When a cell becomes diseased and the function of the cell begins to falter, it may start to come apart at the seams. Bits of its essential structure, the DNA and RNA, may become detached as it is falling apart. The cell will try and clean up these bits by preparing them for the rubbish bin. The small pieces of genetic material, which are now floating around in the intracellular fluid, will be isolated by means of encapsulating them. As the cellular disintegration continues more and more of these bits are seen inside the cell and more and more small "bags" of useless genetic material will appear. Once the cell is totally dysfunctional and filled with rubbish, the cellular wall itself bursts and the contents will be spilled into the cellular environment. Here, the cleanup continues by packaging these small bags up even further into what has been called the lymphocytes and macrophages of the immune system. These large vesicles now drift away into the lymphatic fluid and the blood stream, from where they will be filtered out at appropriate draining stations, like the spleen and the lymph nodes. This process continues until the whole lot has been cleared.
This explains why the number of viruses is the highest at the very beginning of the disease and continues to decline steadily throughout the disease process, even without treatment. This also accounts for the thousands and thousands of different viruses that have been identified and for the mutation of viruses. Viral behavior is essentially totally unpredictable, because the cells and the way they disintegrate is never the same, not because this is an animal that changes its behavior so quickly and intelligently that nothing can keep up with it. It also does away with the idea that the virus can lay dormant for an indefinite period of time and become activated without any triggers or reasons having been identified.
How do we then explain viral epidemics? Why is it then that we get a cold the day after someone in the office starts to cough and sneeze a lot?
The medical profession knows that viruses have incubation periods. These are said to vary from virus to virus from a few days to several years. A cold virus has an average incubation period of about a week. Now, first of all, you can't catch a virus; and secondly, if you could catch the cold virus, it would take a week before it had established itself within your body and starts to show symptoms. Consequently, your cold cannot have been caused by the other person's cold in the office the day before!
What is seen and has been named a virus starts after the cellular structure begins to disintegrate. Why does a cell start to fall apart? Because it is diseased. The disease is already there, long before any viral particles show up in any pictures. So, then we have to ask the question why the cell has become diseased? The answer to this lies in the build-up of toxic material within the cellular structure. As the cell gets loaded up with inappropriate material it will eventually be unable to cope and it will start to fall to pieces. It is exactly those pieces that are photographed by the electron microscope and have been named viruses.
The influences that can lead to an increased pressure on the system are many and are varied. They range from the weather, to living and working environment, to lifestyle and diet, to the balance of activity and rest, to mental balance, stress and worries. Because a lot of these influences, such as working conditions and the weather, are general circumstances which affect all of us, it is very likely that a great number of us, in the same environment, will fall ill at or around the same time, succumbing to the environmental influences. Add to this that people who are working in the same environment are very likely to have similar lifestyles, and another factor has been identified explaining why similar disease patterns occur within certain groups of people at certain times. On top of that, we now know that worry reduces our immunity capacity and increases the likelihood of illness. The belief that if one person close to you has a cold you are going to get it increases the likelihood of this actually happening dramatically, as you become more vulnerable through the immune-reducing effect of the worry itself.
Epidemics occur because people in similar circumstances, living environments and conditions have similar imbalances within their systems, leading directly to similar disease patterns. This causes fear and apprehension all around them, making others more vulnerable to start showing a breakdown of health themselves. The disease is spreading. More accurately, the fear of the disease is spreading first, resulting in a lowered resistance, which allows each individual's imbalances to show up through the inability to cope with the problems the system has already been faced with for a long time. More and more people are becoming ill and showing signs of the fact that their bodies have been under extreme pressure for quite a while to maintain health. The showing of an illness is the end result of a long process, even an "acute" illness, of a slow deterioration of the system's normal functioning. Disease is a process, not a state of being.
It is time to learn the facts of life.
It is time to do away with ignorance and the resulting fear.
It is time to focus on individual health and the factors that influence it.
It is time to do away with ignorance and the resulting fear.
It is time to focus on individual health and the factors that influence it.
Viruses are dead, but diseases are very much alive. Let's concentrate on the living, not the dead, if we want to be healthy.
Dr. Patrick Quanten, M.D.
** Patrick Quanten has been a general practitioner since 1983. The combination of medical insight and extensive studies of Complementary Therapies have opened new perspectives on health care.
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