Dr. Giulia Enders

And I went in there in the afternoon, and I said, I wanted to just talk to you about it again for a few minutes.

You've had this really severe infection a few years ago, and it is something that the immune cells see and witness, and they do form a memory.

And when they have been through something like this, they are more likely to react with autoimmunity and maybe attack gut bacteria that aren't bad after all, just because they've seen something so dreadful, so horrible, almost going wrong.

And now they're just being over careful.

And while they're doing that, they're attacking all these things that when they just look a bit funny, they go off.

So it is not convenient.

It is not a good thing, but it is them really now being careful.

overly you know attached to you and trying to secure you and she had a bit of teary eyes and i think for her it was way better to learn it that way and also when we look at all these additional therapies that are now being researched more and more when it comes to autoimmunity different diets you know relaxation techniques or you know all kinds of different things for autoimmunity

It's all like a to-do list if you don't see it from the right angle.

But if you see it from the angle that the immune system is constantly checking on your body, how you're doing and adjusting its aggressiveness according to that, then all these things make sense because they give the signal and communicate to your immune cells, oh, I'm actually doing good.

Are you saying that your immune system is perhaps overprotective some of the time?

It's checking on you and figuring out how aggressive it needs to be.

And if in fact it's on more than it should be, and this is your example with these sort of autoimmune situations where it's sort of attacking something that isn't actually bad.

If you can just somehow calm yourself down, like be more relaxed, then potentially you're sort of sending messages to your immune system that maybe it can also be a bit more relaxed and that can genuinely change the way in which it interacts with, you know, whatever's triggering it and setting off this sort of autoimmune response.

To be very clear, you cannot heal an autoimmune disease by just relaxing.

That would be insane.

There's always multiple causes and influences on diseases.

Usually it's multifactorial, you know.

But one factor is also an interaction of the nervous system with the immune system.

Those two communicate, and we know those roots through medicine.