Learn how to Bump up Your Immune System!
If you keep getting sick, you have an autoimmune disease, precancer or cancer, listen up! Your immune system is to blame! You most likely have an unhealthy or aging immune system. Our immune systems age and become suboptimal over age 40, and become literally incompetent after age 60. Women’s immune system starts to fail they reach 40. Men have an extension but their immune system tanks after age 50.
The most important factor influencing the health of your immune system after age 50 or 60 is your free- testosterone (the active form of testosterone). The falling level of free testosterone occurs at the same time as the increase in number of autoimmune diseases, cancer, viruses and bacterial infections. In other words, a person’s falling free Testosterone triggers the aging of the immune system, and the immune system decreases every year after 40.
Now don’t freak out because if low free T causes a lack of normal immune function, then replacing testosterone in the bio-identical form is the only way to regain a healthy immune system. So, we can’t turn back the clock, but we can care for our immune system in several ways that help us avoid the diseases that follow poor immune function: autoimmune diseases, viruses, pneumonia, and cancer.
Some of my friends (who are over 60 and some over 70) always seem to have a cough, a sinus infection, and viral illnesses. They blame it on their grandchildren bringing them viruses from daycare…..but in reality, they have been exposed to viruses throughout their day forever, but they didn’t get sick when they were younger (when their own kids brought home the same viruses) until their defense system started to fail with aging.
Luckily this has not continued because most of my friends are aging in a healthy fashion because they receive T pellets with me and BioBalance Health. They got an extension of their immune protection with the first testosterone pellet treatment.
Let me answer a question before it is asked. How can testosterone replacement increase the immune systems activity to fend off communicable disease and cancer, when it also decreases and regulates the overactive immune system of patients with autoimmune disease. TESTOSTERONE IS AN IMMUNE MODULATORY in the youthful body and it can only be replaced with bio-identical non-micronized T pellets to recreate the same immune modulation.
AI is confused about the immune benefit of replacement of T because the majority of the studies about T replacement was done with testosterone cypionate injections which are not the same as our own T or T pellets and do not provide immune protection!
With the immune system, as with all things, nothing lasts forever. The protective effect doesn’t always extend the protection from testosterone stimulated immunity for our whole life, even though it is the most effective factor, it is not the only factor that affects the immune system.
The things you cannot control that interfere with immunity. They include:
- Genetic based cancers,
- Toxins in our environment,
- Chronic infections like Lyme disease and long-term Covid infection,
- Severe stress that increases our cortisol and decreases the effectiveness of our immune system
- Drugs for some diseases result in an impotent immune system (current treatment of autoimmune diseases)
- Severe depression or anxiety fights with the immune system
- Gut disease that lowers the immune support from the intestinal bacteria
- Cancer treatment that lowers the ability of the immune system to work properly except against the cancer they are fighting eg radiation therapy.
But I am here to tell you about the things You CAN control to extend the health of your immune system by changing your lifestyle:
- Certain supplements,
- Whole foods diet-no fast foods, processed foods
- Daily exercise for an hour
- Treat your obesity—it is the biggest factor that suppresses your immunity by causing chronic inflammation
- Stop drinking Alcohol
- Stop smoking both cigarettes, cigars, and marijuana
- Stop fluorinated water intake
Isn’t your healthy life in the future worth some organization and work now? I doubt you want to spend the rest of your life in doctor’s offices, but if you don’t take care of your immune system you will!
Let me digress here to tie this to something you may have noticed in your experience…
- Breast Cancer peaks starting mid 40s…Breast cancer is a failure of your immune system to kill the cancer cells that normally occur every day in every woman… The loss of testosterone increases the incidence of breast cancer.
- Prostate cancer begins to increase in men after 55, the exact age when the male immune system becomes deficient in free-testosterone.
- Autoimmune diseases occur in women starting in the 4th decade in women, at the same time as T deficiency occurs.
- Autoimmune disease occurs in men after 55 when male testosterone drops below ideal levels.
- After age 60 both men and women not on testosterone need more help for their immune systems. Evidence that the mainstream medicine knows that is that we are given more potent immunizations than people under 60.
I can go on and on about our risk of disease raising after middle age, but if you have lived you have seen yet not understood why this happens.
What is the Lifetime progression of the immune system?
When we are babies we are born with the immunity that our mothers give us for the first 3-6 months, however our own immune system has not kicked in yet, so we tell new mothers to keep babies at home and to avoid crowds before 3 months of age so they don’t get every virus and bacteria out there. After 3-6 months the immune system of a baby cranks up, and the Thymus gland, the source of T killer cells, T helper cells, and antibodies= our immune system becomes very active. The thymus gland sits behind the breastbone (sternum) and is very large in babies compared to the size of the chest. The thymus’s job is to help a child live through exposure to all the viruses and bacteria in their environment. Growth hormone is the hormone that supports the health of the thymus gland in childhood.
After childhood the thymus gland shrinks slowly, but progressively until age 40 when it loses its powerful ability to recognize and kill invaders. The hormone that supports the Thymus in adulthood, is primarily testosterone as well as Growth Hormone to a lesser degree. Both start a downward path, and the thymus shrinks and becomes less protective. If we don’t replace testosterone, our immune system tanks following the drop of testosterone. The incidence of all diseases that depend on the protection of the immune system, start to increase as testosterone drops with age.
If the immune system is stimulated by Testosterone to be more active, then why does do we need Testosterone to treat autoimmune disease age 40?
The immune system is held in balance by GH/and activity of the thymus gland in childhood and by testosterone in adulthood. Testosterone is both an immune stimulator and an immune modulator….Testosterone stimulates the production of immune cells and antibodies if they are low, but it also keeps and overactive misguided immune system from attacking the body itself. Loss of T destabilizes the immune system and genetic mutations in cells can’t be stopped, or re-targeted by the immune cells, without testosterone.
One of my most interesting reads is a book called Lies Your Doctor Told You. I don’t agree with all of what the author writes, however his read on cancer and autoimmune disease is correct: An unhealthy immune system is the real cause of cancer and autoimmune disease. His other statement that I agree with is that Testosterone is necessary as we age to protect our immune system from failing and that I agree with. Over the next decades mainstream medicine will slowly be more aware of these facts and doctors will be trained to treat testosterone deficiency to prevent future disease.
This Health cast was written and presented by Dr. Kathy Maupin, M.D., Bio-identical Hormone Replacement Expert and Author. www.BioBalanceHealth.com • (314) 993-0963. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel and please check “ Like “. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at BioBalanceHealth.
