Pnei Book - CLINICAL PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINOIMMUNOLOGY

Introduction Pnei Book - CLINICAL PSYCHONEUROENDOCRINOIMMUNOLOGY

PNEI is the most recent of the medical disciplines, which studies the neuro-immunochemical mediation of emotions and states of consciousness and their effect on the state of health or disease through central psycho-neuroendocrine regulation of the immune system. Emotions are the expression of the psycho-soul dimension, while the state of consciousness is related to the spiritual dimension of the person, always keeping in mind that spiritual is not synonymous with mental or moral conscience, but only with self-consciousness. Only self-consciousness is spiritual and true self-consciousness is only that founded on Love, understood as the perception of one's neighbor as if it were another self.

Clinical PNEI is simply the application of the knowledge of PNEI to the clinic at both the etio-pathogenetic, diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive levels. Unlike the now scientifically outdated Psycho-somatics, which attributed the role of mediating the psychic influence on the functionality of the various organs only to the central nervous system and peripheral neuro-vegetative system, the PNEI identifies the lymphatic immune system as the main intermediary of the relationship between the person's psycho-spiritual experience and biological state of health. Briefly, it can be stated that the nervous system is the mediator of psychic life, while the immune system is the mediator of spiritual consciousness on the state of functionality of the biological body. While the alterations of the neuro-vegetative nervous function give rise to chronic, persistent but minimal functional disorders even if they worsen the living conditions, the immune system responds in terms of Life or Death in the two extreme conditions of the missing reaction or the exaggerated one, in relation to tumor or autoimmune diseases respectively, effectively sanctioning recovery or death.

PNEI does not replace or nullify any of the previous medical disciplines but on the contrary requires and integrates them according to a holistic vision of the human being, thus definitively overcoming the mechanistic and separatist conception of the various organ functions of a living organism. In itself, PNEI is at least the integration of three different medical disciplines:

1) Endocrinology regarding endocrine and neuro-endocrine functionality

2) Immunology regarding immunological functionality

3) Neurology-Psychiatry regarding psycho-neuro-chemical functionality.

Compared to PNEI, understood as primarily an experimental science, Clinical PNEI requires expertise in a fourth medical discipline, that of Internal Medicine, in order to translate the scientific knowledge emerging from PNEI into a new way of interpreting the etio-pathogenetic pathophysiology of the main human diseases.

Concretely, to all this we must add a typical and specific expertise of PNEI, that of the pathophysiology of the pineal gland, which, paradoxically despite being one of the 7 endocrine glands, still today after decades does not fall within the expertise of endocrinology. Likewise, the study of the biological effects of the various proteins produced by immunological cells, the so-called cytokines, falls within the typical competences of the PNEI, which the old Immunology, founded on the pure in vivo translation of what was observed at the immunological level in vitro, without therefore taking account of the neuro-endocrine modulation of the immune response in living things, does not yet seem capable of considering it in such a way as to lead to a new and more systematic vision of the involvement of the immune system in the main human pathologies.

The evidence on which PNEI is based in its holistic pneumato-psycho-biological vision of the human person is essentially two:

1) nervous and endocrine cells have receptors for the cytokines of the immune system, therefore they are influenced by them and in turn produce endocrine and neuro-active molecules capable of directly influencing the functionality of the immune cells, with stimulating or inhibiting effects

2) immune cells, lymphocytes and macrophages, have receptors for hormones and neuro-active molecules, which is why their functionality is under central neuro-endocrine control and in turn, again through the production of cytokines, they are able to act not only on the other immune cells but also on the neuro-endocrine system, therefore on the hormonal and neurological state of the person.

The PNEI consequently imposes a general review of all medical and medical-psychological science.