The Hydra
The Hydra is a creature from Greek mythology with many heads. If you cut one head off, two grow back in its place -- unless you cauterize it.
I don't really know where to begin writing this piece. It's an important piece and it differs radically from the mental models modern medicine provides us.
In the US, we tend to think of war as something that happens elsewhere. It happens on some frontier or off in some other country. It doesn't happen on OUR soil. It doesn't happen among OUR homes. It doesn't happen on OUR farms.
Worse, modern Americans seem to often be mentally disconnected from the fact that our food comes from the land. More than half of the world lives in cities and farming -- food production -- is no longer an essential part of the lifestyle of most people. Most of us the world over consume food but don't produce.
In some article I read, they started a garden at an inner city school and one day one of the teachers went and got a carrot or an onion from the garden and ate it. And one of the students freaked out and was like "Did you SEE that? He PULLED that OUT OF THE GROUND and he ATE IT."
I guess he thought carrots came from cans or something. I don't know.
Your body is a complex ecosystem and there are more aliens inhabiting it than you have cells. There are more microbes -- more gut micriobiota helping you digest food, more viruses, more bacteria and sometimes nastier inhabitants like mold, other fungus and even parasites.
If you are American and you think war is something that happens elsewhere, you probably think war is about wanton destruction. You probably think winning at any cost is fine.
You probably think a scorched earth policy works. Just kill it all, as long as your enemies are dead, it's all good.
And if that's how you think, you will be poorly prepared to win the battles in the landscape of your body. If you have health problems, your body is the battlefield and if you just nuke it from orbit because it's the only way to be sure the cancer is gone or the whatever is gone, you may simply die with your disease or shortly after it.
Historically in Europe, it was relatively rare for war to be pursued as a scorched earth policy. It was noteworthy when some enemy was deemed so horrific that you went in and salted their fields so nothing could survive there anymore -- just to be sure.
The Romans supposedly murdered worshipers of a terrible faith which I believe involved child sacrifice and salted the lands and nothing grew there for at least a thousand years. But that's not remotely how things normally worked.
Historically, when you went to war, you wanted to take possession of both the lands and the peasantry that worked those lands because farm work was done by people, not machinery. So in order to increase your holdings or your wealth or your power, you needed not just acreage but fertile acreage and you wanted it to be occupied by locals with knowledge of the area and skill to produce food in that area with that climate and you wanted their good will.
Peasants tended to not care who won. To the peasants, it tended to boil down to paying the same tax to a different king.
Whatever, dude.
Because the people fighting over those lands knew they needed the people to not hate them and the land to not be ruined by the battle, so they had policies for how to fight battles with the local king while mostly not disturbing the land and the peoples therein.
The problem is this: Your immune system works similar to a border patrol and checks IDs on incoming invaders. This is why seventy to eighty percent of your immune cells can be found in the gut: The food you take in voluntarily is one of the biggest potential threats to your health.
And it's why fasting has a vague, hand-wavy reputation of being helpful for many conditions for reasons no one understands: Most likely, fasting frees up immune cells from the ongoing burden of dealing with incoming food and allows the body to send them elsewhere to tend to oft neglected maintenance issues.
So if you are chronically ill, what happens is your body decides about SOME infections "These guys? They're okay. THEY LIVE HERE." and stops bothering them. Your body stops having an appropriate immune response. It stops recognizing them as invaders.
So you improve your nutritional status and this means you are feeding these infections better. Your body is not only the battlefield, it's the buffet upon which they feed. It's THEIR farmland.
So as you grow stronger, your infections may grow stronger and you may find yourself in a pickle, not knowing how to strengthen your body while killing infection, especially if the infection has been dormant, "wakes up" and your immune system isn't yet recognizing it as a problem, so isn't yet making white blood cells coded to kill this type of infection.
Worse, if you DO manage to successfully battle it, viruses and bacteria mutate rapidly when in a hostile environment. So whatever you are doing to kill it, it won't work for very long.
Using the SAME treatments over and over while the infection rapidly mutates is how you develop drug resistant infections.
If you start to strengthen your body and an old, dormant infection wakes up that you didn't realize you had, the battle will be fraught and you had better be prepared to change tactics repeatedly, possibly every few hours for usually up to two or three days before things calm down again.
This piece SUCKS. It doesn't say what I want it to say. I'm publishing it anyway because I have to start SOMEWHERE.
The idea that you just give people antibiotics to treat infection and THAT'S IT is so overly simplistic and it's part of why drug resistant infections are on the rise.
I don't really know where to begin writing this piece. It's an important piece and it differs radically from the mental models modern medicine provides us.
In the US, we tend to think of war as something that happens elsewhere. It happens on some frontier or off in some other country. It doesn't happen on OUR soil. It doesn't happen among OUR homes. It doesn't happen on OUR farms.
Worse, modern Americans seem to often be mentally disconnected from the fact that our food comes from the land. More than half of the world lives in cities and farming -- food production -- is no longer an essential part of the lifestyle of most people. Most of us the world over consume food but don't produce.
In some article I read, they started a garden at an inner city school and one day one of the teachers went and got a carrot or an onion from the garden and ate it. And one of the students freaked out and was like "Did you SEE that? He PULLED that OUT OF THE GROUND and he ATE IT."
I guess he thought carrots came from cans or something. I don't know.
Your body is a complex ecosystem and there are more aliens inhabiting it than you have cells. There are more microbes -- more gut micriobiota helping you digest food, more viruses, more bacteria and sometimes nastier inhabitants like mold, other fungus and even parasites.
If you are American and you think war is something that happens elsewhere, you probably think war is about wanton destruction. You probably think winning at any cost is fine.
You probably think a scorched earth policy works. Just kill it all, as long as your enemies are dead, it's all good.
And if that's how you think, you will be poorly prepared to win the battles in the landscape of your body. If you have health problems, your body is the battlefield and if you just nuke it from orbit because it's the only way to be sure the cancer is gone or the whatever is gone, you may simply die with your disease or shortly after it.
Historically in Europe, it was relatively rare for war to be pursued as a scorched earth policy. It was noteworthy when some enemy was deemed so horrific that you went in and salted their fields so nothing could survive there anymore -- just to be sure.
The Romans supposedly murdered worshipers of a terrible faith which I believe involved child sacrifice and salted the lands and nothing grew there for at least a thousand years. But that's not remotely how things normally worked.
Historically, when you went to war, you wanted to take possession of both the lands and the peasantry that worked those lands because farm work was done by people, not machinery. So in order to increase your holdings or your wealth or your power, you needed not just acreage but fertile acreage and you wanted it to be occupied by locals with knowledge of the area and skill to produce food in that area with that climate and you wanted their good will.
Peasants tended to not care who won. To the peasants, it tended to boil down to paying the same tax to a different king.
Whatever, dude.
Because the people fighting over those lands knew they needed the people to not hate them and the land to not be ruined by the battle, so they had policies for how to fight battles with the local king while mostly not disturbing the land and the peoples therein.
The problem is this: Your immune system works similar to a border patrol and checks IDs on incoming invaders. This is why seventy to eighty percent of your immune cells can be found in the gut: The food you take in voluntarily is one of the biggest potential threats to your health.
And it's why fasting has a vague, hand-wavy reputation of being helpful for many conditions for reasons no one understands: Most likely, fasting frees up immune cells from the ongoing burden of dealing with incoming food and allows the body to send them elsewhere to tend to oft neglected maintenance issues.
So if you are chronically ill, what happens is your body decides about SOME infections "These guys? They're okay. THEY LIVE HERE." and stops bothering them. Your body stops having an appropriate immune response. It stops recognizing them as invaders.
So you improve your nutritional status and this means you are feeding these infections better. Your body is not only the battlefield, it's the buffet upon which they feed. It's THEIR farmland.
So as you grow stronger, your infections may grow stronger and you may find yourself in a pickle, not knowing how to strengthen your body while killing infection, especially if the infection has been dormant, "wakes up" and your immune system isn't yet recognizing it as a problem, so isn't yet making white blood cells coded to kill this type of infection.
Worse, if you DO manage to successfully battle it, viruses and bacteria mutate rapidly when in a hostile environment. So whatever you are doing to kill it, it won't work for very long.
Using the SAME treatments over and over while the infection rapidly mutates is how you develop drug resistant infections.
If you start to strengthen your body and an old, dormant infection wakes up that you didn't realize you had, the battle will be fraught and you had better be prepared to change tactics repeatedly, possibly every few hours for usually up to two or three days before things calm down again.
This piece SUCKS. It doesn't say what I want it to say. I'm publishing it anyway because I have to start SOMEWHERE.
The idea that you just give people antibiotics to treat infection and THAT'S IT is so overly simplistic and it's part of why drug resistant infections are on the rise.
