wayneholland.org

 

DISEASE IS REACTION

June 9, 2010

 

I used to think that disease was like an invasion, that some sort of evil force was literally ravaging the body. I have recently come to the conclusion that it is something that we are doing to ourselves.

To be sure, there are indeed pathogenic agents involved that are definite players in the game, that dynamic that we so casually refer to as disease, but they are not truly the cause of the condition. We cause the illness by responding to them. Our response to the pathogen (or other invasive factor) is the disease.

Since I am not a physician, it is completely understandable that you feel no inclination to attach any credibility to what I am suggesting, but I base what I'm saying on the words of a highly recognized, and fully licensed, physician, namely Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell. The following quotes are taken from an essay (Germs) that appears in that book:

We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do. They come after us for profit, and there are so many of them that disease seems inevitable, a natural part of the human condition; if we succeed in eliminating one kind of disease there will always be a new one at hand, waiting to take its place.

These are paranoid delusions on a societal scale, explainable in part by our need for enemies, and in part by our memory of what things used to be like.

We can carry brucella for long periods in the cells of our reticuloendothelial system without any awareness of their existence; then cyclically, for reasons not understood but probably related to immunologic reactions on our part, we sense them, and the reaction of sensing is the clinical disease.

Did you catch that very last part?

... the reaction of sensing is the clinical disease.

Whatever illness that we observe (or experience) does not result from the mere presence of a germ. It appears because we respond to its presence. In other words, we make ourselves sick, which further suggests that sickness is not some thing that is waiting out there to waylay us, or some monster that we just might have the misfortune to bump in to. It's more like a slumbering beast residing in the deepest regions of our own biochemical terrain just waiting for something to awaken it. If there is anything we should feel threatened by it is our own demons.

---

Doctors
Medicine
AIDS
Swine Flue
Big Pharma
The Healthcare Debate
Humpty Dumpty
Human Neuroses