Fever Chills + Nerve Damage
  The cold is partly in your mind? What most people don't know is that fever & chills + nerve damage are work almost hand in hand when you are contracting any influenza. One unorthodox area of investigation that intrigues a number of researchers is the possible role of stress in reducing the efficiency of the immune system and opening the way to infections such as colds. Stress in its narrowest physiological sense is a collection of body responses—faster heartbeat and respiration, heightened blood pressure, increased muscle tension, greater hormone output—all designed to gear the body to respond to immediate or anticipated threat.
These reactions evolved over the course of human development as a “fight or flight” response, a constructive preparation for the human animal to engage an enemy or to flee from one at all possible speed. This is typical of the fever & chills + nerve damage. But as the threats to the individuals have become less a matter of physical danger and more one of psychological challenge, the stress mechanisms have ceased to serve their original purpose. Instead, they have become a source of wear and tear for which the body has no productive release. Tension headaches, nervous stomach, aching back and chronic high blood pressure are typical outlets for the threat response today.
Some researchers now believe that less obvious ailments, including the common cold, may also be ways by which modern man unconsciously reacts to threats. Certainly, a cold provides an effective rationale for escaping situations that, recognized or unrecognized, can be overwhelming to some individuals. Pursuing this subject, Richard Totman, an investigator at Britain’s Common Cold Unit, set up an experiment aimed at discovering whether there was some link between colds and interruptions in routine social and work activity such as occur after a death in the family, the breakup of a marriage or the loss of a job.
He gave 52 volunteers a series of medical tests to determine the cold antibodies in their blood, and then ran them through interviews designed to assess their recent experience of stress and their normal psychological patterns, searching for factors that might indicate neurotic behavior. Each subject was then given nasal drops containing two common rhino viruses. The volunteers were kept isolated to prevent infection from outside sources and from each other for the next 10 days, During this period they were monitored to see who came down with a cold and how severely, as measured partly by their symptoms, partly by the more objective index of how much virus they shed. This is very important when considering fever & chills + nerve damage.
When all the information was evaluated, stress factors appeared to play nearly as large a role in determining who got uncomfortably sick as did pretrial levels of and dies. Tot man concluded that psychological factors play a large part in determining whether the body is able to mount an effective defense against a cold, He found also that a person who responded to psychological stress by dropping all normal routines and reducing work and social activity for prolonged periods was far more likely to be vulnerable to infectious assault than the individual who, under the same stresses, went calmly on with the conduct of life. Totman noted one other curious factor that he thinks may play a contributing role in the severity of colds, if not in the contracting of them:
Introverts suffered worse symptoms than extroverts, perhaps because they were more given to self-awareness and, ultimately, to self-pity. In the final analysis colds are almost inescapable. Once you have taken reasonable measures to reduce the opportunities for cold transmission and perhaps to control some of the habits that strain your immune system, you must still resign yourself to existing in a world full of colds and cold sufferers. If you fall victim to a cold, let the severity of the symptoms and your general energy level be your guide in determining how to live with it, If the symptoms are mild and previous bouts with colds have passed uneventfully, there is no medical reason to stay home from your job, school or social activities.
Colds do not, after all, spread in epidemics and if you are otherwise healthy your immune system is going to run through its complex choreography of counterattack and recovery without need of extra bed rest or isolation. Indeed, interrupting your normal routines may add strains to the burdens of your cold and this results in fever & chills + nerve damage. |
