If there was anything to the pathogen theory, it would have been noticed if these GF mice were healthier than CRed non-germ-free mice.
This conversation is just repeating itself like a stuck record.
You have produced no studies to back up your statements about germ-free mice, so we cannot assume your statements are true.
I am not accepting any of these assertions on germ-free mice unless you can cite studies.
There's no such thing as a purely functional, chronic disease absent structural damage. This is physically impossible.
Everyone who has looked into the medical science of chronic disease knows about functional disorders. Functional disorders like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) are common, and it is well known in medical circles that functional disorders take up an inordinate amount of a doctor's time, because the patient presents with symptoms, but no causes can be found.
Have a look at this Wikipedia article on functional disorders.
Functional disorders have been recently renamed as medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), which you can also look up.
I think of functional disorders as a bit like a software fault in a machine (like an aircraft). If there is a software fault, there is no physical damage to the machine, but nevertheless the machine can malfunction. Planes have crashed just due to software faults.
The immune system itself is like software: the adaptive immune response is programmable, as gets programmed all the time (to mount the appropriate antibody and T-cell responses) when exposed to new pathogens.
Sometimes it can be incorrectly programmed to attack parts of the human body, rather than pathogens. This can then result in an autoimmune condition.
Functional disorders used to be considered psychosomatic, because no structural damage could be found in this diseases. And some backwards doctors still see them as psychosomatic. But the latest evidence shows tiny microscopic abnormalities in functional disorders, and abnormalities in the functioning of various bodily systems.
Chronic immune system dysfunction is mostly caused by:
This is all structural damage.
- anergic immune cells (due to shortened telomeres or inappropriate receptors)
- thymus involution (due to cell loss)
- lymph node fibrosis (probably due to senescent cells and other damage)
- inappropriate response of healthy immune cells to damage elsewhere (destroying tissue due to senescent cell signaling or causing athero plaques to form due to getting overwhelmed by the intake of oxidized cholesterol).
Please provide some references to support the above assertions.
Your perspective on chronic disease seems to come only from the small world of anti-aging research, which is a field with a limited and narrow scope.
When I have spoken to anti-aging researchers about chronic disease, and I mention the way that pathogens can harmfully alter the immune system, they always quote the same thing: "yes we know about pathogens, we know cytomegalovirus can cause immune senescence".
That cytomegalovirus stuff is always the one thing they quote, because it appears to be the only piece of knowledge anti-aging researchers has about pathogens. Which shows how narrow anti-aging researchers are in their scope.
