Health Viewpoints
If you asked my doctor, he’d tell you that I have a number of chronic “diseases”—hypothyroidism (underactive thyroid), hypercholesterolemia (blood cholesterol levels higher than considered normal), and eczema. Yet I take no medication whatsoever, not even over-the-counter drugs, feel great most of the time, and have no limitations on my life. My son Ethan was diagnosed with ADHD and Asperger’s when he was five years old. The doctors told us we would have to put him on powerful drugs that could cause all sorts of side-effects but without them our son wouldn’t be able to function in society. Today Ethan is eighteen years old and one of the healthiest teenagers around. He also takes no medications, has no limitations on his life, and he’s the kind of kid who gets straight A’s without studying, is effortlessly good at most sports, and designs aircraft and race cars in his spare time. So, what is a “disease”?
Professor Jackie Leach Scully wrote an interesting essay on this topic a few years ago which I encourage you to read. She explains that while the definition of disease changes with the human and cultural context “we must have a reasonably clear idea, first what a disease is, and second, which diseases are most worth the investment of time and money.” This highlights the practical matter of labelling a set of symptoms as a certain “disease” so that treatments can be marketed to combat it. The labelling also enables us to track statistics to monitor what is going on in a population and perhaps altruistically address it in a certain way through policy. Quit smoking campaigns of the 1990s are a good example of this once lung cancer was highlighted as being on the rise and the connection was made.
But does the label help you as an individual? You might get a momentary period of relief when the symptoms that have been plaguing you for months or years finally get a name and you feel vindicated that there is, indeed, something identifiable wrong with you. But then you enter the world of the “standard of care,” which includes medication, potential surgery, and ongoing testing. You won’t be told what is causing the disease. Likely, your doctors will just put it down to “bad luck” or “bad genes.” With no known origin, there can be no real cure. So you are expected to hand your future over to the guy in the white coat.
At the same time, medical gaslighting has become more widespread these days. This practice of ridiculing patients is more recently connected with people experiencing adverse symptoms since getting a Covid-19 vaccine, but medical gaslighting has been going on for years. Whenever a doctor cannot identify the reason for the symptom, they will insist that there is nothing wrong and it’s all in your head. It has been instilled in their training that a vaccine couldn’t possibly cause any ill effects, the food you eat is inconsequential, and if nothing shows up in a blood test or imaging then nothing is wrong. They send you home with a pat on the back and a prescription for an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication.
The Intersection of Infectious and Chronic Conditions
While Government agencies and maybe your health plan have been focusing on infectious disease, it is estimated that around 133 million or 43 percent of all Americans are living with one or more chronic diseases. The CDC puts the rate at 60 percent. This includes more than 40 percent of children and adolescents. The rates have skyrocketed in the last two decades. While an infectious disease tends to be self-limiting, a week or two of discomfort, a chronic disease persists for an extended period of time, months or years, perhaps a lifetime. The economic cost is astronomical in terms of spending on healthcare and lost productivity. At the individual level quality of life can be seriously impacted.
The war on germs that started in the early twentieth century has gotten seriously out of hand. We’ve discussed the importance of microbes to our overall health in terms of the synergistic nature of our microbiome. We’ve also seen how the majority of infections are entirely manageable with some common sense and nature-provided assistance. It’s also interesting to note that in fact a bout of certain infectious diseases seems to benefit us in the long run. There is plenty of medical literature documenting tumor remissions after a measles infection for example. A large Japanese study found that a history of measles and/or mumps in childhood significantly protected against deadly heart attacks and strokes later in life. Another study found that each additional contagious disease contracted in childhood, such as measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox, and scarlet fever increased the protective effect against cardiac events as adults by 14 percent. Yet again God’s mysteries abound.
What if in our effort to stamp out infectious disease we inadvertently encouraged chronic illness?
Illness is the body not functioning optimally. The root cause is rarely just a single factor such as a pathogen. Back to germ theory vs. terrain theory. If your body is healthy, you won’t succumb to a pathogen. If you are unhealthy to start with, a pathogen (such as a virus or bacteria) could throw you into a chronic condition. Maybe it’s the toxin the bacteria excreted (in tetanus for example); or a mycotoxin excreted by mold (a fungi). The toxin could be man-made such as pesticides and all the chemicals we covered in Chapter 4. Ultimately, it’s a huge variety of elements day to day, month to month and year to year that results in health or illness as we discussed in Chapter 3.
But this is actually good news. If we can get to the root cause or causes, we can reverse chronic disease and generate health.
I want to help you think differently. Think beyond the labels. You (or your family member or friend) are not a person with X disease. A medical professional has identified a collection of symptoms or something out of whack in the body which meets the criteria of a particular label. In conventional medicine that opens up a list of drugs that have been approved to treat it. Rarely will they reverse or cure it, but the doctor will be there to let you know what the next drug or the next step is when your symptoms progress. There is another way.
