The pace of change in the human ecosystem has accelerated rapidly in the past 30 years. These changes not only affect human health, but the health of plants and animals that share the environment with us. Nine keystone vertebrate, invertebrate and plant species have experienced extinctions or population crashes since the 1980s, and opportunistic human infections are on the rise. These crashes and infections can be traced to changes in metabolism that underlie epigenetics, innate, and adaptive immunity. Epigenetic and immunologic ripple effects have led to new Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndromes (AIDS) in plants and animals, and Acquired Autoimmune Disorders (AAIDS) in humans and domesticated animals. Autism is one of nearly a dozen new, neuroimmune and metabolic spectrum disorders (NIMS) that have emerged as a consequence of these new combinations of environmental factors that have never before been encountered by the human genome. This talk will showcase examples of AIDS, AAIDS, and NIMS that teach us about the unintended, and often-invisible environmental changes caused by human technological progress, and how these changes can be measured and managed systematically.
Tag: Salutogenesis
Health, Interconnectedness and Salutogenesis | Daniel Christian Wahl
Reproduced from: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/health-interconnectedness-and-salutogenesis-ca69c4f5366c Health, Interconnectedness and Salutogenesis from ‘Design for Human and Planetary Health’ D.C. Wahl 2006 So what genuine possibilities stand before us when we are considering the question of health? Without doubt it is part of our nature as living beings that our conscious self-awareness remains largely in the background so that our enjoyment of… Read More
Selected images from “The Handbook of Salutogenesis”
Images reproduced from: http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-04600-6
Is pathogenic human interference the cause of our social and planetary woes?
“Life creates conditions conducive to life.” – Janine Benyus
As many of you who follow my blog articles may have realised, I have become captivated by Professor John McMurtry’s life work. His book, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure, has provided a unifying framework of meaning and understanding of all of the degenerative trends of our time. What you may not know, is that for over a year, I have been trying desperately to translate the medical concepts from my training from the level of the individual life host up to the social and planetary levels of life organisation. And by trying to do so, it was hoped that we would be better able to understand the pathogenesis of these degenerate trends, and be able to convince our policy and decision makers on what steps need to be taken at the local, regional and international levels so as to prevent and rehabilitate the social and planetary pathologies in our midst.
What I have just come to realise is that the difficulties I was having in accomplishing this goal had to do with a preconceived assumption that was a major mental block in going forward. That concept has to do with what we in the profession call, the natural history of disease. Read More