” Yes, do you know why? “Well, no, not really.” It seems evident that often knowing WHAT it is is not as life serving as if we can get to the root and recreate functional opportunities that restore and retain human functioning.
More and more are we seeing autoimmune labeling, confounding anxiety, and multiple allergies, and many yet sub-clinical and thus un-diagnosed. However, we have yet to truly see the extent of poor metabolic adaptation and function as a primary cause for these conditions, and the part trauma, stress, and the multiple nervous systems' role. COPP theory hopes to answer to this.
1 Autoimmunity may be rising in the United States. (2020, April 8). National Institutes of Health (NIH). https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/autoimmunity-may-be-rising-united-states
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
Go to program: www.autoimmune.center
Allergies are an “error”. It is the body reacting inappropriately to a seemingly harmless substance, that after multiple failures at multiple levels of stress on the nervous system can elevate its expression of complexity of symptoms. While cancer has taken the lead next to cardiac mortality as the fearful front runner in science and healthcare, my belief is that many cancers will be found to be related to as metabolic conditions and therefore influences by diet, metabolic defense, detoxification abilities, nervous system signalling, and the multi community microbiome influencers puts it side by side with autoimmune disease which I believe will become more extensively the topic of research and study, pulling ahead as the new front runner in disease expression and cause of morbidity, incorporating cancer under its umbrella. That’s a bold statement, I know, but accurate in my mind when it seems health comes down to the uninhibited processes of the body and functional systems to perform.
Very basically we can temporarily suspend correlating factors outside of metabolism and very basically look at the affectations of our health outcome by the parenteral process. Put simply, as the body brings substances like food and toxins into the presence of the cells, there is an acceptance or a rejection created. If a rejection occurs, the substance has now become part of the physiology of the body and as an attempt to always correct in order to protect and maintain homeostasis, the body has it’s defense mechanisms. These mechanisms in their effort to protect can create adverse expressions that we can perceive as symptoms. Largely these can be related to our experience of the immune system turning on our own tissues due to the offending culprit (autoimmune), the inability to eject the offensive substance (elimination, lymphatic, vagus nerve toxicity and brain toxicity), the imprinted rejection memory created in the cells, the trauma adaptive stress response by the cells, the rejection of injured tissues and mechanisms and the inability to re-engage back through the vagus nerve. In this way multiple maladaptive messages can be recorded on the neural circuitry in the brain and nervous system and create what I’ve termed a “brain allergy”, anything that is rejected, remembered, and rejected at each introduction until corrected.
Brain allergy can contribute to such maladies as all autoimmune and inflammatory conditions including colitis and IBD, anxiety, chronic lower back pain nasal congestion, chronic fatigue and include many other problems such as depression, bedwetting, hayfever, intestinal disorders and skin problems.
Essentially the frame of reference focused on in this work is the rejective and maladaptive response of the body’s innate efforts to heal and the programming received by the brain to continue that response pattern. This theory offers the belief that not only can the body create an “overactive” immune response, as in common leaky gut theory, but can and often does activate a phylogenetically older system of immobilization and that this is often a missing link to why we can’t reduce an inflammatory response. This work will show the contributing factors and the necessity of seeing these factors holistically and synergistically in order to down regulate the stress and reject response effect a restoration of original state.
Amanda Plevell, PhD, CNHP is a Natural Health Practitioner with a key interest in Psychoneuroimmunology and autoimmune specific immunology. Find her credentials here, and search the AAANMC site for additional information.
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.
Go to program: www.autoimmune.center
Interest in my theory using cellular optimization through vagal toning, enhanced communication networks of the microbiome and extracellular matrix, phenolic strategies and finally, mitochondrial health and growth and resolution science has come with a request to produce more information, more to digest and understand, in a way that is more accessible not only to clinicians, but to the people we serve that perhaps don’t have as extensive understanding in the field of health or wellness. While there is extensive information about the Vagus Nerve and Polyvagal Theory through research and articles, information in phenolics in general is difficult to find and certainly information for using phenolics as an applicable method towards healing previous to the COPP Theory was non-existent. The importance of the two as a combined effort and how they matter to each other certainly needed to be defined as well. My objective is to communicate and convey ideas. To start a dialogue and a curiosity in individuals as well as clinicians that can build on COPP Theory as a viable option in health strategy. My intention is also to provide clinicians with an understanding of how our nervous system adapts to challenges and what that means to our inherent systems as well as how imperative a full and complete metabolic process is to our whole health. My talks have primarily focused on cellular programming, but in this case we focus on COPP Theory as an explanation for how the regulation of the autonomic nervous system functions as a neural canvas upon which various adaptive strategies by the cells are employed, and what this means for autoimmune and inflammatory disease states. COPP Theory teaches us that cells themselves can signal a defense; not exclusively the immune system which is activated once a substance is in the bloodstream, but that ANY cell in the presence of the offender has and will use this authority as a primal evolutionary adaptive defense mechanism. We learn that the cells have the capability of experiencing their own stress adaptive response, above and beyond the current idea that external stressors ignite symptoms, but by internal stress created by cellular memory activation of physiological trauma. It is my premise in COPP Theory that these programs and adaptive strategies have the power to generally shift, halt, disrupt or distort cellular responses and ultimately metabolic pathways leading to adaptive behavior causing symptoms and inflammatory disease and that these responses are then neurally encoded: what I call “trauma-adaptive programming”. Most importantly, in understanding these operations, we are allowed a platform with which to develop strategies to rebuild a phytochemical foundation, convey a new program to the cells, essentially “re-setting” the cellular code and neural messaging, ending the feedback loop expressing symptoms and disease and altering DNA. In writing this book, it is my hope to highlight the importance of switching our focus from symptomatic treatment at the expense of curative care. I also endeavor to show that true curative care is largely established by the body “feeling safe” in order to reduce an expression of defense, and to convey a new theology of functional nutrition that contributes to the whole metabolic process as an essential and viable component of healing and continued wellbeing.
1 Chandrashekara S. The treatment strategies of autoimmune disease may need a different approach from conventional protocol: a review. Indian J Pharmacol. 2012;44(6):665-671. doi:10.4103/0253-7613.103235
2 Autoimmunity may be rising in the United States. (2020, April 8). National Institutes of Health (NIH). https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/autoimmunity-may-be-rising-united-states
3 Harvard Health Publishing. (2020, June 24). Autoimmunity indicators on the rise among Americans. Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/autoimmunity-indicators-on-the-rise-among-americans
Disclaimer
Amanda Plevell, PhD and companies are not medical providers or physicians of any kind. We do not heal, treat, cure, attempt to heal, treat, cure, or diagnose any condition. Any and all sources that you choose to employ in your life should be first discussed with your trusted healthcare partner. The information contained in this self help guide are opinions and should not be substituted for medical advice, but are merely a plan based on research and experiences. Likewise, all statements and information in this guidebook, our books, websites, and consultations are for educational purposes and are considered opinion based on concept and belief and should be evaluated by the individual reader for the application to their life. This information and guidance is what we have found to be useful in an easy format to understand. We intend to serve life by submitting this information for your perusal with the highest intention for your and our world’s good. All writings are protected under copyright and all rights are reserved. No distributing or copying for disbursement for any reason without express permission from the author.