Disorganisation & susceptibility Part II
In the first part of this blog I set the scene why some people are more receptive to viral insults. Why some cannot simply mount a robust defence, when they are a product of inheritable traits, polluted environments and susceptible to the increased stress from emotional, chemical and physical assaults. On social media and in the press, there’s been an uptick in how wonderful, novel new medicines can be at the front line in the war against cancer and other diseases. Despite no large success stories from randomised control trials, the public is being swept up in the wave of molecular medicine to create magical responses, that on paper just don’t seem so promising.
We’re being conditioned to believe that everything is in our genes, and that the supposed problems within our genes are either correctable, able to be edited out, or can be simply out-vaccinated. High Modernism is a concept coined by James C. Scott in his excellent book Seeing like a State. The priests of High Modernism are a special sort. They like to plan, and I mean plan, plan everything from how you are born, fed, raised, educated, treated, rewarded and ultimately plan how you should choose to die. In Scott’s book he describes the architect Le Corbusier’s passion to turn cities in vast sprawling metropolises of straight organised lines . Where culture and creativity are stifled into organised rows, creating legibility of all and sundry who live within its confines.
The more recent and relevant priests of High Modernism are the ones telling you what to eat, how your health is not under your control, and any thoughts you have about self-autonomy are wrong, misguided and selfish. They’ve been planning for years, from secret, private rooms thinking they know best, everything making sense on paper and in the spread sheets. Yet these people have never been to your house, understood, your stress/problems/worries (I’m not sure that they care about these anyway) but they want to make it better with their narrative of life. In medicine, the new form of religion is around a Neodarwinian view of life that health problems are gene related, a component beyond your control(Noble, 2015). They still ignore the well documented concepts of Lamarckian inheritance (Burkhardt, 2013), and the idea that damage accumulates, and is passed on trans generationally. As the biologist Denis Noble suggested “Genes =0, environment =0 but genes + environment = 100%”
Here’s a novel idea. . instead of seeing ourselves as organisms totally at the behest of programming, DNA and proteins. Perhaps we are able to think about our health problems, understand what creates more robust responses, and optimal boundary conditions with the environment? Bringing back the conversation to viral susceptibility or more aptly how to be less susceptible to viral insults I mentioned how best working thyroid function is key to dealing with many health issues, and how analysing this function under any form of stress remains problematic. it’s also worth discussing the organisational components of progesterone, methylene blue and the serotonin inhibitor Cyproheptadine.
Progesterone and resolving hypoxia
There’s plenty of research on progesterone. There’s good research and there’s erroneous research built on the idea that synthetic progesterone (progestins) are the same as natural progesterone. A decade ago, a study came up with the grand statement that oral contraceptive (OC) users had less mortality than non-users (Hannaford et al., 2010). However, many doctors well versed in statistical analysis pointed out the bias, funding, exclusion of study drop outs, and avoidance of analysing incidence of disease in OC users. Dr Ellen Grant made the following statements (commenting on HRT and headaches) regarding just some of the problems with the ideas that both HRT and OC lead to when we blindly follow the suggestion that synthetic progestins are the same as natural progesterone produced by the ovaries and adrenal glands.
• “Overgrowth of arterioles is probably a fundamental reason why use of progesterone-type hormones for contraception or HRT increase the risk of numerous conditions including severe migraines, ischemic strokes and fatal lung cancers in women.1,2,3
• Progesterone means sterol essential for pregnancy. Endogenous progesterone levels are elevated after ovulation and in pregnancy along with high modifying levels of oestrogen.
• Oestrogens activate oestrogen receptors and progesterone’s (an appropriate term for both natural as well as synthetic hormones) activate progesterone receptors. Progesterones up or down regulate thousands of genes - several fold times more than oestrogens do.
• Synthetic progest-ogens (BMJ), -agens(Lancet) or -ins (USA) were manufactured to be much more powerful than natural progesterone when taken orally and are used as contraceptives or HRT.
• Synthetic progestogens can have extra oestrogenic or androgenic activities but act predominantly like progesterone by increasing or decreasing enzyme activities and changing immune system balance.
• Progesterones increase Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor within seconds of administration whereas oestrogen has no effect.
• An increase in endometrial arteriolar development occurs in the late secretory phase of a normal cycle and in pregnancy to form the placenta. In contrast, prominent well-developed arterioles appear throughout progesterone-dominant therapies in women with severe headaches and migraine even if the endometrium is relatively atrophic.
• Different dose combination of progestogens and oestrogens induce first year incidences of migraine, with or without visual disturbances varying from 8% to 60% matching the incidence of well-developed arterioles.
• As headache is a main reason for first year discontinuation of hormones, the absolute risk of either ischaemic or thrombotic stroke is lower than otherwise because further adverse arteriolar, venous or blood changes with longer use are avoided.
• Unfortunately long-acting progestogens are being recommended for contraception to prevent early discontinuation. Very high doses of progestogens alone are being given for emergency contraception. Daily use of progesterone cream can accumulate in fat and raise tissue levels.
• Over the last 50 years in my experience use of progestogen only regimes can cause an alarming encephalomyelitis type of reaction.
• Progestogens increase the risk of breast cancer more than oestrogens do. Inherent actions of progesterone increase in monoamine oxidase activity and risk of depression while a switch from cellular to humoural immunity increasing immune disorders like the systemic lupus erythematosus. Endometrial atrophy induced by progesterone dominance may seem beneficial but vascular fibroids, endometriosis and polycystic ovarian disease, premenopausal hysterectomies and oophorectomies have increased.
• The online home page of The Lancet online for the week of 9th January 2010 quoted from my correspondence about combined HRT increasing lung cancer mortality, “There is no valid reason for taking HRT, which is now dead and should be buried.” 2 It is alarming that progestogen combinations increase breast cancer - the commonest cancer, and lung cancer - the commonest cause of cancer death in women.”
Progesterone’s specific anti-viral actions.
If you’re interested in reading some detailed theory on biological actions of progesterone Katherina Dalton, Ray Peat, John Lee and many more have written excellent resources on the generality and practical uses of progesterone (Dalton, 1959; Peat, 1997). A more recent and pertinent theoretical read by Shah (Shah, 2021a) (Shah, 2021b) explores the immune protection and enhancing effects of progesterone, which could help to prevent and lessen the effects of a viral insult. Previously progesterone has been shown to decrease the catabolic and deadly effects of influenza in female rodents (Hall et al., 2016) by decreasing the over-activation of the immune response, limit tissue damage and restore the repair process.
Shah 2021
Just some of progesterone’s biologically enhancing effects include decreasing the cytokine storm that can occur from infection, reverse hypoxia, mediate less damaging immune responses from balanced Th1 and TH2 helper cell responses, and enhance the repair of the mucosal endothelial tissues that are easily damaged in respiratory, gastrointestinal and reproductive tissues. The elevations of amphiregulin are a key component of tissue repair in these structures and is notably enhanced with adequate progesterone (Hall et al., 2016). In the last post I mentioned how converging factors such as high fatty acids, low thyroid and disordered temperature responses might drive worse outcomes in Covid patients. . In both male and female mice the pathology and weight loss associated with SARS COV2 infection was substantially decreased with progesterone (Yuan et al., 2022).
Many other factors can converge including an excess of endotoxin (LPS or lipopolysaccharide) which up regulate the pro inflammatory damaging response of SARS COV2 (Petruk et al., 2020). Progression to lethal infection was often mediated by organ breakdown, rampant endotoxin production and sepsis. Poor diets, poor environments decreased protective steroidal hormones and thyroid suppression is an open door to viral susceptibility mediated by rampant inflammation. A combination of hypoxia and persistent glycolysis is damaging, and a hallmark of disease progression in most cancers. Inflammation creates hypoxia, and those predisposed to inflammation and easily activated chronic hypoxia are most susceptible to convergence of the factors mentioned. Progesterone seems one of many simple, practical solutions that could be used to prevent worsening outcomes.
But there are no single magic bullets. Progesterone, and other useful interventions still require a foundation of adequate nutrition, light and basic life enhancing strategies that were largely ignored over the last two years. Those in power chose lockdowns, masks, social distancing, destroying livelihoods, coercion, division and more destructive tactics. Yet learning, empowerment, enhancing biology and robustness could have been a more unifying, economical and worthwhile approach. But that might be bad for business?
The observations from Shah, Peat and others, that males suffer worse outcomes from more recent viral insults is certainly note-worthy and some experiments were conducted last year exploring such interventions. The results should at least be interesting.
Progesterone does indeed have some very broad, life enhancing qualities. However, the water continues to be muddied, even by organisations like the WHO or insist that synthetic progestins in the form of OC can provide the same level of protection as natural progesterone. Men produce progesterone in small amounts in many tissues like the brain testicles adrenal glands, and there’s some useful logic in considering supplemental progesterone to those with health problems that are hypoxic and inflammatory in nature. However, the idea that synthetic progestins would provide the necessary solution to degraded male and female physiology is a dangerous proposition
References
Burkhardt, R. W. (2013). Lamarck, evolution, and the inheritance of acquired characters. Genetics, 194(4), 793–805. https://doi.org/10.1534/genetics.113.151852
Dalton, K. (1959). Menstruation and acute psychiatric illnesses. British Medical Journal, 1(5115). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.1.5115.148
Hall, O. J., Limjunyawong, N., Vermillion, M. S., Robinson, D. P., Wohlgemuth, N., Pekosz, A., … Klein, S. L. (2016). Progesterone-Based Therapy Protects Against Influenza by Promoting Lung Repair and Recovery in Females. PLoS Pathogens, 12(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1005840
Hannaford, P. C., Iversen, L., Macfarlane, T. V., Elliott, A. M., Angus, V., & Lee, A. J. (2010). Mortality among contraceptive pill users: Cohort evidence from Royal College of general practitioners’ oral contraception study. BMJ (Online), 340(7748). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c927
Noble, D. (2015). Evolution beyond neo-Darwinism: a new conceptual framework. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 218(Pt 1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.106310
Peat, R. (1997). From PMS to Menopause: Female Hormones in context.
Petruk, G., Puthia, M., Petrlova, J., Samsudin, F., Strömdahl, A. C., Cerps, S., … Schmidtchen, A. (2020). SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to bacterial lipopolysaccharide and boosts proinflammatory activity. Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, 12(12). https://doi.org/10.1093/jmcb/mjaa067
Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing like a state. Yale University Press.
Shah, S. B. (2021a). COVID-19 and Progesterone: Part 1. SARS-CoV-2, Progesterone and its potential clinical use. Endocrine and Metabolic Science, 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endmts.2021.100109
Shah, S. B. (2021b). COVID–19 and Progesterone: Part 2. Unraveling High Severity, Immunity Patterns, Immunity grading, Progesterone and its potential clinical use. Endocrine and Metabolic Science, 5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endmts.2021.100110
Yuan, L., Zhu, H., Wu, K., Zhou, M., Ma, J., Chen, R., … Xia, N. (2022). Female sex hormone, progesterone, ameliorates the severity of SARS-CoV-2-caused pneumonia in the Syrian hamster model. Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-021-00860-5
https://ww.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4380/rapid-response
https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/02/royal-college-general-practitioners-pill-study-reports-three-times-more-de
https://cultivatingillegibility.substack.com/p/on-the-origins-and-objectives-of
ormone disruption - A rats tale