Bernhoft Center for Advanced Medicine

Most people are familiar with the Central Nervous System (CNS, the brain) and the Peripheral Nervous System(PNS), which carries messages from the brain to the muscles, and sensory messages back to the brain. Fewer people are familiar with the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS).

The ANS is not ordinarily under our conscious control. Which is a good thing, for the most part, because it controls a lot of subconscious functions – heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to the skin and digestive organs, and so on. The ANS is divided into two parts: the Adrenergic, which stimulates much like adrenalin does, and the Parasympathetic, which calms things down.

Many pollutants have a profound affect on the ANS. This is in part because a lot of the message transmission in the system relies on acetylcholine, which also plays a major role in the nervous system of insects. Many pesticides kill insects either by blocking acetylcholine, or by overstimulating it. They play a similar, but less lethal role, in our ANS, by the same biochemical mechanisms.

Consequently, pesticides can sometimes have a dramatic effect on our clinical status. For example, to use my own case, when I was recovering, I noticed that when I went to a medical meeting and ate non-organic (presumeably pesticide-ridden) food for 4 or 5 days, my blood pressure would go from its baseline 110/70 to 160/100 or 170/110. Then, when I came home and resumed my organic diet and saunas, it would drop back down to baseline over the next couple days. There was no discernable difference in salt content of my food. It seems to me that I was unusually sensitive, at the time, to the ANS effects of pesticides. They no longer seem to bother me. I have probably cleared out enough of my body pesticide load and given my liver detox enzymes enough cofactors to work with, that these things are less of an issue for me than they once were.

A parallel example has emerged in recent years: the heart attack rate in major cities closely parallels the air concentration of particles called PM2.5 (mostly particles of diesel exhaust). It is thought that these particles lodge in the lungs, stimulate the ANS, thereby disturbing the heart rhythm, causing heart attacks. The health of the ANS matters.

We have an objective measurement of ANS health in our office, the Inteliwave Heart Rate Variability System, which is approved by the FDA for use in Heart Rate Variability (HRV) measurements in response to paced respiration and controlled exercise. It provides an index of ANS health, and can be used to measure progress; as detox continues, ANS status generally improves with treatment.