Lowering Inflammation Is Not A Goal In Itself

First: What is inflammation, roughly?

It's part of the immune response. Inflammation happens in response to a pathogen, toxin, or injury. We see it as increased blood flow and often swelling, which brings redness and warmth but at the cellular level, there's a huge cascade of processes aimed at clearing out pathogens (bacteria etc) and also our own damaged cells.

What's the problem with inflammation?

It's causing damage to our own systems as well as whatever is being targeted. Inflammation is necessary or we'd die of infections and not recover from damage but it also causes "collateral damage".

That's not a problem unless the inflammation goes on for too long, becoming chronic (ongoing) rather than acute (temporary).

When I lower inflammation, my child's symptoms improve, so isn't lowering inflammation necessary?

In a sense, it is. That's part of the ultimate goal.

But the problem is that simply using something to lower inflammation isn't fixing whatever is causing the inflammation in the first place.

This seems to be why so many kids improve with some intervention, only for symptoms to slowly return. Raising the dose of whatever it is, again brings improvement but again, they slide back. If that's because they have latent infections, it's likely that lowering inflammation has allowed the pathogen(s) to multiply, actually increasing their pathogen load higher than it was before the intervention. (This isn't some pet theory of mine - it's well worth watching Friendly Fire on this subject)

It is possible that in some kids, their inflammatory response is simply stuck on and the original pathogen has been cleared. However, it does seem that even then, using an anti-inflammatory without also doing something to calm the immune response more fundamentally isn't going to help long-term. (I'm not at all sure what to do about that - I think it's tied up with the Cell Danger Response, CDR).

So how do I fix what's causing the inflammation?

The answer is going to be different in different cases and I don't have all the answers by any means.

But that doesn't change the fact that simply intervening to lower inflammation without at least attempting to address the deeper causes is not only a losing battle but is also often counterproductive.

So where do I start?

I think regardless of what else someone has wrong, nothing is going to be fixed without fixing the gut.

That's obviously a hard thing to do but that's where I think we need to look first. 

It's becoming clear that, without a gut microbiome, the immune system simply doesn't function at all. We used to think that the gut microbiome "tuned" the immune system but it's becoming clear that it's not tuning, it's entirely driving it (a mouse study in 2020 showed this well - sorry, don't have a citation. It was mentioned by Kiran Krishnan in this video. Note that if you want to work with the doctor in that video, check he works with children as I've heard he and his partner do not).

I also think therapeutic peptides have huge potential for regulating the immune response. Things like KPV (perhaps initially - and more info here) to calm inflammation and Thymosin Alpha 1 to both calm and to up-regulate immune cell production.