Health Gazelle: The Battleground

The Battleground

I read a book some years ago called "Seeing like a State". In that book, there is a story about a fruit tree in a poor, isolated village where gardens are a primary source of food. The tree was prized for its delicious fruit. Then a colony of red ants moved in and made their home around the base of the tree. The red ants liked the fruit of this tree and soon had destroyed most of the fruit. The life of the tree may have even been in danger. The old man who owned the tree did not have money for chemical pesticides and there was no store nearby that sold such things. But he was old enough and experienced enough to know something which wasn't as quick but which was more effective and healthier: He began a war between the red ants and some black ants.

For weeks, the old man picked up curled up leaves full of black ant eggs and moved them to the ground around the fruit tree. At first, it made no real difference. The red ants were much bigger than the black ants and greatly outnumbered them. But, over time, the black ants began to outnumber the red ants. Eventually, the black ants won the war and took over the territory around the base of the tree. Unlike the red ants, the black ants had no interest in eating the fruit of this tree. In time, the tree recovered from the damage and the villagers once again enjoyed its delicious fruit.

The many drugs that CF patients take are like chemical pesticides and are, essentially, a "scorched earth" policy: It may kill the infections you carry, but it also slowly kills you. The organic approach I have taken to living with CF is like the ant war which saved the tree without poisoning it. The many infections we carry are like the red ants, eating the fruit and ruining the tree. Our white blood cells (which "eat" other micro-organisms) and pro-biotics are like the black ants. Just as pesticides would have killed both red ants and black ants alike, the drugs we take kill both infections and pro-biotics as well as weakening our body and making it less able to produce strong, effective white blood cells.

As with any scorched earth policy, what is left is actually more vulnerable to an invasion of "red ants" and less friendly to the survival of "black ants", thus creating a vicious cycle and downward spiral. My son once compared drugs to burning down the forest because cutting down the trees is going too slow -- only to realize it has left you with no wood to harvest, which was your reason for cutting down trees.

Another analogy is to think of practices of human wars, where one side bombs the infrastructure of the other in order to undercut their ability to produce weapons. If your body is like a bombed-out battleground where the factories and other infrastructure have been destroyed, you won't have what it takes to win this war. The infrastructure must be rebuilt. In this case, that means aggressive supplementation, eating organic yogurt, and other things which grow healthy populations of both white blood cells and pro-biotics. When those two "armies" are at your disposal, other invading forces have a much harder time getting a foothold and are much more easily evicted.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

I think about this war analogy a great deal. I was thinking today about the scene in one of LOTR movies where the orcs have breached the gate. Yes, they call for reinforcements to fight the orcs trying to come into the castle this way. But they also have two elites (Gimli and Aragorn) go outside the gate and force the orcs to back off from the huge hole in the gate so they can call for wood to reinforce the gate and close the hole in the gate. I feel like this is not something I ever see doctors do. They seem to just keep calling for more troops and never bother to close the hole in the gate. So you kill the current invading force and then feel all relieved that the war is over, and no one bothers to close the big gaping hole in the gate. Then the next invading army comes along and you wonder why this battle is so hard and so endless.

At the risk of repeating myself -- and I feel like I do that a LOT, but maybe saying the same thing a little differently will help someone get it -- it seems to me that the way to close the gaping holes in the gateways of the immune system is to fortify the body with the right supplements and the right diet. For me, lifestyle changes and "best practices" serve the role of Aragorn and Gimli: they get these invaders off of me while I work on fixing the gaping holes in my defenses. I know lots of people who are using diet and supplements to be healthier with CF than you are supposed to be. But I have yet to meet anyone getting the kind of results I get, even though I meet a lot of people who really know far more than I do about nutrition and the like. I am always wondering what is the critical difference in the results I and my son are getting compared to other people who do so much research and have so much knowledge and have done some of the same types of things I do. And these lifestyle differences seem to be a big part of it.

The two primary gateways to infection that I have focused on closing are 1) healing the mucus membranes and 2) reducing the excess acidity. As noted elsewhere on this site, there is research that shows that reducing acidity in CF patients reduces their vulnerability to infection. This fits with everything I have read and experienced. And, as noted elsewhere, I consume sea salt, in my food but also as a supplement when that is just not enough. This has helped my body produce better mucus. Mucus is like an invisible shield (okay, not really invisible, mostly slimey) for keeping out invaders. However, I have been working on getting well for about seven years. I have made gradual, steady progress. I couldn't do that if I didn't also do things to give me some space and keep those invaders from stepping through those gaping holes while I try to painstakingly rebuild a body ravaged by decades of illness, much the way Aragorn and Gimli gave the king his space to close their damaged gate.

This is where my lifestyle changes come into play. This is also the role "best practices" fill, practices like leaving our shoes by the front door and wiping myself down with peroxide when exposed to something at work and showering as soon as I get home when I have been exposed. We simply do our best to not bring those invading armies of virii, bacteria and fungi into our home and we do our best to not just let them get into our bodies if possible. When they do get on us, we try to get them off of us before too many get into us. This means our immune system has less work to do because there are fewer invaders to fight and kill. I do get sick from exposures but I can usually recover within about 12 hours now instead of suffering for days or weeks and then picking up something new on top of that and ultimately ending up in the emergency room.

Having such practices gives me the time I need to repair my body so that my immune system isn't so severely compromised. And I do find that as I get healthier, I don't have to be quite so picky about things, I am more resilient, I don't pick up every single bug I am exposed to and so on. My life is becoming more "normal" in some ways. I don't expect to ever go back to a normal life of North American Affluenza. But I am very much enjoying a growing sense of freedom from the burdens I lived with for so many years, the burdens of being sick all the time and unable to do the things I wanted to do.

I am beginning to feel like I have room to breathe.

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