Chemical, Mold & Food Sensitivities Are Real | Ashok Gupta | Gupta Program |

Well, hello, and a warm, warm welcome to our Facebook live here from the Gupta Program. And I'm so excited that you can join us today. What will be an illuminating discussion talking about multiple chemical sensitivities, mold illness, electrical sensitivities, and food sensitivities and what really causes them. And. And also to give you hope that there is a way through, there is a way of healing from these conditions, and many before you have healed, and so can you. That's the message of hope that we want to leave you with today. So, once again, thank you for joining us. I'm really glad that you could be with us today. And I just want to start by saying, you know, I've been in your situation so many, many years ago, 25 years ago, I suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME, which is another illness which at the time wasn't taken seriously. And people thought, oh, people are just making it up or it's depression or something else. And at those particular times, I thought that, you know, my life's over. No one's really taking this seriously. No one knows what I have. And it was a very depressing time. But with research, I managed to get myself better and help others at my clinic and then with the Gupta program. But I remember at that time thinking, why don't people understand? I'm not making up this condition. And with a condition that you may be facing, or perhaps a friend or family member, you may also be going through a similar process of just really trying to explain to your doctor or people around you that this is a real illness, a real condition. You have real symptoms in your body. And just with me and chronic fatigue syndrome, 25 years ago, when people didn't really take it seriously, now they do take it seriously. The research is there, and it shows that it is a real physical condition with so many different manifestations and changes in the body. And so it is with multiple chemical sensitivities that for many people. And mold illness, for many people, those illnesses don't have enough research that has been conducted to really prove to the mainstream medical profession that they are real. But actually, recently, things have got better. More and more research is being conducted. We can see the brain images, the brain scans. This is a real condition. So many different variables that have changed within people with these conditions. So that is good and positive news. It's now becoming more and more recognized. Now the challenge is that in the process of wanting to get the condition recognized as a real physical condition, many people with this condition are actually falling into the trap of believing that the only way they can get better from this is through drugs, perhaps surgery even. But let's say it's some kind of medical, some kind of medicine, mainstream facility. And unfortunately, in doing that, many patients with this condition are ignoring the opportunity to actually use complementary and alternative techniques to be able to heal. And in fact, we wouldn't call ourselves complementary and alternative. We call ourselves a mainstream type of treatment, which is brain retraining. Okay, so let me. First of all, before we go into all of that, I'd like to just go through a hypothesis of what I think may be causing your condition, a logical explanation for why you're experiencing what you're experiencing, and then we can move on to how you can actually heal from this condition. Now, going back to that point I was making about people just saying, right, if it's not a medical procedure or medicine that I'm taking, I'm not going to take it seriously. And many support groups who we actually invite to these Facebook lives to challenge us, to ask questions, they say point blank, no, we're not going to tell our members about it. We're not going to come to this, because we believe it's a real physical illness. And I say, yes, I also believe it's a real physical illness with real physical symptoms. However, I believe that it starts in the brain and the processes that are causing it to continue are neurological in nature. They're in the brain, they're in the nervous system. So sometimes support groups can be very negative, sometimes because they are trying to emphasize this point that there's no way through, there's no cure, there's no way of recovery. And if someone did recover, then they probably didn't have the condition in the first place, which doesn't make any logical sense and is closing ourselves off from the opportunity to heal and recover and move on with our lives. So what I'd like to do is just briefly go through a hypothesis as to what we believe causes these types of conditions. And we call them neuroimmune conditioned syndromes, nics, neuroimmune condition syndromes, and that includes the ones that you're here with, but also fibromyalgia, me, cfs, pots, and a variety of other connected conditions, which the mainstream profession doesn't really have an answer. And the reason I believe they don't have an answer is because there is a separation between physical conditions and mental and emotional conditions or neurological conditions. There's almost this kind of barrier between those two different branches of medicine. But the body doesn't make that differentiation. So the body doesn't say, am I under threat? Is it emotional threat? Is it a physical threat? Is it a chemical threat? Is it an immune threat? It simply says, I need to orchestrate a defensive reaction to protect this individual and to survive. There is always that physiological survival instinct that incorporates all aspects of our physiology, our emotional state of mind, and also our neurology, all the nerves running through our body. It's a coordinated response. The brain doesn't differentiate between the different types of responses. And that's where we have some challenges in trying to treat this using conventional medicine, because conventional medicine is very good at treating the body like a car. Something's gone wrong with the engine over here, right? We go and fix that. Something's gone wrong with a wheel over here, right? We go and fix that. Very much treating the body like a car. And the medical profession is very, very good at that. And so in the example of coronavirus, which is something that obviously everyone's talking about at the moment, the medical profession is very good at understanding that an external invader is coming into the body and degrading the cells in the throat and the nose and then traveling into the lungs. We recognize that we are then able to make a copy of that particular virus and then train the body to defend against it with a vaccine. So medical profession has done incredible wonders for the world. But there is. There are many conditions now for which that mainstream model doesn't work. And that's what I call software conditions, not hardware conditions. So rather than seeing the body like a car or like a computer, when something goes wrong, is it a hardware problem or is it a software problem? The medical profession is very good at seeing it as a hardware problem. So for those of you who have laptops and mobile phones, which is just about everybody, sometimes something goes wrong and you're not sure, do I need to take this phone or this computer to a repair shop to repair the physical aspect of the computer, or do I need to call up IT support and is it a software problem and do I need to fix the software? So we look at these conditions as software challenges where there is a bug in the software which is causing a vicious cycle. And let me just describe that to you now. And by the way, we're having this Facebook Live the next half an hour and then half past the hour. We will then close this Facebook Live and we will then start another Facebook Live, which will be a Q and A. You'll have an opportunity to say hello, ask some questions that you may have challenge me in any way that you want. I hope that I'll be able to answer some of your questions. Okay, good. So I'm just going to share my screen, and then we can take a look at one of the hypotheses. Okay. So hopefully you can see my screen there. Good. So in terms of these types of sensitivity reactions, so we're talking about multiple chemical sensitivities, mold reactivity, electrical sensitivities, certain food sensitivities. We're not talking about allergies. And if you have a very strong allergy or a very strong reaction, please see your doctor and work with mainstream treatments first. Before you look at this, what we're talking here about is things that you've been to your doctor for. They've done whatever they can, but they've told you that there's nothing else that they can do. And then it's most likely that this is a software problem rather than a hardware problem. So if we look at the precipitating factors for these types of conditions, there are three precipitating factors or background factors that may cause this problem, process, or this illness to occur. So the first one, there is a chemical exposure. So at some point in our lives, perhaps we were feeling very vulnerable physically, emotionally, mentally. We may have been under a lot of stress, or we may have actually been under a lot of physiological stress. But many people describe a period of acute or chronic stress at the beginning where they then were exposed to chemical mold or electrical field or some kind of food poisoning. And it may well be that there's some genetic vulnerability that you may have experienced. So we know that, for instance, in mcs, not in everybody, but in a large proportion of people with mcs, there are certain genes that, or genetic changes or genetic differences that have been noted in medical studies. And those genetic vulnerabilities are around detoxification or processing of certain chemicals in the body. And finally, that genetic vulnerability, as we said, may have compromised the ability of the body to detoxify and created more of a vulnerability to getting this kind of condition or more of a defensive position that the body takes. And why are we here? The biggest question of all, why are we here? Well, not from the philosophical perspective, but from the, I suppose, survival perspective. We're here because our genes have been passed over from so many different animals right through to us to handle the environment and protect us from the environment. So we are survival machines. And that is the number one priority of the brain, survival over everything else. So we've had exposure to this chemical or this mold, or whatever it may be. And in that process, at that particular time, that vulnerability means that the brain will create a response or a reaction to that chemical that perhaps other people wouldn't necessarily react to. So at that point in time, the brain makes a decision that this chemical or this mold, at this point in time is dangerous for me because I know I have this genetic vulnerability, perhaps I won't be able to detoxify this chemical from my system. Or even if there isn't the genetic vulnerability, the body and the brain just make that decision that this chemical is very, very, very dangerous. And there are two brain structures where I believe that the software change occurs, and that is the amygdala and the insula. So the amygdala are two round, little almond shaped structures behind our eyes. And the insula is a brain structure that kind of sits just between the kind of limbic area and the cortex. It's more a kind of cortical region. And those two brain structures work together to defend us from things that could potentially be very dangerous or catastrophic for the body. And within those two brain structures, I believe chemical or neurological learning occurs, which essentially means that either as a result of that chemical exposure, even that chemical may itself cause a massive inflammatory response, or that chemical may indeed affect the brain directly. Although it's difficult to prove that the amygdala and insia make a decision, wow, that chemical is dangerous, or that mould is incredibly dangerous. And because we are in a vulnerable position, emotionally, mentally, physiologically, we are weak. Because we are feeling weak, we must over defend against this particular chemical now and in the future, which then leads us on to this vicious cycle. So I believe the trauma occurs in the amygdala and the insula. There's dysfunction in the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate, which is another brain structure which decides on what we focus on, where that spotlight of attention is. The anterior cingulate also becomes trained to now train all of the brain's resources to direct them against potential dangers and events.