Last week the memo came around, about the latest pandemic infection control guidance. Surely it amounts to common sense and ‘don’t spread infections’? I mean, where do they think we have been all our lives?

Infection Control is one of those heroic phrases beloved of various low-tier healthcare-related desk-jockeys. Tidiness junkies who fail to grasp the complexity of life, tend to see solutions as things to bolt on, rather than questions of why we have problems in the first place.

Is there really some secret to avoiding infections, that has all this time been kept from those of us with university training in health? And is the middle of a crisis now the time to reveal this occult knowledge?

So we will have to do a dance and tick some boxes; okay. The required outcome will of course be to have all the boxes ticked. Actual real-world outcomes are of little importance to members of the administrative classes. The fact that with all our years of training and experience we aren’t killing people is irrelevant.

I said uncautiously; “They should be asking us for advice on this, not the other way around. After all, we aren’t the ones spreading diseases”. It’s true: nobody has gotten sick in our facility, or in any facility like ours, anywhere. In fact our clients are overall much healthier than average.

The obvious response this invited was; “We aren’t treating the same sorts of cases. Public hospitals deal with serious conditions that we don’t. It’s just in case somebody asymptomatic comes to us and we don’t know”.

But big hospitals have been employing stringent infection control systems for well over a century. They get more and more stringent every year, and yet nosocomial infection (caught in hospital) is as big a problem as ever. All that hand gel, bleach and barrier equipment, and all those antibiotics, haven’t stopped hospitals being rife with infections. In fact they have produced new kinds of infection that couldn’t have existed without their help.

Long before this current media-driven crisis I had come to see ‘infection control’ through the same eyes as ‘war on terror’; great soundbites, leading to lots of serious-looking activity, but more likely to create problems or worsen them, than to solve them.

The war on germs has failed.

Why? Because we are being asked to go after completely the wrong part of the problem. Germs are not the cause of disease – they are the product of disease. If you don’t believe me, try living on nothing but white bread and coke and two hours’ sleep a night and see how long it takes for you to get an infection. The issue is susceptibility (a massive subject, one for another essay).

It’s certainly true that people with cholera, MRSA and yellow fever don’t generally visit us first of all. So in some ways that is right: we are not exposed to these situations.

But over the years I have treated plenty of patients in the midst of colds, flu, diarrhoea, pneumonia, whooping cough, ear infections, UTIs and much much more. And I have never caught anything from a patient.

As far as I know, none of my clients has ever caught anything from me. And I don’t let a bit of a sniffle keep me away from work. In college, absenteeism from clinic for minor illness was very much frowned upon. The phrase “unless you are at death’s door” is what we were told.

So that’s almost twenty years of trial. It isn’t that I never get ill, it is just that these things follow other patterns of which I am now aware, and have virtually nothing to do with who has been near me.

Outside of the operating theatre, and certain minor medical procedures where absolute sterility is obviously essential (basically any time a hole is made in somebody), there is little evidence that battling germs achieves anything, beyond a good level of basic domestic hygiene. The reverse is probably true: our lives quite literally depend on the ecology we share with microbes. Experimentally, animals kept in aseptic conditions (without germs) invariably die in a matter of days. There is absolutely no way to sustain them. On the other hand, a ride on London Transport exposes one to just about every pathogen known to man, yet we aren’t all dead as a result (pandemic or not).

There has been no suggestion of any outbreak being centred on any business in our field that I know of.

As well as all the coughs and sneezes that happen in my office as much as anywhere else, I have delivered hands-on therapy to literally thousands of people with verucas, warts, athlete’s foot, boils, cold sores, shingles, cuts, caries, earwax, runny noses and more. And my hands aren’t covered in warts etc. Don’t get me started about all those who show up for appointments without first showering. Then there must be countless clients who don’t know they have something, and there must be those who don’t tell me they have something.

And beyond an appropriate level of basic hygiene and common sense – changing linen, hand washing, cleaning the toilet, not spitting at people – we have not until now been doing anything particularly remarkable.

So why isn’t everybody in my business dropping to bits from other peoples diseases?

Answer: because it doesn’t work like that!

Contagion is one of the most entrenched superstitions in modern society, and outbreaks are one of the most willfully misunderstood phenomena. Why willful? Because the entirety of medical science would have to go right back to the drawing board if the truth were widely recognised. And it is commercially very lucrative just the way it is. That’s two reasons for starters.

If that all sounds absurd and medieval, it actually conforms to the research on clinical contagion much better than the conventional theory that disease is caused by proximity to others, which, on its face, is an absurd proposition. These problems have almost nothing to do with who has been near us, and what diseases they have. Sure, things come in clusters, and outbreaks, but there are other very good theories as to why, and those theories are not getting a look in. Once again, big subject, and another story.

Obviously I won’t convince everyone, so if you want a watertight case, ask a plumber. My job is to share what I have learned, not prove it: and your job, dear reader, is to decide for yourself by your own criteria. Don’t take my word for it, in other words: do your own research. [Useful searches might begin with Terrain Theory, Bechamp, Robert and Shelley Young, VIrus Mania.]

But, more importantly, it explains why social distancing, lockdowns, isolation, masks and endless toxic hand-sanitiser have made little if any improvement to the current crisis. What is in fact totally medieval is the media-driven one-dimensional panic responses of administrators (there they are again), and the selective silencing of real experts who, one after the other, are saying that we have got this all completely wrong. They all have different reasons, but the one thing they do all highlight is the absolute lack of science supporting the enforcement of a criminally perverse and dangerous social avoidance theory.

There have always been good reasons for basic hygiene.

Don’t get me wrong; we are not being cavalier about this. And of course we are cleaning and scrubbing and disinfecting and monitoring more than we did a year ago. Masks and gloves are always near to hand. There is nothing wrong in taking extra care when there is so much doubt and confusion. We are not bucking the programme in any way at all. But I am certainly questioning it, big time.

What I believe keeps us and our clients safe from infection is that our mindset on health and disease is very different to the medical mindset. Our theories are not germ-phobic, they are ecological, and that means we see the multidimensional nature of the situation. The answer to health lies in the promotion of health, on strong natural immunity, and on being on good terms with our environment; and not in the phony failed war on germs and disease. And that has a material bearing on our actions and habits, in many small ways that add up to a major difference.

Our business is empowerment. Medicine, on the other hand, has adopted a mindset of disempowerment.

“Do not trust your health, there is little you can really do. Surrender to the medical experts. Adopt an external locus of control. Health and disease are only a matter of chance. If your number is up disease will strike you, so be afraid. Your only hope is to find a good enough doctor, pray for those altruistic drug companies to come up with something, and live in a sterile bubble.” That is what we are being told.

Don’t you think there is something wrong with this picture?

 

 

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