Nobody gets out of this life without having taken on countless infectious agents into the body. Many are well served in early development as they train our young immune systems to prepare for living in an unsanitary world. The infections we are most interested in are not the acute kind (despite their debilitating or deadly history) but the chronic hard to diagnose infections that can weaken the body over the course of years.
These infections run rampant in the modern industrialized world despite advancements in sanitation and anti-infective drugs. Worse yet are the prevalence or drug-resistant strains of pathogens which are quickly evolving around our efforts to fight these infections. Still others are so elusive as to create controversy within the mainstream medical community. Despite what I perceive to be overwhelming clinical evidence of the presence of chronic Lyme disease (a spirochete bacteria in the same family as syphilis) most medical doctors will only recognize and treat acute Lyme infections. For more info on this, see the documentary Under Our Skin.
Then there are the infections that we all know about and live dormant in our body, just waiting for some sign of stress to release their ugliness into our lives at the most inopportune moments. Shingles, cold sores, warts – a lot of viruses that hang on for dear life to our innards while we go about life as usual. The very presence of these types of infections (when they flare-up) indicate that our body is not operating under ideal circumstances. Even in their dormant states however, they do draw from the body’s nutritional and energetic reserves – parasites of the smallest order.
Some of the worst infections are those that are hidden deep within the body, leaking steady streams of microbes into our system on a regular basis. They avoid detection as this low level of intoxication does not trigger a fever or other acute immune response. A focal infection of a tooth that has undergone a root canal falls squarely in this category. A dental infection such as this is all the more insidious when you consider that a patient who starts feeling ill weeks to months after a root canal may not necessarily connect the dots. Instead of returning to their dentist, this patient may visit their doctor who is ill equipped to diagnose and treat this latent infection, the end result being the underlying cause of a patient’s illness going undetected.
Then there are a whole host of communal microbes or larger parasites that reek havoc on our digestive systems. These bugs are really bad news and can severely weaken the entire body. The more we learn about biofilms the more we can appreciate how an overgrowth of pathogenic gut bacteria and yeasts (dysbiosis) can start a whole cascade of events, the endpoint of which includes multiple food and chemical sensitivity, chronic smoldering inflammation, neurotransmitter imbalance, weakened immunity, and ultimately malnutrition as the body fails to assimilate what you eat. This is an inner chronic trauma that makes all other conditions very difficult to heal if left unaddressed.
Thankfully, there are many great dietary and herbal strategies for dealing with these bad bugs but we also have to recognize that we do not and can not live in a sterile world. We have to think of our bodies as representing a diverse ecology full of good bacteria (the quantity of which far outnumber your own cells) that live symbiotically with us and provide food for us just as surely as we provide a home for them. That being said, you might want to think twice about surrounding yourself with all manners of anti-bacterial agents and instead reinforce your body’s innate immunity. What are your infectious thoughts on this topic? Leave your comments below and help this blog go viral (pun intended) by sharing it with friends! Thanks for sharing and thanks for reading.
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