Immunology

Mast Cell

Mast Cell Activation

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

Immune Insights: Pathways To Healing MCAS

Reversing Mast Cell Activation and Histamine Intolerance Summit 2.0

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OSwVczyhKz3kCkkb99IrcM4qC9TMZcVE/view

Inside the body, the mucosal linings of the organs produce a sticky, viscous fluid that traps our pathogens. These linings cover areas such as the respiratory tract, the gastrointestinal tract, and the urogenital tract, and they can act as internal guards for us. Then we have our chemical barrier. We have lysosomes in the eyes. These contain enzymes that destroy bacteria and viruses and protect our eyes from infection. We also have acid in the stomach. This is important. I&#8217;m often misunderstood. when we&#8217;re looking at something like H. Pylori, which decreases our stomach acid, or when we take something like a proton pump inhibitor, which decreases our stomach acid, potentially allowing more pathogens to enter our body. If you have a parasite in your food, your stomach acid is going to kill it off. But sometimes, when that stomach acid gets lower, we&#8217;re not able to kill some of these pathogens. that can lead us to more infections that we&#8217;re dealing with. It&#8217;s just to keep in mind that we do need stomach acid. That can be a big misconception a lot of times. Then we have our mast cells, which is what we&#8217;re talking about here. These cells play a key role in our inflammatory process. Upon detecting invaders, they release histamine and many other chemicals, such as tryptase and heparin, which increase blood flow to the affected area. They&#8217;re trying to help the other white blood cells get to that area. This results in inflammation. Again, remember, inflammation in a short time is a good thing. That&#8217;s what we want to do. We want to create inflammation to fight off the infection. But we want it to go down. It&#8217;s when this inflammation becomes chronic that we have a problem. We want to get the inflammation there to isolate the intruder and signal immune cells to the sites. Then we have white blood cells called leukocytes. They are mobilized to the site of inflammation. They act as soldiers, ready to fight that invading pathogen. Then we have our phagocytes. Neutrophils are the most abundant type of white blood cell. They&#8217;re among the first responders to that infection site. They can quickly reach areas of the breach to attack pathogens. After destroying the invaders, they die, and they contribute to the pus formation.
When you have a cut or something and you&#8217;re seeing pus come out, that&#8217;s when your neutrophils are dying off, which is interesting. Then we have our macrophages. These are the big eaters. Think of these as the Pacman. They engulf and digest pathogens. They can roam freely in our bloodstream. They&#8217;re also isolated in specific areas that are prone to infection. Macrophages can consume numerous pathogens before they die off. Then we also have our natural killer cells, specialized in detecting cells that have become cancerous and are infected with viruses. They look for cells that lack normal proteins called NHC on their surface as a sign of abnormality. I&#8217;m finding such a cell. The natural killer cells bind to it and release deadly chemicals to kill it. Then we have our dendritic cells, and they&#8217;re going to bridge us over to that adaptive immunity. Dendritic cells are stations at the interface with the external environment and places like your skin, your nose, and your lungs. They ingest pathogens and process their antigens. Then they migrate to the lymph nodes to present these antigens to our T cells of the adaptive immune system, thus initiating a more targeted response. We&#8217;re not going to get in-depth with the adaptive immune system today. But I just want to give you a brief overview. Unlike the innate immune system, which responds immediately and not specifically to threats, the adaptive immune system tailors its response to specific antigens. It creates memory cells that allow for a faster and more effective response when you&#8217;re exposed.
It primarily involves two types of blood cells. It has B cells, which produce antibodies that bind to specific antigens and neutralize them or mark them for destruction, and T cells, which either help coordinate the immune response with our T helper cells or directly kill infected cells with our cytotoxic T cells. The adaptive immune response takes longer to initiate than the innate immune response, several days, but it provides long-lasting protection. It has that immunological memory; that&#8217;s why you don&#8217;t get the same virus over and over. The problem is that when you&#8217;re constantly exposed to the things we&#8217;ve been talking about, like invaders, underlying gut infections, parasites, candida, tick-borne illnesses, viruses, things that cause chronic inflammation, toxins like mold, heavy metals, allergens, other chemicals, stressors like chronic stress, past trauma, and your mast cells. They&#8217;ll start getting confused, and they&#8217;ll start firing constantly at things that are not threats. This is why we start to be overreactive. We start to be hypersensitive. We can&#8217;t do anything without getting a reaction sometimes. Mast cell activation syndrome can have different levels of reactivity. Just because you&#8217;re not reacting to everything if you&#8217;re not so hypersensitive doesn&#8217;t mean that you&#8217;re not having this reaction.
We can still see people who can tolerate supplements that can do things when their mast cells are activated; your symptoms might not be as strong, but then we can see the whole gamut of people who are reacting to everything that can&#8217;t take supplements—that you can react to water, to air, to everything that you touch. We&#8217;re getting this extreme hypersensitivity, and you can even see your cells begin to change. We start to go into what we call a cell danger response, where our cells go into lockdown, and the cell danger response is a cellular-initiated response to threats such as infections and toxins. Then cells release signaling molecules, for example, cytokines or chemokines, that communicate with our neighboring cells and the immune system. These signals are critical for coordinating a comprehensive response to detect threats. Under normal circumstances, a cell danger response will recede once that threat is effectively removed. But once the body has crossed the threshold of toxicity, pathogen overload, trauma, stress, and injury, we&#8217;ve entered the cell danger response. There can be several biochemical changes that begin to happen. What we start to see is the stiffening of our cell membrane. Dr. Naviaux, who discovered the cell danger response, says we start hardening our cell borders and we don&#8217;t trust our neighbors. Think of your cells like a turtle. They want to protect themselves. They want to get harder. They want to stay away and hide because we feel this danger. This is going on all the time, and we can&#8217;t figure it out.
So we start to see this cell danger, and things go haywire. Your microbes volume changes, your hormones change, and you get inflammation. You get more inflammation. You get this immune dysregulation. We start to see things like methylation changes, lower glutathione production, a decrease in vitamin D, and an enzyme called histidine decarboxylase activity getting increased. That&#8217;s going to trigger more mast cell response activity; heme activity gets altered. Then we can see tryptophan gets shunted away from serotonin and melatonin affecting our mood and our sleep. We start to see bowel changes, microbiome changes, and mitochondrial changes. We start to see a change in the change in the sleep cycle. We start to feel fatigued. We feel exhausted all the time. We feel like we&#8217;re pushing our bodies. Then we can start to see this hypersensitivity. We start to see someone who needs to detox, who may be overloaded with infections and toxins and needs to improve methylation but can feel much worse after taking something like glutathione or methylated B vitamin. A good thing at the wrong time can be a real problem. then we start to get to another level. If your cells are constantly feeling in danger, it starts to affect your limbic system.
When your cells are screaming danger, the brain associates danger with everything you do. You could be going for a walk or playing with your kids, doing pleasant things, and you&#8217;re reacting because your body&#8217;s not feeling safe. Imagine if you smell a rose, but every time you smell that rose, you also touch your stove. You smell your rose, and you touch your stove. Your body starts to think that the smell of the rose is a dangerous response because you&#8217;re starting to associate it. When I smell this beautiful smell, I have pain. So you can then go and smell a rose and feel that pain because your body has been associating that with it.  We can see past traumas playing a role here, which is why we need to look at the physiological, and psychological parts together. This is why mindset and nervous system work are foundational parts of healing. We need to rewire the nervous system to stabilize and calm the mast cells. We need to be able to get the body back into our parasympathetic nervous system. We need to work on our limbic system and rewire those pathways. We need to work on the vagus nerve and the gut-brain connection. We need to sometimes do some somatic work to help with trauma release. We need to work on reframing our thoughts. We need to work on rewiring and building this neuroplasticity so that we can have lasting healing. We do that tediously while we&#8217;re working on the root causes. We&#8217;re doing the nervous system work at the same time while we&#8217;re healing the gut, while we’re stabilizing the mast cells, and while we&#8217;re doing these other things to get lasting results.
We also need to work on healing our gut. We need to support gut motility. We need to support the microbiome. We need to heal that gut lining so that we&#8217;re not getting this systemic inflammation from things that are happening inside the gut. We need to support constipation so we can open our detox pathways. We are discussing the role of diamine oxidase and breaking gut histamine. We need to work on these foundational pieces so that we can start getting you to metabolize histamine. While we&#8217;re doing that, we&#8217;re also working on stabilizing mast cells. Looking at a low-histamine diet, we have a whole talk on navigating foods. I encourage you to watch that one. We&#8217;re going to look at the effects of the effects of the low histamine diet on mast cell stabilization. People can have triggers that go beyond histamine. We can have oxalate salicylates, lectins, and FODMAPs for individual food sensitivities. We need to take all of that into account when we&#8217;re working on the diet. That is more to calm things down. That&#8217;s not the long-term solution. I want to say that because that&#8217;s an important piece. So many people talk about diet, and that&#8217;s one piece of this puzzle, but it&#8217;s not the only piece, and it&#8217;s not the long-term solution because we can start to become more sensitive to more foods if our goal is just to remove all foods. Then we can start working on things like the adrenals, blood sugar, hormone support, nutrient support, all of those things that we need to look at to get back and balance. Then we need to look at mycotoxin exposure, chemical exposure, and heavy metal exposure. We need to start working on detoxing. But we can&#8217;t do this until we have all of the other things in place. This is important because if you detox too soon, it can backfire and make you feel worse. We need to ensure that everything is optimized and that all of our drainage pathways are open so that toxins can be removed from the body. If you&#8217;re ready to get this healing process started, get in touch with me or one of the practitioners who are teaching you about the stomach. Stay tuned, because, after the summit finishes, I&#8217;m going to be hosting a series of classes to get you more information on this process. We help people from all over the world, so be sure to add info@megmill.com, that’s MEGMILL dot com to your safe email list and I&#8217;ll be in touch with you after the summit.
You can also find me at megmill.com and I have all of the summit resources posted at megmill.com/summit. We have some great things that people have been talking about this whole week. You can go over there, find information, and find resources. I have guides that are there for you to help you through some of these things. That&#8217;s a great place to get started. If you&#8217;d like to get permanent access to the summit interviews, just email support@drtalks.com and the team will get you all sorted out. I hope you have a great day.

<h6>Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP </h6>
Hello and welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome And Histamine Intolerance Summit. I&#8217;m your host, Dr. Meg Mill, and I am so happy to be here with you this week. Today, we&#8217;re going to talk about the immune system. We&#8217;re going to talk about why your mast cells have gone haywire and are overreacting. We&#8217;re going to get into the cell danger response and how this plays a role in what&#8217;s going on. Then we&#8217;re going to talk a little bit about the order in which we approach things that can be important for long-lasting healing and not overreacting to some of the treatments that we need to do. I want to start by talking a little bit about the immune system and just give an overall week to spend a full hour talking about the immune system. This is going to be brief, but it&#8217;s just going to give you an overall idea of what is going on in your immune system, the purpose of it, and what starts to happen. Our body has a powerful army that protects us from outside threats, and these threats can come from bacteria, parasites, fungi, and viruses. Every day we encounter a huge number of viruses and bacteria, and we don&#8217;t get sick every day. This is because of our immune system. It&#8217;s an army of cells that are roaming our body, ready to ward off attacks at all times. Our immune system can be divided into two parts. We have our innate immunity and our adaptive immunity. Our innate immunity is nonspecific. It&#8217;s your body&#8217;s initial response to a foreign invader, regardless of its nature. This system is alert. It&#8217;s surveying for danger. Unlike our adaptive immunity, which targets specific pathogens, our innate immunity doesn&#8217;t differentiate between types of pathogens. Its primary goal is to block or eliminate intruders before they can establish an infection. It&#8217;s alert. It&#8217;s ready to go. It&#8217;s not going to put tags on it. It&#8217;s not going to differentiate. That&#8217;s where our mast cells are coming in. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re going to talk about. The first part here is the physical barrier. Think of your skin. Your skin acts as a physical barrier to prevent pathogens from entering your body. It&#8217;s our largest organ, and it serves as a formidable wall against these invaders. We also have our mucosal lining.

https://d1tnc8rqovg0h0.cloudfront.net/2024+Summits/2024+Reversing+Mast+Cell+Activation+Summit+/Transcripts/2024_RMCAHIS_Mini+Talk+Day+4+Transcript+File.pdf

Dr. Meg Mill is a Functional Medicine Practitioner, PharmD, bestselling author, speaker, and podcast host. She was first introduced to Functional Medicine as a patient. She struggled with many of the issues the people she works with struggle with today. She has made it her mission to help people all around the world with her virtual practice. She works with people worldwide to heal the root cause of seemingly unrelated health struggles through advanced diagnostic testing and personalized support. With her two decades of clinical experience in conventional and functional medicine her practice is designed to look at all factors surrounding health conditions including genetic, epigenetic, biochemical, emotional, and environmental.
She has been seen in national publications and on media such as Fox News Channel, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Reader’s Digest, Health Magazine, Mind Body Green, Authority Magazine, Life &amp; Style and Sunset Magazine as well as several national publications, blogs and podcast guest appearances.
After helping hundreds of patients transform their health and resolve gut health issues, hormonal imbalances, allergies, skin conditions, migraines and mood imbalances. Dr. Mill has pioneered solutions for the missing link to resolving many of these chronic health conditions by reversing Histamine Intolerance and MCAS with her revolutionary E.A.T Method. Having personally experienced the transformative power of functional medicine, she’s on a mission to help others reclaim their health and vitality, enabling them to lead fulfilling lives.

Immune Insights: Pathways To Healing MCAS

Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP

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Meg Mill, PharmD, AFMCP