July 2024 Health Care Forum
On July 3, 2024, the third recorded Salus Health Care Forum was held. In attendance were Mitch Applegate, William Bergquist, Jeremy Fish, Walt Mills, Perry Pugno, Scott Sandland and Mark Vukalcic. The Trigger topic for this forum was provided by Peter Sterling (a noted neurobiologist and author or co-author of any publications (including Principles of Neural Design). It concerned the process that Sterling identifies as allostasis, as this process relates to medical diagnoses and treatments.
Follow-up Comments
Jeremy Fish posted this email following conclusion of the forum:
Thanks for Peter’s provocative trigger topic of Allostasis vs Homeostasis, which launched us into a broad discussion of childhood experiences, the natural adaptive capacity of our minds to predict what’s next based on what is happening right now—and that shifting our focus from “eliminating errors to restore us to comfort and stability”, to “more accurately predicting what comes next so we are prepared and ready to navigate through” is the essence of a new way of framing our pursuit of health and wellness.
Perry made his statement via Chat toward the end which I think captured the spirit of our discussions, so am sharing here:
Does the highly structured life we build for children today interfere with the “brain training” necessary for functional predictions when facing undifferentiated problems in our lives? Are we, therefore, working against allostatic capacity for predictive adaptation ?
Is that why I became a family doc… energized by undifferentiated problems and seeking both therapeutic and preventive interventions to improve people’s lives ?
Also, Walt brought up the term “Allostatic Load” which is used in Public & Population Health literature to indicate “the accumulation of toxic loads that disrupt our natural physiological state via environmental, stress, racial, cultural, chemical and other sources that stress our system”
A High Allostatic Load would indicate a pathological disruption in natural allostatic dynamics—thus creating sufficient disruption in our overall health and creating the circumstances for acute and chronic illnesses to take over. (CAD, Cancer, Diabetes, Hypertension and the like). I believe “Allostatic Load” is derivative of Peter’s “Allostasis” yet is itself a complex term we might venture back into at a later time.
Adverse Childhood Events as a measure of “allostatic load” is probably the most broadly understood example of how excessive external events and experiences can fundamentally shift our underlying metabolic health.
- Posted by Bill Bergquist
- On July 22, 2024
- 0 Comment
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