Review of Alliance for Natural Health International's Recent Event - The universal pathway of chronic disease

  Published to Latest News on Dec 12, 2023

You’d be forgiven for not knowing exactly what psychoneuroimmunology (CPNI) is.  

This masterclass (which will be available to purchase and watch on catch up soon) gives a hands on practical introduction to CPNI.  Rob Verkerk PhD and Dr Leo Pruimboom, both excellent speakers, had the audience gripped throughout.

Watching a conference on catch up might not be your idea of fun but I can’t recommend it enough,  particularly if you’re intrigued to find the answers to questions such as:

• Why oral sex might help conception?
• Why sitting all day can make us ill?
• Why the hippocampus is the most expensive part of the brain?
• How does cold exposure influence tumour growth?

Psychoneuroimmunology is an exciting, rapidly evolving and translational field of medicine that explores the connections between the supersystem comprised of the mind, nervous, endocrine and immune systems.  In the process, CPNI identifies clinical interventions that optimise multi-system function while positively influencing multiple risk factors known to activate disease mechanisms.  It looks at how thoughts, feelings, and behaviours interact with our ancestry and epigenetic expression to create unique and individual traits that influence physical and psychological health — particularly immune function, which exerts influence on every cell in the body.  It could more accurately be termed clinical psycho-neuro-socio-endo-metabolo-immunology.

I think we can all appreciate that the biochemical pharmacological healing model has seen major advances for treating acute illness but is failing many people with chronic disease.  We now, more than ever, need to broaden our mind, past nutrition and cast the net a little wider.  Now is the time to look wider at alternative approaches.

A great analogy is would you run a car for years and year on end without servicing it? Yet we all do this with our bodies, and I was wondering myself when was the last time I checked in for a health MOT?

Looking to the past shows us how nature provides the fundamental building blocks for a future health system based on health and resilience.  The human brain evolved in a natural environment and has not yet caught up with the current context - busy lives, abundant food, sedentary jobs.  

The influence of the brain on the body is huge, yet the brain hasn’t had time to adapt to the modern day environment. It is still keeping us safe on the savannah wanting us to move as little as possible and to eat as much as possible, with a pessimism bias designed to protect us.  Translate this into a modern day environment and we get sick, we assume the worst, we see food we want to eat it and we naturally want to rest.  No wonder we ourselves and clients struggle to change habits when the master controller is driving us not to!

No time to watch the masterclass?  More details can be found at the Pruimboo Iinstitute and at the Alliance for Natural Health.  

Caroline Gilmartin and Susie Willows