Understanding the Immune System helps us understand health and wellness issues. Conventional medicine has jettisoned it. Natural medical therapies embrace it. It's the main difference between them.
The main problem with Pharmaceutical (or Conventional) Medicine, for most people, is that its treatments (notably its drugs and vaccines) are (i) largely ineffective, and (ii) often positively harmful. Yet this is actually a secondary problem, and it arises largely from its most basic problem.
The fundamental problem with Pharmaceutical medicine is that it has forgotten/discounted/jettisoned the one and only mechanism that keeps us well, and makes us well again when we fall sick.
Pharmaceutical medicine has successfully installed two very disempowering beliefs, as described in this Substack article by Embodying Homeopathy:
“It’s a really good way to keep people sick and dependent. And whether that was the intention or not isn’t up to me to say - but regardless of intention, the impact is all around us. These beliefs put a massive obstacle to cure smack dab in the middle of your healing journey because they reinforce a very core idea that your body is not capable of healing”.
I agree. The Conventional Medical Establishment is just plain wrong in its attitude to health and well-being. The human body has everything it needs to keep itself healthy, and to get better when it gets sick - with one proviso - we need to look after our immune system.
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM
From whatever vantage point we take to view pharmaceutical medicine this neglect of the immune system becomes apparent.
Pharmaceutical drugs (the pain ‘killers’, the ‘anti-’ drugs, the ‘blockers’, the ‘inhibitors’, et al) all seek to force the body to do something it would not normally do. They kill pain (temporarily); they fight germs, they block and inhibit natural bodily processes. What they do is described in the name!
Vaccines seek to fight germs, artificially, from the outside, trying to do what the body’s immune system does naturally. And it does so on the arrogant belief that the pharmaceutical industry knows best.
Yet it is worse than this. Conventional medicine’s failure to acknowledge the immune system’s role in our health is probably the most important factor preventing it from understanding what is actually making us sick, and why its treatments are failing to deal with illness, effectively and safely.
MEASLES OUTBREAKS
Whenever conventional medicine considers a medical issue, their dismissal of the immune system means that they are unable to identify the real problem. Take its regular problem with so-called “measles outbreaks”. It is not just that they are trying to make ‘a mountain from a molehill’ (measles is a mild illness, most of these ‘outbreaks’ involved small numbers of cases, and recovery is usually quick. Regardless of this conventional medicine requires the vaccination of the entire population of young children!
Conventional medicine states that these ‘outbreaks’ of measles are serious, and routinely blame them on ‘unvaccinated’ children. It makes the assumption that if only all children were vaccinated no one would ever contract measles.
The problem for conventional medicine is that amongst those who contract measles in these outbreaks are children who have been fully vaccinated. And conventional medicine is not very good at explaining why this should be! In addition, and more generally, there is now a number of good studies that show ‘unvaccinated’ children to be healthier than ‘vaccinated children’. So how is this to be explained?
Conventional medicine struggles to explain why children who contract measles come from both groups. They either avoid the issue, or come up with highly complicated, often quite incredible explanations.
The simple explanation, however, becomes clear when we bring the immune system is taken into the picture. Natural medical therapies can consider 4 different groups of children.
Vaccinated children who have a strong, protective immune system. This means they did not need to be vaccinated as they would not have contracted measles anyway. These are the vaccinated children who do not get sick.
Vaccinated children with a weakened or compromised immune system. These children are more vulnerable to contracting measles, and any other disease. These are the vaccinated children who get sick.
Unvaccinated children with a weak immune system. These children are most in danger of contracting measles, are most likely to get sick, and who are likely to suffer the (very occasional) serious side effects of measles.
Unvaccinated children who have a strong, protective immune system. These children will not get sick, regardless of their vaccination status, and do not require vaccination in order to keep them well.
So for natural medical therapists vaccination status is not important; but the immune system most certainly is! What this means is that the starting point to illness, of all kinds, is quite different to that of pharmaceutical medicine - the primary importance of supporting and strengthening the individual’s immune system.
THE CONFUSION OF CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE
This is why Conventional Medicine always goes around in circles when it discusses illness. It does not understand illness, so it has no effective treatment for it. I recently read this Substack article from Popular Rationalism about a recent measles scare in the USA. It correctly asks for ‘more data’ as it struggles to make sense of the existing data. It is an excellent article, in its restricted way, but it is clearly uncertain about why both vaccinated and unvaccinated children were going down with measles! If it is read with a focus on the immune system, rather than vaccination status, many more questions are answered.
“I realised this first several years ago whilst starting to put together my Iatrogenic (Doctor-Induced) Disease E-book. Each page of this book focuses on an illness or disease in order to see whether conventional medical drugs and vaccine can cause it. In doing so I found that conventional medicine routinely denies that their drugs and vaccines cause all kinds of illnesses. Indeed, worse than this, time and time again, conventional medicine states that “there is no known cause”.
So I asked the important question that arises. If a medical system does not know what causes illness and disease how is it able to treat it, safely and effectively? Let’s look at the different ways conventional medicine, and natural medical therapies, deal with a fever.
DEALING WITH FEVER
When someone gets ill the body’s usual response is to throw a fever. This is a normal and natural response of the immune system, an attempt to heal itself. The response of conventional medicine is often to give the patient a pharmaceutical drug in order to reduce the fever. What this means is that drugs are introduced to treat the patient in a way contrary to what the immune system is trying to do. It is what causes illness, through adverse drug reactions.
Homeopathy does quite the opposite. Faced with a patient with a fever it will prescribe a remedy which is made from a substance (homeopathically diluted and potentized) that (in its normal state) would actually cause a fever. In other words, the remedy is prescribed to correspond with, and support what the immune system is already seeking to do. It is called ‘treating like with like’, or the Law of Similars, on which homeopathy is based.
This is a fundamental difference in approach to treating an illness. Homeopathy is not fighting, or blocking, or inhibiting anything. It is recognising the body’s ability, through its immune system, to heal itself - and supporting that process.
So conventional medicine, when it considers an illness like the measles outbreak study mentioned above, focuses on pharmaceutical interventions (vaccinated or unvaccinated), whilst natural medicine focuses on the immune system (strong or compromised). The former talks about the need for drugs and vaccines. The latter focuses on the individual immune system, ensuring they are (i) eating a good diet, (ii) having adequate exercise, and (iii) having sufficient relaxation and rest (avoiding stress) - the three main factors that support and strengthen our immune systems.
For the pharmaceutical industry, which dominates conventional medicine, the former view is the more profitable, the latter is not. This goes some way to explaining its approach to most health issues; and the reason for its failure. When it considers illness it focuses on its business model - selling drugs and vaccines. If fails to focus on the individual, and the capacity of his/her body to heal itself - which is not profitable.
For natural medical therapies the patient is central, identifying the body’s weaknesses, and addressing them by supporting/stengthening/utilising their immune system. This goes a considerably way to explaining their greater success in dealing with sickness.
An effective and safe medical system is possible only when the immune system becomes central. The 100 year plus experiment with pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines demonstrates clearly that treating the body ‘from outside’ does not work. It has led to epidemic levels of chronic disease, and a plethora of ‘new’ and ‘rare’ diseases.
We, each one of us, as individuals, have within us the means of staying well, and regaining wellness. Any successful health system needs to recognise this simple but vital point. Accordingly it would spend less time promoting drugs and vaccines, and more time educating everyone
about the importance of their immune system, and how we can all support and strengthen it every day of our lives.
