Never Be Sick Again (8 page)

One of the great scientific minds of the twentieth century, biochemist Dr. Roger Williams, wrote, “Body cells in general die for two reasons: First, because they do not get everything they need; second, because they get poisoned by something they decidedly do not need.” Humans can live long and healthy lives if we do two things right: provide our cells with all of the nutrients they need and protect our cells from toxins. To the extent that we can accomplish these tasks well, we can significantly extend the length and the quality of our lives. In the real world, these two tasks are never accomplished perfectly. As a result, cells suffer, we age, the quality of life is diminished and we die. The variable in this sequence is how fast we allow this to happen.

What about other causes of disease, such as genetic inheritance and infections by microorganisms? Yes, genes and germs trigger cellular malfunction, but they do so by causing deficiencies or toxicities, which are always the common denominators of disease. Eliminate these factors and you eliminate disease. For example, consider diseases with a genetic basis, such as ALD (adrenoleukodystrophy), the genetic disease featured in the movie
Lorenzo's Oil.
People with ALD develop abnormally high levels of very long-chain fatty acids, which are molecules that are natural to the body. These fatty acids can build up to levels that are toxic to cells. This
toxicity
is the result of a genetically caused
deficiency
of special protein molecules that keep these fatty acid levels within normal limits. Lorenzo's parents compensated for the genetic deficiency by supplementing their son's diet with a combination of oils that helped to lower the level of the offending fatty acids, thereby reducing the toxic effect on his body. What caused Lorenzo's disease? Was it genetics? Yes, but for his disease to manifest, his cells had to be deficient and toxic.
Deficiency and toxicity are always the common denominators
of all disease.
The same is true of infections from microorganisms. Anthrax, for example, makes us sick and kills by producing toxins. Without deficiency and toxicity causing cells to malfunction, there is no disease.

What about stress? Hasn't that been proven to cause disease? True, stress is a major factor that contributes to disease. Chronic stress results in an excessive buildup of natural chemicals in the body, which at higher levels become toxic. In addition, stress depletes the body of certain nutrients, resulting in deficiency. Stress is a contributor to disease, but only by expressing itself through the common denominators of all disease: deficiency and toxicity.

Deficiency and toxicity, regardless of their cause, increasingly compromise the functioning of cells, making a person steadily more vulnerable to developing a diagnosable disease. By the time you contract a diagnosable disease (whether we're talking about the common cold, allergies, cancer or heart disease), you have probably been “sick” for a long time. You have suffered enough cellular damage from deficiency and toxicity that cells throughout your body are malfunctioning. You
are
sick long before you
get
sick. By the time symptoms are produced, cellular malfunction has become widespread, cell-to-cell communications have been disrupted and the systemic manifestations are the symptoms. Remember that disease does not just randomly happen, like a meteorite falling out of the sky. Health, not disease, is the natural state of human existence, but forgetting this point is easy when we see all the disease around us.

Symptoms Versus the One Disease

Our society's current understanding of disease is based on the concept of
symptomology. Symptomology
is about focusing on, identifying and categorizing symptoms—in other words, the effects produced by disease. In this manner, doctors supposedly can differentiate one disease from another. Because the entirety of modern medicine and everything we have ever learned about disease is based on symptomology, the concept of only one disease may seem unacceptably simplistic. Actually the symptomology concept is the flawed one.

Symptomology is based on a fundamental misconception, one held by virtually all medical establishments in Western society. The misconception is that thousands of different diseases exist, each with different symptoms, causes and treatments. This misconception stems from the many different ways that cells can malfunction, and therefore the thousands of different symptoms that can be produced. The modern medical treatment of almost all disease focuses on the management of these symptoms (the effects of disease), rather than eliminating the causes, which are deficiency and toxicity. People are told to take insulin to manage their blood sugar rather than eliminating their diabetes, or to take diuretics to treat their hypertension rather than normalizing their blood pressure. They are told to have a bypass operation rather than reversing their heart disease or to undergo chemotherapy rather than healing their cancer.

Diagnosis by symptoms is the process by which modern medicine gives each collection of symptoms a particular name. Medicine views symptoms as enemies, and physicians are trained to eliminate them, even if that means aggressively assaulting the body with dangerous toxins, radiation or invasive surgery. Symptomology leads the medical profession to look at symptoms individually, organize them into thousands of categories, label them as different diseases and then prescribe a currently accepted protocol to suppress those symptoms. This approach adds needless complexity, creates massive confusion and results in an inability to deal with disease in a meaningful way.

In truth, each collection of symptoms—each specific “disease”—is just a different expression of malfunctioning cells. However, with all of our different types of cells, and all of the different ways in which each cell can malfunction, the number of possible combinations of symptoms becomes vast. In other words, when cells malfunction, we may feel sick in many different ways.

Cells that are malfunctioning because of a vitamin C deficiency exhibit different symptoms than those malfunctioning because of a zinc deficiency. Cells malfunctioning because of lead toxicity exhibit different symptoms from those malfunctioning because of mercury toxicity. Various combinations of deficiencies and toxicities produce a myriad of complex symptoms (thousands of “diseases”), but the symptoms are not relevant. To solve any problem, you have to address the causes, not the symptoms.

Modern medicine, by placing the focus on symptoms, has yet to develop any theory regarding the relationship between health and disease. Medicine looks at these as if they are two different states, while health and disease are really different sides of the same coin in a constantly shifting continuum. Lacking a practical theory, physicians have no framework in which to understand health or how to help patients achieve it, like being lost in a vast jungle without a map or compass. Narrowly trained, our physicians are taught the art of surgery and the administration of drugs as tools to manage symptoms. If the only tool you have is a hammer, so the saying goes, then every problem looks like a nail. If you go to a conventionally trained physician, then medicine's “hammers”—surgery and drugs—are what you receive. Unfortunately, these tools are designed to manage and suppress symptoms, not to cure disease.

For a more meaningful understanding of disease (cellular malfunction), we must consider the health of our cells. Remember that noticeable health problems begin when a large number of cells malfunction. As this happens, important cellular chemicals are not produced, cell-to-cell communications become garbled and the body ceases to regulate itself properly. Our tissues suffer and noticeable symptoms appear, e.g., allergies, fatigue, aches and pains, colds, flu, depression, anxiety, cancer or any of thousands of other complaints.

Categorizing and suppressing the symptoms of malfunctioning cells does not fix the problem. This approach cannot explain why the problem occurred in the first place, cannot prevent the problem from happening again and cannot prevent it from appearing elsewhere in the body. The only “cure” is to restore our cells and tissues to health.

What Is Health?

Everybody thinks they know what health is, but people asked to define it give you many different answers. In order to define health, perhaps we first should provide the definition of health used in modern medicine: “Health is the absence of disease.” This medical school lesson is not a very good definition. For medicine to recognize disease, it must be diagnosable. You are not sick until the day the physician can diagnose something. The absence of diagnosable disease is not a good working definition of health.
Modern medicine has
no way of recognizing or diagnosing disease when your health
is in its initial decline.
When I was sick and already experiencing disturbing symptoms, my physician pronounced me in excellent health. He had never been taught how to notice and measure my already extensive decline in health. We are considered sick only after the problem has become serious enough to produce symptoms that fit neatly into one of medicine's disease categories. This way of looking at health is not helpful, productive or self-empowering. Health is much more than the absence of a diagnosable disease.

When your cells are functioning as they should, you have ample adaptive capacity to thrive in our constantly changing environment without ill effects. With properly functioning cells, you have strong resilience to various kinds of stress— physical, chemical, biological and emotional. You have the ability to make daily repairs to your cells, the ability to build healthy new ones, and the ability to efficiently remove pathogenic microorganisms and toxins from your body. You become an optimally balanced organism, with integrated mental and physical equilibrium. Perhaps most important is that achieving good cellular health gives our society the ability to produce healthy offspring.

While the above descriptions explain the practical effects of health, they still do not offer a single, concrete definition of health. In order to clearly define health, as a concept concrete enough to be understood and discussed, let us work with the following definition:

Health is the state wherein all cells
are functioning optimally.

Never are all of our cells functioning perfectly, so the challenge is to keep cellular malfunction to a minimum. Even in healthy people, cells are constantly being damaged, dying and being replaced. Our bodies produce more than 10 million new cells every second, as we constantly rebuild our tissues. How healthy are each of these new cells? If we replace sick cells with sick cells, we will never recover. As cells die off are we replacing them with healthy cells or sick cells?

Who Succumbs to Disease?

Only sick people become sick. Once you start to compromise health, a cascade of events follow. Once a critical number of cells begin to malfunction, internal communications and self-regulation systems become debilitated and destabilized. As the number of compromised cells increases, the effects are compounded. Before anyone can exhibit noticeable signs of disease, normal cell function has to be compromised significantly throughout the body. Vulnerability to infections, for example, is created by widespread cellular malfunction. An infection indicates that cellular malfunction already has weakened the immune system. Having a cold or the flu is an alarm screaming at you that all is not well, because healthy people resist infections in the first place. Few of us pay attention to these alarms. We think that having a cold or the flu is normal, and that once the symptoms are gone we are well again. Not so.

The level of your health and immunity determines whether or not the presence of a microorganism results in an infection.
You are already sick before you come down with an infection.
Otherwise everybody who is exposed to a given “bug” would become sick, which is not the case. Contrary to the common notion that we “catch” diseases, people become sick only after their cellular health is already compromised. Disease (cellular malfunction) comes first; active infections and chronic problems follow.

The skeptic says, “But he was born with asthma and suffered from it as an infant.” “She was in the best of health, took great care of herself, and then suddenly got breast cancer.” Although we hear these kinds of statements frequently, the notion is flawed that a person is a powerless victim of disease. This way of looking at events comes from living in a society that does not have an accurate understanding of disease, or of what is required to create and maintain health.

Think of the historically healthy societies, such as the Hunzas. These people implicitly understood what they needed to maintain their health. They lived far longer than we do, without the chronic degenerative diseases from which we suffer. The principles of good health were built into their beliefs and lifestyles. The key lesson to be learned from these people is this:

Healthy people do not get sick.

Most of us have not learned to think this way. We grow up in a society where almost everyone has a chronic disease. We have been taught, through experience, that disease is a “normal” part of the aging process. Diseased people are typically seen as the helpless victims of an inevitable and “natural” process. Especially when the symptoms of disease develop suddenly, people feel surprised and victimized. Yet, the two causes were there all the time, gradually wearing down cellular competence and creating an opportunity for disease to “strike.”

As part of the body's normal maintenance and repair process, old cells are constantly being replaced with new ones. If new cells are not built with proper raw materials, they will be unhealthy and weak. Such cells are unable to perform their normal tasks, including routine repairs, and will be vulnerable to sickness and injury. Ultimately, the body's self-regulation systems will break down. Because of the poor diets and the toxic environment in our society, cells are often deficient and toxic when first created, becoming progressively more so over time. This situation is precarious, with a large number of cells either malfunctioning or functioning at a borderline level. Similar to walking a tightrope, falling off is easy. Any number of stressful factors can affect a person adversely who is already deficient and toxic, be it a stressful event, a pathogenic organism, a night out on the town, a physical injury or even a lengthy airplane flight. Almost any challenge to a compromised system can be the straw that breaks the overburdened camel's back.