In emergency care, the first priority is to assure respiration because if a person can’t breathe — nothing else matters.
When cells can’t breathe—nothing else really matters either.
Cells with compromised respiration don’t do well. They perform poorly, get sick, and die early.
Oxygen travels from the lungs to the tissue in blood, via a complex series of steps. There are many ways this process can fail.
When oxygen’s cellular journey is unsuccessful it causes health challenges. Stress interferes with cellular oxygen delivery, and suffocates the cells into one or more failure modes that present as many different symptoms and diseases.
Cell Failure Modes
There are three closely-related cellular failure modes that occur when oxygen fails to reach cells for any reason.
Vascular Brownout—occurs when a hypoxic stress event causes inflammation in the vascular endothelium. This shrinks the inside size of the pipes that carry blood into a bottleneck. Each bottleneck inhibits blood flow that chokes off oxygen to downstream tissue.
Local pH Imbalance—the tissue brownout triggers a triple pH dysfunction. First, anaerobic cells produce lactic acid; second anaerobic cells cease production of carbon dioxide, third the bottleneck that inhibits blood flow causes waste products to linger, creating an area prone to “acid” soreness as waste products irritate tissue. These areas are unable to perform because their energy is reduced to 1/19th of normal.
Immune Brownout—the brownout region of weakened cells becomes preferred habitat for parasitic organisms.
First reduced cellular energy decreases cellular ability to resist attack and inhibited blood flow makes it harder for immune