Second White Paper

A typology of chronic defensive autonomic states as specific antecedents to disease etiology

In 2020, when I began architecting the Autonomic Compass software (it was not called that at the time), part of my guiding intuition was that the manner is which modern allopathic medicine and mental health regard stress-related disease (and MOST of what is wrong with modern humans is stress-related disease) is not being understood through a diagnostic axis that renders the totality of the problem visible.

To use a metaphor here, there are certain angles that you might peer in through the door or window (or keyhole) of a house that will allow you to see all the way into its interior, whereas there are certain angles that do not. (You cannot see into a house by putting your eye up to the wall. Put your eye up to a window and you’ll have better luck.)

If you use the Autonomic Nervous System as your primary diagnostic axis, it allows the totality of symptoms to come into view in a way that makes sense. If you do not use the ANS as the primary diagnostic axis you end up with a bunch of partial views that do not line up, integrate, or make sense.

So why on earth does no one arrange a diagnostic taxonomy of well and illbeing around the ANS?

Allopathic medicine provides a partial view. Psychiatry and modern mental health provide a partial view. Let’s take, for example, inflammatory bowel disease. If you go into a primary care setting, and this is what is wrong, they will run a bunch of tests to rule out organic dysfunction before sending you to a gastroenterologist. When you do get sent to the organ specific specialist, the gastroenterologist may note that you have inflammation in your guts, and may give you drugs to help with this. What the drugs won’t help with? Anxiety. What the gastro-enterologist will say? Oh, that’s not in my purview. That’s a mental health issue.

So often the next referral is to psychiatry, for anti-anxiety meds. But guess what– the psychiatrist capable of treating your anxiety has no diagnostic framework adequate to address inflammation in your guts. That is not in their purview. So now you are on two drugs and you have three doctors (one for your general health, one for your guts, one for your anxiety). But what about the brain fog? What about fatigue? Who helps with that?

The problem in both of these cases is that inflammatory bowel disease is not a problem with your guts. It is a problem with the neural regulation of the guts, and the neural regulation of the guts is governed by the Autonomic Nervous System.

So what to do? If people are wealthy enough, they aggregate a private retinue of practitioners, often centered around a functional or integrative medicine team. If a person does not have the resources for this, they continue to shuffle between traditional medical departments, not getting better, draining health system resources, and not getting relief. This is a major problem for health system, and a major problem for patients.

At the center of this entire problem is something structural. Allopathic medicine emerged from a mindbody split, and every stress related disorder is a mindbody problem.

Allopathic medicine is incapable of centering the Autonomic Nervous System in diagnosis, because they would have to re-organize every medical school, medical textbook, specialty training program, clinic, and hospital on earth.

In this white paper, we explore what it would mean to create a taxonomy of disease correlated to non-resolving antecedent autonomic states. Because that is what Inflammatory Bowel Disease is. And so is anxiety, depression, frozen shoulder, restless leg, PTSD, c-PTSD, complex chronic illness, various auto-immune disorders, complex regional pain syndrome, and Parkinson’s disease. And these are just the ones we have treated clinically. Most of what is wrong with us - 60 to 80% - are the neurobiological sequelae and entanglements with other physiological systems of chronic and non-resolving defensive (threat response) autonomic states.

In our research and innovation lab, we are working on a complete autonomic taxonomy of disease etiology. The white paper is a glimpse into this work. If you are excited about this side of our work, get a front row seat through an innovation lab subscription. Want to use this kind of autonomic taxonomy to help heal yourself? That is what the autonomic compass does.

NEW WHITE PAPER

A typology of chronic defensive autonomic states as specific antecedents to disease etiology

Abstract: Correlating stress-related diseases with their specific autonomic antecedents provides 1) a novel and clinically-relevant taxonomy of stress-related disease etiology, 2) an empirical basis for early preventive intervention if there is detection or monitoring of enduring pathogenic autonomic states, and 3) pathways to more effective treatment of underlying autonomic strata beneath symptoms.

For the past decade, Hearth Science has been developing a new foundation model of autonomic physiology, and correlating pathogenic autonomic states with stress-related disease etiology. In this white paper we map out general findings, exploring the autonomic undergirding of a variety of illustrative disease pathologies, as well as characterizing some of the complex non-linear interactions between autonomic substrates, the immune system, and the neuroendocrine system. This mapping provides a framework for understanding autonomic antecedents to common stress-related pathology ranging from post-traumatic stress injuries, to pain syndromes, to gastro-intestinal disease, auto-immune disease, and beyond. It focuses not on symptoms in target organs, but rather on the autonomic pattern language of the down-regulation of specific physiological systems as a result of chronic or archived allostatic loads in the body, which are differentiated by neurology and neurochemistry.