398: How PTSD Affects Your Immune System—and What You Can Do About It
34:23 Share

Hey everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you're probably someone who's deeply interested in elevating your health, right? Yeah, I think so if you're listening to this podcast. Well, if there's anything I've learned over the past few decades of helping patients and other people heal and transform their health, it's this. If you truly want to heal and experience a breakthrough, it happens at the intersection of natural health, holistic medicine, personal growth, and even psychology. And that's exactly what I dive into on the

Dr. Josh Axe Show. On my show, I give practical tips and insights on how to grow in body, mind, and spirit and overcome conditions like hypothyroidism. I teach principles like how to become a better methylator, improve gut health,

experience a breakthrough in autoimmune disease, how to detoxify your body, and how to heal using food as medicine, but also mindset medicine. Whether you're looking for a mindset breakthrough, a spiritual breakthrough, or a health breakthrough, you're not gonna wanna miss the next episode of the Dr. Josh Axe Show. You can find it on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Go to those channels now and subscribe today.

Welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast, where East meets West in the world of medicine. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and here we explore how modern Western science and traditional Eastern wisdom come together to unlock the body's full healing potential. Each week, we'll dive into powerful tools, techniques, and approaches from both sides of the world to help you optimize your health and live with vitality. Let's bridge the gap between ancient practices and cutting-edge medicine. Let's get started.

Hello friends, welcome to the Ancient Health Podcast where East meets West. I'm your host Dr. Chris Motley. We're going to talk about PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and its relationship to your immune system. I want to ask you a question. Do you ever feel that you can get anxiety, anxiety symptoms, shortness of breath, rapid pulse or heart rate, tightness in your chest, any changes in your blood pressure, and if you feel as though you're always getting sick?

are you always on the brink of getting sick chronic digestive issues cold and flu symptoms allergy symptoms and in the back of your mind you think i wonder if what i am feeling in my emotional body my trauma is it associated with how my immune system reacts or responds well if that is you we are going to talk about

How severe it can affect your body and what are some of the things you can do to help with cleaning up? I use that very kindly, like cleaning up, but as in releasing the PTSD. Are there things that you can do to help with this? And I believe yes, there is.

We're talking about PTSD, and if you suffer from it or know somebody who does, then you know how severe and how much it can debilitate you. I have every single member of my family, all the males, have mostly all been in the military. Thankfully, most of them don't have severe PTSD, but I do have some close family that do have PTSD and that do suffer from PTSD.

These different shifts in their neurology and their brain because of the thing they experienced within a war or within that time. So I see it firsthand. But on the other hand, it doesn't just have to do with war. If you're out there, you guys know as well as I do, if you're driving and listening right now or watching, you can go to work.

And expect to talk to somebody that may not be your favorite person at the office. And you guys are laughing and smiling. And you're like, there's somebody out there that I cannot stand. And, you know, I just don't want to see their face. Now, if that's you and you're smiling, you're like, yeah, but I'm almost crying inside. I get it. But that's PTSD. You've suffered trauma.

And your body has built up a defense mechanism all the time you've been around those people, places, things, or work, or job, or family life. And your body has tried to build up a reaction to it. And that means you have to heighten your blood pressure. You have to, you know, basically dilate your eyes. You have to get moving to escape or fight against something.

So it can happen in the workplace. It can happen at home. It can happen at school. Kids can get PTSD. I have seen kids come in that are less than 10 years old with PTSD. And this is like them actually being diagnosed with it. And that's just so alarming to me that we live in fear and we live in injury. We live in hurt. And it is a shift of the mind to get out of PTSD. And there are some great practitioners and teachers out there that have podcasts about that.

But I want to give you some practical ways along with good other any other techniques, but the ways in Chinese medicine and ancient health forms of how to actually clean it from an ancient perspective. And there's many other types of techniques. So if you guys out there have any other forms, please send it to me in the comment section. I'd love to learn even more. There was a condition known as soldier's heart. And this was in the Civil War. A soldier's heart.

was basically PTSD defined back in that time era where the soldiers have shortness of breath. They have rapid pulse rate. They were having problems with severe anxiety and chest pains. And the heart was getting overstimulated because if you think about it, before you go into war, you're saying tomorrow we're going to go into war and there's going to be people that are going to be shooting at you with the small metal guns

in their muskets and those things can tear right through your bone and they would not even put anesthesia on it. They would just saw your leg off if something happened and you got an injury. Now, if you heard about somebody doing that, going through that, what would you do? Like you would have all the blood pressure in the world. You could not relax. There has been PTSD throughout all ages, in my opinion. When you fast forward into World War II, they called it shell shock.

And they would get such big panic issues that they could not go to sleep. So they had sleep issues. The same thing happens in a minor scale to some of us where we anticipate what's going to happen the next day at work, the next encounter with a boss that I may not favor, or the amount of the workload. I like to use myself as an example. There's times when I look at my schedule and it's so heavy at times I'm thinking, wow, how am I going to surmount all this?

So I take my B vitamins, I take my minerals, I take all my things and it helps. It gives me the energy to handle it. Take my B minerals, shout out to B minerals. But one thing that I have to truly consider is you don't want to take your body and push it continuously to a point where you know it's leading you to emotional exhaustion, but you're doing it to make the ends meet.

So when you know that you are facing an issue that has emotional exhaustion as one of the results, you can take a lot of supplementation. And I believe in it. I take homeopathics, which I think really helped me to do it. But I necessarily do not want to keep taking a supplement to help me keep coping with something. That's me personally. I'm not saying you have that way. Maybe you do have to do it because it's the way you are in your life.

But I want to give me the strength to create more vision. So how can I get out of this situation? How can I improve the situation? That's what I would say, first of all. And so you have these, quote, minor skills, but they're big to you. It doesn't mean you're in war. You could be super huge in your brain and taking up all your neurology. Side note, the more you think about something,

And then another author, I can't remember her name. She was on one of the other, I think it was on Joe Rogan or another podcast. She was saying the more we ruminate, the more we ruminate and chew like a cow chews on cud. I'm not calling you a cow. I'm not calling myself a cow. I'm saying we chew on something over and over again like cud, chew on the cud like a cow and ruminate. What you're doing is you're growing that neuronal network, that nerve network in your brain. And you're only carrying that information within those nerves.

So if you're always thinking about a bully, you're growing that nervous network, the spider web in your brain to only carry the signals for the bully. And any sensation, sight, sound, smell, hearing, taste, touch, anything that would remind you of the bully will trigger the network. Okay, that's the basics. So these doctors saw that these soldiers with the shell shock and the soldier's heart

Anytime they got reminded, their body did, of the sensation of what was happening in war, they went back into the shell shock. Soldier's heart. Doesn't make sense. Their brain doesn't know how else to react to it because that trauma is so imprinted on their body, on your physiology, on your brain, that your only way to cope is I have to have a form of a defense mechanism. Okay? So...

When they started seeing this reaction and response, they're thinking this definitely is an emotional response. And they termed or coined the term PTSD in 1980 after they researched the survivors of the Vietnam War. And it saddened me because then you saw how people had abusive painkillers because they are in so much pain.

And I just look out. I mean, truly, if you see my face now, I've had people that I love that are on those kind of conditions because they've been in such military settings. I'm not putting down the military. I'm so proud of all the veterans and I love the veterans. My family's veterans. So shout out to all the veterans out there. I love y'all. But when you look at it and you see how people are hurting and you think, well, let's just say you had a bad relationship with your mother and it puts you into PTSD. You want to avoid pain. And

This is where your body will store all that information and push it into the closets of the mind and of the brain. But your body will take your emotional trauma, and if it is too great for you to process, it's creating that neuronal network. But the information that cannot be processed at that present time will be suppressed in an area of the brain. And so it's trying to help you forget the trauma.

the information. I like to look at it as an issue with like the iPhone. If you have too much information that is being downloaded onto your phone and it's too many gigs and you don't have enough RAM memory, you don't have enough memory space on your phone, it will make the phone run slower and it will make all the other apps run slower because it's diverting all the energy into that one program.

That's what happens when the emotions or memory is suppressed. So what they're saying in neurology, and this is just maybe just a quick explanation, and there's probably even more research by the time this comes out, is that you have certain areas like the limbic system. The limbic system. You also have the amygdala, the hippocampus. All these are areas like near the horseshoe area.

area of the brain. And what it's saying is that we can make it very complicated, but what happens is that area of your brain is there to help you process all your stress. That's just what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to help you process your stress. If it gets overloaded and it doesn't know what to do, it's going to be like, I'm going to put that into a closet over there and process it later because I don't have enough hormones. I don't have enough neurotransmitters. I don't have enough chemistry right now

to handle what just came down the pipe. Your body uses those centers of your brain, those areas of the brain act as a thermostat. So that's why some people, if they heard a really loud noise and they have PTSD, they'll shut down or they'll faint or they'll black out because it's too much neurological information. Does that make sense? It's just like, it's too much. I'm going to shut down. That's why people disassociate.

So the brain is recording all the information. They say, even in PTSD, if you suffered it when you're a baby, when you're a kid, I don't care if you're in the womb, if you suffer from that information and it's too much for your body, it's stored in a certain area of the brain. That brain has neurological, fascial, energetic, frequency, electrical connections to other parts of your body. And people think it's so weird. They do. They're like, there's no way that my...

that my tricep, there's no way that my tricep muscle in the back of my arms is associated with my pancreas. Okay, okay, I get that. Because I can look it up on, you know, put on AI and such. But if you research in gestation, when you are forming as an embryo in the womb, you have certain days of your gestation, of your growth, where there are certain parts of your body being created at the exact same time. Does that make sense?

certain days of your gestation, and you can check it out, that certain muscles are created on the same day that certain organs are. Your triceps are created pretty much the same day your pancreas are. So they all have a resonant frequency. They are connected. So when I see a person with a very weak tricep or a latissimus muscle, I automatically know their pancreas or their spleen is injured. That's how cool embryology is. That's how we are interconnected.

And so you have a part of your brain that has a trauma. You have a part of your body that has a trauma. So you can have pain and injury in both ways. You injure a part of the body, like say you get hit in the lat. Can that send a signal up to your brain and then go back down to your pancreas? Yep. And vice versa. So you start to learn how PTSD can not only mar and scar your emotional body, but if it's pushed away into the closets of the mind and of the brain, that energy reduction and pull happens.

can then affect the parts of the body associated with that part of the brain, part of that area where it's stored. They're all interconnected. So you can start having physical issues. You can start having severe physical pain and reduction of your immune system from PTSD. One of the things I just mentioned, I talked about the tricep, I talked about the latissimus muscles, you know, the wing muscles you see on the comic books where those guys have those big wings like a cobra.

that's a lat muscle. It helps you do the lat pulldown, the lat lifts. Now, it's associated with the pancreas and spleen. Here's a good example. Your spleen is related, your spleen to organs. In Chinese medicine, in the ancient world, spleen and the pancreas

are two organs that literally sit right beside each other. And the pancreas is often associated with you releasing insulin to help you with blood sugar. The spleen is associated with you removing old, dead red blood cells, shifting them to the liver to make bile. But it also helps you with production and maturation of white blood cells and also serves as a filter to filter out the junk and the crud out of your lymph system. That's the spleen and the pancreas.

heavily associated with the formation of the white blood cells, helps your immune system stay strong. What happens when you get Epstein-Barr virus? The Epstein-Barr virus gets into your lymph, goes into the B lymphocyte cells, works their way in there because they have a natural attraction to the B lymphocytes, starts to replicate themselves in your cells, takes them over, pops them open. That's what happens when you get Epstein-Barr. In Chinese medicine, the motion...

that's associated with your spleen and your pancreas is worry over concern i'm thinking all the time i can't stop thinking i'm thinking about everybody else's health i think about my children i think about my husband i think about my wife i think about somebody i think about my work all the time i'm overthinking and i care more about what's what their life's about than my own health as long as they're okay i'm okay if you say that i want you to pay attention

And so we often forget that this will cause a change in your physiology. I'm a nerd. This is what it does. You start thinking that way. You'll start changing the acidic levels within your stomach. Your digestion will get worse. Your body, your spleen will get weakened. Your spleen will get weakened. You'll lose the ability or weaken the ability of your spleen to filter out your lymph nodes, the crud. And what does it do? It goes back into your bloodstream causing reinfection.

And it weakens your pancreas, your body's ability to create insulin to help your blood sugar stay regulated. So you start having changes and shifts, not only in your gastric acids, but also in your body's ability to absorb and metabolize sugar properly, which can lead to weight gain, diabetes too, N1. And also too, what? Regulating your parasympathetics, your fight or flight.

You see how much it is in that one little thing? Like, I'm not kidding. Like when I used to study it, I'm like, good heaven, there's so much stuff. Digestion and immune system from worry. And why is it happening? If we can think about it simply as this, if I'm always thinking about somebody else or something else and you divert all your emotional energy to them, you're telling your body, I don't need to worry about me. I'll be fine. I need to handle this.

So in Chinese medicine, some of the main organs that are affected the most are the ones that would help you with just basic primary actions to help your survival, as in digestion of food. That's what your stomach does, right? It digests your food. And what is your digestion of food? It takes your stomach with the acid. It takes your spleen and your pancreas to help push all the enzymes in there to actually digest your food. Have you ever been so worried that you got nauseous and you couldn't eat? You're like, I'm too nervous. I can't even eat.

Because all the blood is rushing to your brain to help solve or fight the problem. It's taking it away from your digestion. It's going to your extremities and to your hands and to your feet to help you run or fight the problem. I want to show you all the ins and outs and the intricacies, not to overwhelm you, but to tell you that when you are worried too much, you're taking the energy away just from those three organs, your stomach, your spleen, and your pancreas. And that is taking primary function out of your body to give you the energy to help with life.

If your body is undergoing PTSD and you're always fighting this worry and this fear, those emotions will shut down the organs and those organs won't perform their metabolic function. And just like the spleen and pancreas and those areas, your white blood cells, your immune cells will suffer. They will not be matured because you're taking the energy away from those organs and shifting them somewhere else. It is a big balancing act in your body.

All day, every day to help your immune system to stay strong. This is no fault of your own. I'm not trying to blame anybody. I'm saying that in your heart, in your life, if you're always having undergoing PTSD, it can happen. Like for instance, if you always have fear, that's the emotion that goes along with the kidneys, but it's going to weaken the kidneys. And the kidneys are hormonally directly related to your bone marrow.

And your bone marrow helps you create red blood cells. If your kidneys are weak from consistently being fearful, your bone marrow won't create red blood cells, which means you could get anemic. You could have blood issues, weak blood, low blood, always cold hands and feet, cold body, shivering, internal fears, always feel like there's a fear over your shoulders. I'm telling you, if you have a kidney issue and you have PTSD, that is a real thing. And why I get adamant about it is because I see it every day.

And they go to the doctor and the doctor says, oh, it's just like you have PTSD. You just have to like, you know, do some, you know, some, maybe some talk therapy can help. I love talk therapy. I'm saying it does, but they just, you know, here's some painkillers too. And here's some painkillers to help numb the pain. And that's what's happened. Now we've got an epidemic. How high is fentanyl in our country today? Why? People are in pain.

Have you ever had a doctor that you come up and say, I think your kidneys are really injured and I think your spleen is too. We really need to mature those organs. We need to strengthen them, give them some good energy, give them some herbs to help you with that organ. And that in turn will help change your neurology and may help you process the emotion out. Far be it from us though, like in our culture today, I actually think that we should like strengthen up the organs to help our emotions. But it's the truth. All right, I'm getting on a soapbox. I got to stop now. Here we go.

So my producer is going to be like, okay, you need to tone it down, bro. Tone it down. There are a few things I want to consider though, truly. When you have trauma and PTSD stored down, I've seen some beautiful work with some individuals such as there's Dr. Calvin NG. I'm going to give him a shout out. Calvin's a great guy. He's out in Orange County.

But him and my friend, Dr. Carrie Jacobson, she's out in Chicago. And I give them shouts out because they do different types of technique. I'm just saying they do techniques such as NET. So if you're listening to this, look into NET Mind to Body. I want my producers to write that down. NET Mind to Body. It's called neuroemotional technique. I'm not saying you have to go to those doctors. But look into this technique because it shows you that there are practitioners who,

That literally can help you release your emotions by working with the acupuncture system and the spine. I have seen people with incredible results do NET. Myself included, but some of my patients, I do it, but there are some people that are so gifted at doing it. Also, look for a doctor in your area that does NET. Look at NET MindBody. I love EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization, where you can look at a person's eye movement and it will tell you what area of the brain the emotion and the trauma is stored in. If you can...

Retrain the eye movement. If you can use the devices to help retrain where your eyes look when a certain name or event or a trauma is revealed, you can stop looking at the trauma. Does that make sense? You stop looking at it. Like, I don't have to look at it anymore. EMDR is a beautiful technique. I want you guys to write this down. I could go through and explain, but I'm telling you, with EMDR, if you train the eyes, if you heal the eyes, desensitize them, you'll heal your brain. Eyes are a direct organ that's built off your brain.

Next thing is neurofeedback. I love neurofeedback. Neurofeedback, L-E-N-S, Lens Oaks. Name of the practitioner who developed it, O-C-H-S, Lens Oaks Therapy. And Lens Oaks Therapy literally is using a device that they literally touch and connect to your head to measure the softness of your brain. I got to start using like really good, cool terms. It just shows you how soft your brain is.

If your brain is hardened by emotions and it's stiff, the emotions stay stuck in the brain. You have to get it soft again. And what happens when guys get concussions? That area of the brain gets injured, starts to necrotize, which means it starts to deteriorate. There's not enough blood flow and the brain gets stuck and stiff in that shape. Because think about your brain hitting the side of your head, your skull really hard. Does it injure it? Yes.

So they use impulses through this device to help put signals through that tissue to help wake it back up. It's like an old rusty piece of machinery. You're trying to open it back up so there's some energy that runs through it and you start having more current flow. But it will...

Bring the stuck memories and emotions, that stiff part of your brain, softening it up and bringing it to the surface of the brain. You guys follow me? Surface of the brain. If you can visualize this. And it all goes down to the prefrontal area right in the front of your brain so that you process it out. So it's like taking an old emotion on layaway. Nobody remembers what that is. Layaway is where you put stuff in layaway. You kept paying on it until you could get it out. You take it to the front and you process it out. Same thing.

So you're using neurofeedback to do that. You can use EMDR to drum it up. Keep looking at that area. You can use both of them. I love it. I do both of them. And you use NET and or EFT. So NET is neuroemotional technique to help release it out of your tissue, out of your body. And EFT is emotional freedom technique. That's one I love. It's EFT. It's tapping. So what they will do if you're listening to this is that you take points on the acupuncture system.

And you'll tap them and you're going to say a mantra. You're going to say, even though like you can say, you don't, you don't have to make it like specific. If you know that you have anger, you can, you can start hitting the liver points on your acupuncture system and it's liver. And it's like, I know I'm angry. I accept that. Even though I'm angry, you know what? I'm going to love my liver. I'm going to love my life and I'm going to start being grateful. You do it enough. Repetition will help your liver start to release the anger. And I'm telling you, I've seen it.

And I have seen some really crazy story with PTSD. I've seen some individuals come to me and say, Doc, you know, like before, whenever my wife would say this, I would just get super mad. And they will start saying these things. And then I would ask him, like, well, how's it been going? And they're like, you know, it's a really funny thing, Doc. I had a patient time. It's like after all these years, my wife said this to me and I thought, well, I'm going to get I know I'm going to get mad. But she goes, he said, the crazy thing was I couldn't get mad. It's like I didn't I didn't want to get mad anymore.

And this is after he'd been doing tapping and doing some emotional work because his organ system had released it and all the other organs were in combination working to help process all those chemicals of anger. And his brain started finding new ways to handle it and to express itself. There's a technique called autonomic homeostasis activation. I need to get that to Chris. The autonomic homeostasis activation is,

And I believe their website's autonomichealing.org. Autonomichealing.org. And I don't know this practitioner, but I've had patients, a patient and friends of my patient went to it. And they had severe issues in their digestive system, all related to heavy emotional issues. And they went one time. And I'm not saying it fixes everything. But he said the way that it retrained the brain was so profound, like most of their digestive system went away. And I checked them and a lot of it went away.

And they're having people with PTSD. Maybe check it out. Try the EFT tapping. The reason I'm giving you all these things is because I want you to know that there's different ways to have different techniques to help. These are safe, supportive ways to help the relationship between your body and your brain. You want to be able to have your body trust the brain and the brain to trust the body. And when there is that great connection there, you'll calm down. It can be done.

That way when it happens, it could help any dependency you may have on painkillers. It may have any dependency on any type of external stimulants or depressors. That's where the healing begins. One of the things I want us all to remember is that

There are a few things that you can look through your life and make sure that as you are healing, you first recognize it. Of course, you're recognizing what your main emotion is. But as you start to unwind and doing the tapping or the neurofeedback, do not be surprised if you had layer upon layer upon layer of emotions. You could have PTSD right now, and it could all be related to when you're a child and you had some bad relationship with your parents. Do not be surprised if that happens.

In fact, it's most of the time it does happen. So as we uncover the layers, the healthiest patients I have are the patients who do the extra work for their emotions. They realize that the physical is related to the emotion, the emotions relate to the physical. They realize that PTSD, yes, is a physical expression, but they're willing to do the parts.

Taking care of their body, eating right, eating less sugar, eating the right way, taking herbs when needed, taking good nutrition, but using that emotional work and that PTSD releasing to help with the whole system. So if you take those techniques and look into them and check them out, you're going to find some cool stuff. I'll tell you that. And I want you guys to take this information and remember that if you do start with the emotional work,

release or the traumatic release and new things come to the surface and you feel like oh man I feel like a little more anxious coming out try this I'm not saying it's easy but when you feel those new emotions come up from something that was so painful in your past an old memory from some traumatic event and you don't think your body's gonna overwhelm you have to they say this is what I've seen happen in my own life and people is that you have to surrender and trust that your body's going to be okay that it's better for you to release it now instead of keep stuffing it in the closet

You have to see that the pain or the anxiety you're going through, yes, it's a horrible thing. You have to surrender and allow the energy to flow through your body. You have to let go and feel that warmth. Instead of it holding real tight in your body and you're like, oh, I'm afraid. Just breathe through your stomach. Breathe through your stomach. Release it through your heart. And say, whatever is happening, it'll be for the greater good. That's my suggestion. So...

It's just a suggestion. I want you to find some good therapists in your area. Look into them. They may have some better suggestions, but I want you guys to be encouraged. That's what this is about. So if you guys have PTSD, my heart goes out to you, but I know you can get healed from it. Check out these things that we just put in there. It's going to be in the show notes. We really appreciate everybody listening. And I do want to add one more thing. With this, so check out the book, The Body Keeps the Score. And

There's a really good book. I mentioned my last podcast, but it has a lot of good mantras and it's called Feelings Buried Alive Never Die by Truman. And just let me know what you think. If you like this kind of information, you know, write in the comment section, send us a comment. If you like this, you want other information associated with it. Just please remember, I have a membership and the membership goes over more specifics within a Q&A I do live every week, almost every single week.

So it's in my bio, the link to the membership. It's also on my website. All right, guys, I hope this has been good. If you know somebody has PTSD, please send this to them. And I really am rooting you on, cheering you on. Love y'all. And remember, hit that bell on the screen so every time a new episode comes up, you can like and subscribe. There is a way out of your PTSD. If you check out this information, you're going to find a way. I'm here for you. Take it easy. Have a good day.

Before we wrap up, please remember that the information shared in this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is formed through this podcast, and the use of information here or materials linked from this podcast is at your own risk. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

Always consult with your health care provider before making any changes to your health regimen and do not disregard or delay seeking medical advice for any condition you may have. Our content may include sponsorship and affiliate links to which we earn a small commission on sales made through those links.

Thank you for joining us today on the Ancient Health Podcast. We hope you've gained valuable insights into the harmony between Eastern and Western medicine. If you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, share, and leave us a review.

Remember, true health is about balance, mind, body, and spirit. So stay tuned for more episodes where we continue to explore how ancient wisdom and modern science can work together to help you thrive. Here's to your health, balance, and well-being. I'm Dr. Chris Motley, and I look forward to our next episode together.