I Never Get Sick!

Can I tell you how many people say to me how healthy they are because they never get sick. This is not the best predictor of your health. The truth is that periodic immune challenges are essential to not only “exercise” the immune system, but to encourage adaptation to your environment and working with pathways of elimination to move toxins from the cells and out of the body. This process will produce symptoms, usually mild, but symptoms nonetheless.

A truly healthy body is one where the immune system reacts quickly and effectively to limit an illness and prevent chronic or long-term injury to the body. So a cold now and then, a fever occasionally, a little nausea are not things that indicate a lack of health. These may actually be signs that your immune system is working appropriately. Never getting sick is usually an indicator that the immune system is not responding because it is dysregulated or it is overburdened by multiple challenges that cannot be resolved, but remain below the surface of symptoms.

So we really don’t want to prevent all illness, nor every illness. We instead want to prevent and reduce severe illness. Let’s look at an environmental example. Throughout history forest management often included controlled burns in order to thin out a forest and create healthier trees. This allowed forests to resist destructive wildfire burns. It would also reduce and control insects and invasive plants. The added sunlight that could reach the forest floor would encourage new growth and young trees, while fire is actually essential for certain pine species in order for them to release cones and fruits that are held to the tree with resin. When these controlled fires are suppressed, flammable materials will accumulate with more tree and bush crowding. Insect species will increase while invasive plants will spread outpacing native species and changing the landscape.

The human body is the same. Periodic challenges to our stress response and to our immune system keep our bodies healthier by instigating managed inflammation to clear dead cells and toxins. Fevering can reduce the population of pathogens that our body hosts while increasing our microcirculation and encouraging the synthesis of immune cells.

This also means that we should not suppress our immune system response when it happens, instead allowing its benefits to occur and permitting our body to be exposed to our environment. This is one of the main differences between conventional medicine and natural medicine, because we seek to encourage the body’s immune system response in a regulated and controlled way. This is the path to long-term immune health.