A person can be allergic to anything, including oneself. What does this mean - that you break out in hives in your own presence? Not usually. It is possible to be allergic to your own body chemicals: hormones, neurotransmitters, even your own DNA! According to Dr. Devi Nambudripad, founder of NAET, you can be allergic to any part of your own body.
Being allergic to a part of one's own body is typically what is called an autoimmune disease. (Please see AcupunctureToday.com for my previous article on autoimmune disease in the December 2001 issue.) Certainly it is possible to be allergic to parts of one's own body, but it is my experience that the reaction is actually a response to some kind of infection (such as a lingering pathogenic factor, or LPF) rather than a response to one's own body. Chronic infections are extremely common and cause a huge range of chronic symptoms, especially allergies, but they may also cause many other serious disorders.
On a karmic/spiritual level, on the level of life purpose, life path, destiny and choice, there is room for a great deal of conflict with oneself. Conflict within can manifest as an allergy to yourself. If society's message tells you to make one choice, but your heart tells you to make another, which do you choose? If you continually ignore your own purpose, path, and your own heart's desire, you can set up a great deal of self-conflict. You can become quite angry with yourself, but not necessarily be conscious of it. The parts of us that feel ignored, neglected and disavowed can act out in ways that make us quite ill. Allergies are a common response from one part of ourselves against another. Now that you're sick, will you listen to yourself? Or do you have to get sicker - or even die?
Learning to listen to your quiet inner voice, meditating, acting on your own truth, and listening to the messages that illness brings, can help prevent more serious problems in the long run, and even resolve the ones that already exist. Certainly a skilled acupuncturist or other practitioner can help someone sort out difficulties such as these. A skilled acupuncturist can help people who are lost find their way back to their path. Such skill is rare, but it can be developed, learned, and taught.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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