Author Topic: Western civilization is a health hazard  (Read 9444 times)

2ThaSun

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Re: Western civilization is a health hazard
« Reply #255 on: May 21, 2023, 12:21:45 pm »
Chronic Inflammation is Insidious and Dangerous. You May Not Even Know You Have It.
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People often learn they have it when by developing an autoimmune disease. But the ailment might also play a role with heart disease, cancer, other disorders.
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Most of us think of inflammation as the redness and swelling that follow a wound, infection or injury, such as an ankle sprain, or from overdoing a sport, “tennis elbow,” for example. This is “acute” inflammation, a beneficial immune system response that encourages healing, and usually disappears once the injury improves.

But chronic inflammation is less obvious and often more insidious.

Chronic inflammation begins without an apparent cause — and doesn’t stop. The immune system becomes activated, but the inflammatory response isn’t intermittent, as it is during an acute injury or infection. Rather, it stays on all the time at a low level.

Experts think this may be the result of an infection that doesn’t resolve, an abnormal immune reaction or such lifestyle factors as obesity, poor sleep or exposure to environmental toxins. Over time, the condition can, among other things, damage DNA and lead to heart disease, cancer and other serious disorders.

“Unlike acute inflammation, which benefits health by promoting healing and recovery, chronic inflammation is characterized by persistent increases in inflammatory proteins all throughout the body and can damage health and promote several major diseases,” says George Slavich, associate professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, referring to small proteins called cytokines that the immune system releases at the site of an injury to promote recovery.

“People typically don’t know that they have chronic inflammation until it’s too late,” he says...
Entire article: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/chronic-inflammation-is-long-lasting-insidious-dangerous-and-you-may-not-even-know-you-have-it?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Here’s How Stress and Inflammation Are Linked
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Research shows that stress can cause inflammation in the body, leading to a number of chronic health conditions. Find out what to do about it.
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A plethora of research shows that stress, a physical response to feeling challenged or threatened, induces or worsens medical conditions, including depression, cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer.

But the exact mechanism by which stress induces disease has remained a mystery. Until now.

A review published in June 2017 in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience concluded that inflammation is a common pathway of stress-related diseases.

“Chronic inflammation is an essential component of chronic diseases,” the authors wrote...
Entire article: https://www.everydayhealth.com/wellness/united-states-of-stress/link-between-stress-inflammation/

The stress of life: a modern complaint?
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[...]Although eccentric and controversial, Ballard’s fictional portrayals of a species under stress captured an emergent reality. In 2000, the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reported that there had been a 30% increase in occupational stress between 1990 and 1995. Four years later, the Whitehall II study highlighted the role of stress in shaping sickness patterns amongst civil servants. In 2009, the HSE estimated that 13.5 million working days were lost to stress each year and that the annual cost of work-related stress was in the region of £4 billion. Concerns about the socio-economic impact of work-place stress have been accentuated by claims that rising trends in hypertension, heart disease and depression might also be caused by the stress of modern lives. According to the American biologist Robert M. Sapolsky (b. 1957), many chronic diseases can be explained in terms of the neuro-endocrine disturbances generated by attempts to cope with the stress of rapid social, cultural and technological change. While a certain degree of stress is accepted as necessary for performance and productivity, unmitigated stress appears to be threatening the health and happiness of modern Western populations in particular.

Although we may like to believe that we are more stressed than our predecessors, complaints about the stress and strain of life have a long history. Even Ballard’s idiosyncratic prophecies have their precursors. In the 1970s, the left-wing American writer Alvin Toffler (b. 1928) argued that post-war populations were suffering from ‘future shock’, a state caused by ‘the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time’. The inhabitants of modern ‘throw-away society’, he insisted, were struggling to adapt to the ‘unwanted tempo’ of life manifest in the transience of people and places, the speed of technological innovation, and the surfeit of choice in consumables, education and the media. In the eyes of Toffler and many of his contemporaries, the inability to cope with change was directly responsible not only for epidemics of heart disease, obesity, anxiety, depression and suicide, but also for escalating levels of aggression and crime, the demise of sexual standards, and the instability of international relations...

[...]According to some inter-war clinicians, prolonged stress led not only to functional nervous diseases, but also to organic conditions. In 1925, the Chicago psychiatrist William S. Sadler (1842-1910) suggested that it was the ‘tension, the incessant drive of American life, the excited strain of the American temperament’ that was responsible for rising mortality rates from high blood pressure and diseases of the heart and kidneys. Humans, he argued, had not yet adapted to the ‘stress of a civilization which counts on the airplane and the wireless as commonplaces’. Of course, for Sadler the prevalence of stress-related conditions served to establish America’s social and technological superiority, an example of hubris also captured by the term ‘Americanitis’, which was popularised by the Harvard psychologist William James (1842-1910) with reference to his own nerve strain.

James’s insistence on a link between stress and psychological disturbances was in turn based on earlier studies of insanity and nervousness. In 1890, the English psychiatrist Charles Arthur Mercier (1852-1919) had argued that insanity was a ‘function of two variables’: heredity and stress. For Mercier, stresses ranged from internal physiological disturbances associated with puberty and pregnancy through to external factors such as overwork, marital problems, insomnia, and head injuries. Other clinicians echoed Mercier’s approach, pointing at the same time to the association between stress-induced insanity and social progress. According to the American physician William A. White (1870-1937), insanity could be initiated by the ‘stresses incident to active competition’ in the civilised, industrial world.

Perhaps the most persistent late Victorian version of a connection between advanced societies and stress was embedded in the concept of neurasthenia, a term popularised in the 1860s by the American neurologist George M. Beard (1839-83) and widely adopted by European physicians and their patients. In several books on neurasthenia, or what he referred to as ‘American nervousness’, Beard explained the growing prevalence of nervous fatigue in terms of the pressures of modern life. In a passage that betrayed a multitude of anxieties about rapid technological and cultural change, he argued that nervousness could be traced to the principal features of ‘modern civilization’, namely ‘steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women’. As in many later pronouncements on the consequences of failing to adapt to accelerating social progress, stress and nervousness were thought to be more common amongst the affluent Western middle classes...
Entire article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306016/

Modern civilization is Western.
« Last Edit: May 21, 2023, 02:35:17 pm by 2ThaSun »
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