Dr. Art Ayers’ blog comments alone are some of the best health writing out there…
From a recent comment by Dr. Ayers on his site:
on bad germs…
I have stopped believing in bad germs and pathogens and lean more toward sickness being a deficiency. The deficiency, however, is not usually a missing nutrient. As you might guess, I think that the predisposed, presick body is deficient in the right …….gut flora.The fun aspect of these thoughts is that health is dominant. (Remember that I am a molecular biologist and that means that alleles that code for an active, functional enzyme are dominant in genetic terms.). That means that sickness is recessive, so intimate kissing between sick and we’ll yields two well people. Lactose tolerance is contagious. Food tolerances are contagious, but gluten intolerance is a dominant exception, because it is not actually a food intolerance. (That would be like saying that “vitamin” D is a vitamin, when it is actually a steroid hormone.)
So… In most cases we get sick because we have compromised systems, because we have compromised gut flora, because we have compromised diets, because we have processed foods, because we have subsidized crops,
because we have politicians, because we want to make lots of money, because we are human.
We get sick because we are human. The germs didn’t do it and there is no point in trying to make ourselves feel safer using antibiotics and antibacterial soaps.
I use Yahoo Pipes and RSS to get only the comments written by a few bloggers that I don’t want to miss. I don’t need the public noise but some of what gets commented on by site owners is really quality stuff for free.