It has taken a while for me to write this and then a good friend reminded me of why I do what I do. Help people to find sustained wellness. I love educating people so that they can become inspired to understand why and how they hold the keys to their own health and empowered to be able to sustain their health and wellness long term.  So I thought I would like to share the notion of a virus through the Functional Medicine lens.

I was very happy to hear a couple of days ago that the British Prime minister is now recuperating, however I have to say I was also quite alarmed by his choice of wording during his speech. There was so much negativity, talking about the enemy, the battle, that we will conquer….just adding to the fear and jumping to conclusions that we are being attacked by some foreign invader, which is just not the case. It is however this “fear” that downstream does mediate disease.

There are lots of different interpretations at present in defining this viral pandemic, it is the fear, defensive, controlling language that enables centralisation of control of a population, to take an orchestrated action for a given purpose, some for the good and some perhaps not so much.  There is a lot of similar behaviour as if we were gearing up for war, that we have a common enemy and we are coming together to fight and conquer or wipe out the threat. 

The current pandemic is a rapid evolving situation, with data projections everywhere and lots of assumptions of how the novel virus is going to behave.   Many people are on a constant quest for more clarity, an obsessive search for statistics which they feel might bring some temporary relief or sense of security but ultimately causes widespread anxiety and fear, which we know through the Functional medicine lens, dramatically impairs peoples immune systems even further.  There is nothing in the news that is going to help you ´fight´ a virus, or nothing that will give you any factual clarity about what is happening, Date is currently limited and by definition it is skewed and the only thing worse then not having data is having in-accurate data. The scientific truth is that currently there is a lot of unknown. 

In the past 2 decades however, we have discovered just how much our health is dependant on the health of the planetary level of diversity and population of microbes that resides in our gut.  Our health is highly affected by theirs. So we know that to ultimately support survival and disease resilience we need to support biodiversity. Maybe we can then take what we have learnt about our internal microbial friends and apply it to our external microbial environment.

Through the Functional lens, we know that optimal health can be simplified to look at the opportunity to Maximise what the body needs, Minimise what is harmful and Prioritise an environment for healing for a unique person.  However we are not very good and I am not excluding myself here, at doing all 3 things consistently, which results in chronic dis-ease in our bodies.

 The focus right now is massively on the Minimise, trying to combat what is perceived to be harmful, we are at “war” with this novel virus, that we have been invaded etc it is a lot of very negative language and purely focused on Minimising.  However we know that in order to be able to create sustainable health we need to consider all 3 areas and currently I am not seeing anything in the media that is encouraging us to focus on the so very critical Maximising and Prioritising categories.

 It is not a woo woo concept, it has been incredibly well documented that our ability to be less vulnerable to what might be harmful is highly dependant on how well we do at maximising what the body needs in order to have strong immune function, regulation and balance as well as Prioritise an environment for healing.  In particular prioritising our Parasympathetic Nervous System which is our Rest and Repair mode, this is what actually allows our strongest immune function and healing, and again inot a woo woo concept, we know when we are in rest and repair mode we have significantly higher antioxidant function and dramatically higher immune function.

There is a huge focus at the moment on minimising what is harmful, however I believe that the best Defence we have, is to have a strong resilient Offence.  Defence is much harder because it is reactionary, where as having a strong offence means we are being pro-active in protecting ourselves.  By putting the focus on Maximising what our bodies need to be strong and resilient and Prioritising an environment for healing we can actually minimise the downstream dis-ease that comes from these ever present genomic challenges which is what viruses are.

A virus, put very basically, is like a ball of genetic wool, stuffed in a protein re-sealable freezer bag and sometimes traveling in a fat sack, as is the case with this novel coronavirus. Which is why washing the hands with hot water and soap is so effective. 

So much at the moment is about trying to minimise the exposure and to protect, yet the reality is that our exposure to viruses is ever present and ever lasting.  Viruses affect all life forms and there are many millions of viruses and they just are, as in they just exist, they don’t have any intent, they do have potential but in the same way a knife has potential or money, it is more about what happens once it is in the hands of a given unique individual.

From a Functional Medicine lens we know that if we are practising the most effective medicine, we should not be focusing on the disease, but rather we should be focusing on Who is the person who has this state of dis-ease and what does it mean to them.  Viruses are constantly challenging our immune systems ability to balance tolerance and regulation. Take our own PM for instance or our very own front line workers becoming critically ill.  Although they have been classed as fit and healthy, through the functional health lens however, they have one thing in common that stands out, un mitigated levels of Stress, as well as lack of sleep amongst many other things, which all promote the fight/flight mode and this directly contributes to the immune system being under more duress and more dis-regulated.  A healthy immune system gets geared up quickly and aggressively for a perceived threat to its balance, but also at the same time produces the opposite anti inflammatory response in order to make sure that the sparks that were created to counter a challenge don’t turn in to a raging fire that can´t then be put out.

A lot of the time when a virus challenges our body if you will, we don’t even know, as if our immune system is strong and resilient it just bats it along.  Sometimes due to known stressors on our body such as emotional, physical stress and/or fear and sometimes unknown like nutritional deficiencies or microbial imbalances, the immune system can be left more vulnerable and this can lead to us to being more susceptible to those viral challenges or re activation in the case for example of having chicken pox as a child and then Shingles as an adult. Yet we blame the virus like it has some devilish evil intent, rather then considering what we could do ourselves to better support our immune systems function.  How people are living, what they have been wrestling with, how they are spending their time and what they were prioritising prior to this pandemic, is dramatically going to affect their ultimate experience should they start having symptoms and become ill, yet this is no different then for any other type of virus.  Viruses are like all of life, constantly evolving and changing all the time, so making it virtually impossible to develop a single pharmaceutical intervention.

We are housed by a planetary level and diversity of microbes whose genetic makeup are even more loaded with viruses, there is many, many more times genetic material in our body from these microbes then there are from our human genes. Yet these are ´pathogens´ we are supposed to attack and spray the environment around us so that they stay away from us as if we can wall ourselves in, in some sort of bio shield to be safe, it´s just crazy.

Sweden has so far not locked down as a country, they are continuing to function with care for their most vulnerable and schools remain open.  The argument, I believe, that a lockdown is the only solution is a hard one to swallow when a whole country is showing there is another way.  Inducing fear as has been done in so many countries only drives the need to name the enemy and control it or eradicate it, to protect and isolate, treating it all with a very threat – focused lens.  I get it, it is sometimes easier to hone in on some external badness, but this leads the way for strategies such as we are currently experiencing such as quarantine and the push for a vaccination that there is no guarantee is completely safe or effective and where total exemption of liability has been given to the profiting companies.

I believe through the Functional Medicine Lens, we can consider a different perspective, one where mother nature is not against us. We have evolved over eons of time in order to survive in our current environment.  We are a highly developed as a species, so at what point are we going to decide that a good strong, resilient health is the best offence, versus a primary focus on scrambling to create a targeted defence against an ever present, ever evolving, mutli-factorial challenge.

For me, I believe, if ultimately we want to thrive in the environment that we are asking our bodies to live in, then we must learn to adapt and develop strong resilient immune function as our priority.  I also believe in order to make a difference, it´s not about converting each other to our view points, but simply sharing our thoughts and allow people to take what resonates for them and leave the rest.

As always if you are not sure where to begin, or are struggling to pinpoint why you are not feeling your best, please do get in touch.soneill@shirley-oneill.com