In my course, we have been talking about the immune system. Here are my thoughts about how a focus on the immune system might help us break free of the costs and the failure of the medical model.
You raise the issue of the immune system. I think that in your lifetime, you will see that we increase our focus to this.
I have always found a useful metaphor for disease to be a herd of zebras being stalked by lions. The lions, bacteria, are always there. Their job is to keep the herd health up by culling the weak and the infirm. In areas where the high end predator is no more, herds grow too fast and in the end crash because they have taken up too much grazing. So long as an individual is healthy and fit, the lions will choose the infirm. so it is I believe with bacteria.
Bacteria are not our enemy not more than lions or wolves are enemies of zebras or deer. In fact they are an important system health enhancer.
You keep the lions or disease off your back by having a robust immune system. if you want to be healthy do everything that you can to improve your immune system. So what in practical terms can we do?
1. When you have a child - breast feed. The best way to inject your immune system into your baby who is largely unprotected. Formula has several other drawbacks. Touch is also a key to infant development. Breast feeding demands skin contact and a closer connection. I see so many people bottle feed almost at arms length and of course fully clothes. This is no small matter - touch is the critical mammal pathway to development. In some horrible experiments - Harlow - baby monkeys were offered a bottle in a wire doll or no food in a fuzzy doll and the babies chose the fuzzy doll before food every time.
This leads in to the key to development - attachment. As a parent the most important thing you can do to help your child be healthy in life - a robust immune system - is to also help them have a strong sense of self which paradoxically can only come from paying the child a lot of attention in the first 6 months of life. humans are born 6 months premature! Our brain size is so large relatively that we have to be born before our heads are too big for the mother's birth canal. Critical then for our development is to recognize the babies need to stay in a womb type of environment. In all traditional environments, mothers keep their babies attached in some type of pouch. Contact is all physical and the baby is never alone. women still work but they have the baby with them.
I am going on about babies because of the importance of the first 3 years in the development of our immune system and also our world view that will shape the rest of our lives and determine how we make our way from then. There is a ton of info if you are interested on my site Our Kids their Future
2. Reject external rewards as the guide to your happiness. Let me explain this more. Starting at school an maybe at home, we have all been taught that if we do well by another person's idea, your mum or your teacher, you will get a reward. We are therefore trained to gear our life to play the game of get the reward by pleasing another rather than by developing ourselves to please our selves. When we devote our lives to please mum, teacher, the boss , our friends, we lose who we are and we jump around all the time - this is highly stressful which is a major driver of the weakening of our immune system. There is a growing body of evidence that women who seek to please at their own cost are candidates for breast cancer. We get confused here with selfishness. I am not talking about being selfish. I am talking about being centered. There are marks in this course. I make it clear how to get them. It is up to you to meet the thresholds. This course is not for me, though I get my own thrill and my own learning from it. It is for each one of you as an individual. You can test yourself against your self. If you take care of your self so many of your worries go away and if you have taken care of yourself, you can help others. At the core of this is the idea of love. It is impossible to love others until you learn love yourself with all the frailties that each of us have. Which brings me to my last point about what we can do to have a robust immune system
3. The key to adult health and happiness is the nature of our relationships. To have health we must have a voice - we must know that we matter to some key people. The tragedy of the corporate Ford world is that it has taken our voice away. What we say means nothing. With no voice, we start to die spiritually. Our immune system goes into a tailspin and hence we have developed the chronic diseases of our time - obesity or substituting food for human comfort, back ache and chronic fatigue for lack off control, depression and even some types of cancer. The Ford system does not allow real relationships.
What do I mean by this? Look at survivor and all the so called reality shows. What real tribe would vote a person off the Island? In a real tribe, a tightly knit group of people bound to each other in social and work terms, You never leave a person behind. In the marines, you never leave a man behind. Why because your own survival and identity in a real tribe is bound up in the mutual love that each member has for the others. you may laugh at the idea of love in the Corps. Research is clear. In war men do not die for their country, nor for their unit - they die for their friends. Imagine a work force that felt this way about each other - Southwest maybe? An you see what a joy it must be to go to work when you feel that strongly about each other.
This for me is where the search for a new model will lead us I hope. To a way of being and working where we have a purpose that is noble and a fellowship of colleagues where we can truly be ourselves. Imagine what such an organization could do? Imagine how you would feel? Imagine what this would mean to your health?
