Very much agree

I agree 100% with what Ali said and ditto to avoid surgery if at all possible. Why risk it unless absolutely necessary? If you have to have surgery, think and talk to the doctors about possibly small doses of steroids or another way to prevent any burst of inflammation. I would guess that this is the difference in AngelSecondClass22699. Allergic reactions are inflammatory reactions and if you are prone to autoimmune disease (which we all are now shown to be because we had one), an inflammation can precipitate it. In the same way that an immunization may not itself be the cause of the GBS, but in people prone to get one, when their immune system starts jumping up and down trying to react to the immunization (which are made to be very reactive), there can be cross stimulation of the immune response to myelin. (Of course, some people may react exactly to and only to a part of the immunization in combination with their own identifying proteins (HLA) such that their immune system thinks the immunization peptide and HLA combination is the same as a myelin and HLA combination). My guess is that most people are the type that the immune system when rev’ed up a lot for any reason have cross-talk and that those specifically reacting to an immunization are much less common. So, most of us want to avoid things that rev up the immune system a lot.

On another thread there are comments about reduction of the inflammatory response with vitamins and herbals. I have been reading a lot about this as well regarding medicines and vitamins. It seems that there are effective ways to calm down the immune system and get it to be less reactive. I am not sure any way will work for everyone.

Just a note, the medical equivalent of an “old wives tale” is that propofol anesthesia is calmer and less “stressful” to the immune system and therefore, potentially less inflammatory. This is what we suggest when one of the children with an autoimmune disease has to have surgery. There are no trials to prove it to be the case and never will be for children since autoimmune disease is so rare in them. Suzanne, if I were you, and HAD to have surgery, I would advocate for a few days of mild doses of steroids around the time of the operation, having everything as optimized as possible to not result in additional stress, and have the anesthesiologists use propofol if they can. The argument against steroids are a potential impact on wound healing (probably not that great at mild doses) and potential increased risk of infection (but steroids really predispose more to infections needing good lymphocyte function–like viruses and funguses–not bacterial infections that need neutrophils and monocytes).

WithHope for a cure for these diseases and peace in our immune systems.