RE: RE: Causes??? (31/05/08)

[Guest guest]

I think the cause is totally

unknown. There are many possible contributing factors and usually a

person can identify some stressor (good or bad stress) that triggered the

RA. My guess is that our immune system has a library of things that it

identifies as “self” to be protected and a library of “other”

to be destroyed. Each library selects some specific property from a molecule

to identify it as “friend or foe”. However, each molecule is

very complex so the library does not contain the pattern for the entire

molecule, but only for a small part of the molecule. Each library is

limited in size so as we encounter new things we have to add to the library and

maybe throw away some old data that has not been used for a while. In a

primitive society people encounter a limited number of foodstuffs to classify

as “good” or “bad” and a limited number of viruses or

microbes from the local area. As travel increases people are exposed to

an increasing number of things that need to be classified.

Now comes the fanciful and far out part

that makes sense to me but maybe to nobody else. The body encounters some

new item to be classified and picks a part of that item to put in the “bad”

library. It so happens that the identified part is also contained in our

joints along with other features of the same molecule. For whatever

reason the body did not recognize that molecules with this feature needed to be

protected so it attacks our joints. Another part of our immune system is

trying to protect our joints so our body is in conflict with itself.

Anyway that’s my simplistic way of trying to understand it. The

mistake may come because we are tired or ill and not careful enough, or that

our library is too crowded to contain all the information we need to have.

Somehow our bodies identify some component of our bodies that needs to be eliminated

so we get any of a wide variety of autoimmune diseases, of which RA is one.

Some form of stress usually precedes

developing RA so that is probably a trigger. We all encounter stress of

some kind or other all the time so I don’t think of stress as the actual

cause but as a trigger. I think the actual cause is confusion in how we

identify some real or imagined threat to our bodies. Once we make an

erroneous identification there does not seem to be any way to correct the mistake

so we just have to live with the RA. Our joints have a lot of individual

components and the mistake could be such that any one component could be the

target of our misguided immune system. That might explain why RA is so

different from one person to the next.

Remember, all of the above is speculation

based on a little knowledge and a lot of dreaming. I hope it helps put

things in perspective for you. God bless.

From: Rheumatoid Arthritis [mailto:Rheumatoid Arthritis ] On Behalf Of Ken Pearson

Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 2:33

AM

Rheumatoid Arthritis

Subject: RE:

Causes??? (31/05/08)

Dear Harold

Thank you very much for answering my question so knowledgeably. I

can now picture the process you describe clearly!

Harold, if I may ask, why did you contract rheumatoid arthritis? What

were the causes?

Thanks.

God Bless.

Ken.