COVID-19 has been the hot topic that fills our TV and social media for the last few weeks. Pandemics have been happening for many years, all the way back to Roman times. Since then medicines and medical practices have improved along with traditional methods.
Chinese Medicine has been and still is contributing to maintaining people’s health. Chinese Medicine theories believe that if you have a strong immune system, you may survive all illness. Strengthening a client’s immune system and prevent them being sick is one of the measurements for the quality of Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners. Let’s talk about the immune system.
There is the innate immune systems, such as skin which provides general protection; and the adaptive immune system, such as certain types of white blood cells (like B and T type lymphocytes cells) which makes antibodies and uses them to specifically fight certain germs that the body has previously come into contact with.(1)
The main tasks of the body’s immune system are:
1. To fight disease cause by outside factor such as virus; and disease cause by changes in the body, such as cancer cells.
2. Recognise and neutralise harmful substances from the environment (1). The immune system protects the body by recognizing and responding to Antigens. Antigens are substances (usually proteins) on the surface of cells, viruses, fungi, or bacteria. The immune system recognizes and destroys, or tries to destroy substances that contain Antigens (2). The active immune system is important to one’s health.
Chinese herb and acupuncture are traditional used to boost immune function. Researchers discovered that stimulation of acupuncture point ST36 enhanced the level of T cells and activates the immune system (3). Clinical trials indicates that Moxa (Chinese herb) generates a protective response by activating autophagy (self cleaning) against bacterial infections, also may help responding cancer treatment (4). If you like to discuss furthermore, please feel free to contact me.
Reference:
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK279364/
- https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000821.htm
- https://www.healthcmi.com/Acupuncture-Continuing-Education-News/1803-acupuncture-immune-system-discovery
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4129972/