As we find ourselves in the thick of cold and flu season our focus on avoiding germs becomes top priority for many of us. We’re quick to Purell our hands and sanitize everything we touch. But are germs really the issue?
The reality is, they’re no more of an issue now than they are at any other time of year.
“If you have a dump, you’ve got rats.”
I’m reminded of the “Rats in a Dump” analogy from late chiropractic icon, Dr. Fred Barge. He used to say, “If you have a dump, you’ve got rats.” It doesn’t work the other way around. Rats don’t create the dump, rather rats are attracted to the dump. In many ways, germs are a lot like rats in that they are both opportunistic. Germs, like rats, not only seek out but require a place to set up camp.
So the question you need to ask yourself this cold and flu season is “how’s your dump?”
Are you eating junk food at every turn, lacking activity, under high amounts of stress with little sleep, and neglecting the health of your spine and nervous system? If so, you’re probably living in a dump.
Or are you doing whatever you can to live as “cleanly” as possible? Do you make a priority of putting good foods into your system and avoiding those which are not? Do you seek out regular physical activity and adequate amounts of sleep? Are you getting regular chiropractic adjustments to optimize the health of your spine and nervous system? Because all of these things give your body what it needs to be well and express life to its fullest potential. Doing the opposite will simply create the opposite — disease and death.
And therein lies the key to health: life. Are you truly 100 percent alive? Or are your lifestyle choices preventing you from reaching that target, chipping away at the percentage?
Rats and Germs…
“Germs,” as Rudolph Virchow, the Father of Pathology, stated, “seek their natural habitat—diseased tissue—rather than being the cause of the diseased tissue.” In other words, you can’t “catch” something if you are expressing 100 percent life—because if you are by definition you are absent of disease.
Even Lou Pasteur, the father of our culturally revered “Germ Theory”, reportedly recanted on his deathbed that “the pathogen is nothing, the terrain is everything.”
And if germs do happen to take hold of your terrain despite your best attempts at “dump-buster” living, your immune system will be in an ideal position to kick in and douse the illness in record time thanks to your healthy habits.
So as you set out this season to employ dump-busting lifestyle strategies to bring about life and vitality to your terrain, remember if germs themselves really are the problem, shouldn’t doctors and nurses, especially ones that work in hospitals, be the sickest people we know?
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Contributed by Dr. Thomas R. Lamar, DC.
[originally published in Kingston Community News, January 2013; republished from Dr. Lamar’s spinalcolumnblog.com]
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