bngenoh
The Living Force
Very interesting theories about allergies being a detox mechanism.
Fascinating woman, and even more fascinating life. I will be digging into her allergy theory further. This just wet my appetite. ;)
_http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201204/the-mysterious-case-the-vanishing-genius said:Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions. A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace.
Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body. Her theories were hotly debated among scientists but embraced by mainstream media. In quick succession, Profet landed a six-figure MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and published two books, including Protecting Your Baby-to-Be, on what to eat—and avoid—during pregnancy.
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Though controversial to this day, Profet’s work is “a paradigmatic example of how evolution can offer new solutions to old medical riddles,” says Michael Jones, a retired psychiatrist who discovered her papers while researching evolutionary biology at the University of Missouri.
Now, converging research suggests that Profet’s allergy theory, which has thus far received less attention than her other work, may be her most important. Scientists have generally confirmed an inverse relationship between allergies and many types of cancer, but struggle to explain the observation. The traditional view is that allergies are an accident of nature. Profet argued that allergic reactions evolved to expel toxins, including deadly carcinogens, from the body.
Prior to Profet’s work, the only discussion of allergies as protective pertained to the finding that food intolerance expels such pathogens as parasitic worms. Profet observed that the sneezing, scratching, watery eyes, and blocked sinuses of pollen allergies all combat toxins, as do the nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea of food intolerance. In extreme cases, blood pressure drops like a rock during allergy-driven anaphylactic shock, to slow circulation when toxins come calling.
If allergies are a broad filter against toxins, then they could presumably combat known and unknown carcinogens. Might irritants that trigger hives also cause skin cancer? Could a heretofore unknown risk factor for brain tumors reside in an allergen that swells sinuses? Profet argued “yes” to such questions, filling her work with intriguing clues. Heavy metals such as arsenic and nickel are the most likely metals to cause cancer; they are also the most allergenic. Aflatoxins from fungus that grows on hay and grain are so allergenic that just thinking about them can cause an itch. They are also among the most carcinogenic substances known. Profet learned facts such as these while working with University of California at Berkeley toxicologist Bruce Ames.
In 2008, neurobiologist Paul Sherman and evolutionary biologist Janet Shellman-Sherman applied Profet’s allergic “prophylaxis hypothesis” to 646 studies dating back to 1953.
“We examined inverse relationships between allergies and cancers of tissues and organs directly exposed to the environment versus those not directly exposed,” says Sherman, who with his wife works at Cornell University. Food-borne carcinogens travel to the stomach and colon and circulate into the bloodstream; airborne carcinogens enter the lungs and brain through sinuses and airways. If Profet was correct, allergy sufferers should get fewer cancers in directly exposed areas.
After an exhaustive review, the Shermans and coauthor Erica Holland, a University of Massachusetts medical student, found this very correlation. Inverse associations with allergies are more than twice as common among cancers of the nine tissues and organ systems that interface with the external environment—mouth, throat, colon, rectum, gray matter, pancreas, skin, cervix, and lung—versus the nine that do not, including the breast andprostate gland.
The brain affords a particularly exacting laboratory for Profet’s theory, the Shermans claim. Dozens of research teams worldwide have shown allergies significantly reduce the risk of gray matter, or glial cell, cancers such as glioma, but have no measurable impact on cancers of the sheath that surrounds gray matter, the meninges. Eight studies since 2002 have shown that when ultrafine airborne particles are deposited on nasal membranes, they cross the blood–brain barrier via routes that come into contact with gray matter, but not with the meninges.
Other studies have shown allergies slash ovarian cancer risk up to 30 percent and leukemia by 40 percent. Cancers of the lung, pancreas, colon, and more than a dozen other areas of the body reflect the same “inverse allergy” effect. The Shermans published their findings in the journal that started Profet’s career—the Quarterly Review of Biology.
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Yet Profet’s best known and most controversial theory focused on menstruation, a seemingly inefficient and taxing biological process that has long escaped clear understanding. Menstruation, she argued, is nature’s way of cleansing reproductive canals. “Sperm are vectors of disease,” she famously stated. Bacteria from male and female genitalia cling to sperm and travel to the uterus, a concept she suggested in a 1982 Obstetrics and Gynecology journal paper entitled “Evidence for Microbial Transfer by Spermatozoa.”
Women should stay away from oral contraceptives that suppress menstruation, Profet insisted. And when patients complain of heavy periods, doctors should test for cancer and infections.
Rethink contraception! Avoid vegetables during pregnancy! Profet’s ideas stirred controversy. But she also emerged as a crossover celebrity rarely seen in academe.
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By proclaiming healthy vegetables “toxic” in her 1995 book, Protecting Your Baby-to-Be, and its 1997 sequel, Pregnancy Sickness: Using Your Body’s Natural Defenses to Protect Your Baby-to-Be, Profet incurred the wrath of prenatal nutritionists and the March of Dimes, who said she was pushing expectant mothers toward unhealthy eating at the worst possible time. :D
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The author of The Committee of Sleep, Barrett—a dream researcher—had followed Profet’s career in part because Profet told the media that her menstruation theory had had its genesis in a dream. (Profet’s dream involved black triangles embedded in red. The triangles were pathogens, she interpreted, red blood washing them away.)
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“Margie was a wonderful, free spirit in the best, intellectual sense of the phrase—a charmer, and a beauty, too,” Mansfield says. “May God protect her, wherever she is.”
Fascinating woman, and even more fascinating life. I will be digging into her allergy theory further. This just wet my appetite. ;)
blunt and to the point, my kind of gal]