Betrayal

This week Dr Tom O’Bryan airs his documentary ‘Betrayal’ on the internet showing the direct link between gut health and autoimmune diseases. It truly is a scandal that the genesis of these diseases is so misunderstood or, perhaps more sinisterly, ignored. It’s yet another example of how difficult it is for someone to understand something when their livelihood depends on their not understanding it. The whole concept of Functional Medicine and root-cause resolution represents a challenge to the established paradigm of symptom treatment. It’s not so long since I myself was completely bought into the status quo. When our children were small they suffered an almost continuous stream of ear infections and corresponding assaults with antibiotics. We had no idea of the damage this was potentially causing for the long term. It was enough to find relief from the broken sleep and endless crying. We were not alone. Nor has the situation changed much in mainstream medicine but today there is a growing understanding of the need for restraint in prescribing antibiotics as human resistance grows and they become less effective. They are the medical ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and a very serious option. As our understanding of the gut microbiome develops we are learning to orchestrate their cooperation as it is now clear that their genetic profile is vastly more extensive than the human genome. We are part of an elaborate symbiote and cannot survive without our bacterial partners. Since the discovery of penicillin we have proliferated our use of antibiotics and relaxed our basic strategies for infection control. Instead of recognising our interdependence with bacteria we have treated them as the enemy and used every means to eliminate and minimise our exposure to them. It’s rather like living within a gated community, sterilised from the world around us. Although no one can justify apartheid practices we continue to flirt with the ideas by emphasising difference in all areas of life and engaging in acts of aggression or, more kindly, ‘Proactive Defence’. Now that Donald Trump has been chosen as President Elect it is important to reflect on the potential outcomes of protectionist policies with the potential to segregate our populations and poison our planet. The biosphere around us is mankind’s most precious asset, the ultimate symbiote. It is a callous betrayal indeed to enact policies that destroy it in the name of growth or to drive policies that inflame peoples and lead to social unrest. This is a humanity level autoimmune disease. It’s interesting also to reflect on the work of Nobel Prizewinner Otto Warburg who discovered that when cellular mitochondria are unable to produce adequate energy through normal respiration they turn instead to fermentation to meet their needs. This is a hallmark of cancer. When individuals or societies are starved of necessary resources they too may turn to unorthodox means to make ends meet. Don’t act surprised when deprivation leads to unrest. And when it does, please can we invoke policies other than the equivalents of the Slash, Poison and Burn offerings of conventional oncology.