The preschool-level depictions of the immune system as a troop of soldiers fighting off the enemy germ invaders are indicative of a fundamental lack of understanding we have about immunology. In fact, the vast majority of immunology is thoroughly and completely devoted to vaccinology. 

Wait, vaccines must have beneficial effect if they produce antibodies, right? Antibodies have been deemed synonymous with disease protection, and we’ve even used a surrogate marker for claims that vaccines “work” in the laboratory setting, but is there actually any science for this? And do the antibodies produced upon vaccination actually bind to and inactivate disease-causing agents? What if antibodies are simply response elements that support the body’s reaction to the many toxic chemicals in vaccines, ranging from detergents like polysorbate 80 to formaldehyde?

And what about contagion? It has never actually been proven that germs travel from one person to another and infect them. Germs as pathogens is a complex question that science has contributed an abundance of literature to in the past few decades. But with the dawn of the microbiome — our inner ecology that reveals not only our harmonious relationship to but our dependency on the very microbes we have demonized — everything about orthodox medicine should have changed. Including the discovery of so-called viruses embedded in our own genomic material, calling into question whether or not viruses actually exist in the way we have assumed.

Has a discrete virus, deemed unable to exist independently, ever been visualized under an electron microscope, or are we still inferring? Research into our inner ecology now speculates that up to 8% of what we call human DNA may have been viral in origin; this is called the virome. Viral, meaning nucleic acids in a protein coat that require cells to replicate, essentially nonliving agents of genetic information transfer. As we understand more about how genetic information is passed between living entities, we may come to question the vectors we empowered with causal roles. 

Transmission of effects can take many forms that we can understand when we step out of the body of conventional medicine. Does a yawn spread like germs supposedly do? What about women’s menstrual cycles syncing up when they live together? Or the spread of fear-induced illness, which is strikingly demonstrated in a study in which women who were convinced that they were inhaling “contaminated air” got sick when they saw others getting sick from it — despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with the air.[1] Then there are people who only get symptoms of a cold when they believe themselves to be unwell at baseline. All of these situations bring the simplistic theory of germs spreading by physical pathogens alone into question.

It seems that the symptoms of infection are evidence that the body knows how to, and needs too, eliminate. Vomiting, diarrhea, sweating, coughing, sneezing, and runny noses all have exudative elimination in common. This likely also explains why so many people develop cold after after pneumonia after cold after bronchitis during and after their taper process: their immune systems are finally able to begin to mobilize stored toxicants.

As we sit in even more curious territory, what other assumptions have we make that have been disproven or remain unproven to date? Science can be a beautiful tool for discovery, but only if it is allowed to dispassionately acknowledge when a more complete picture is emerging. Charles Eisenstein, wrote in Ascent of Humanity: “when we see germs as predators who seek to steal ‘resources’ from us for their own biological interest (survival and reproduction), then a rational response is to deny them those resources, to hide from the predators or fight them off — the fight-or-flight response… If I believe, on the contrary, that there is some reason specific to my own body why the flu has infected me and not you, then the program of control doesn’t make sense anymore.”

Sometimes all it takes is a friendly reminder that when you are aligned with your body — and truly make a truce with it — you can access limitless reservoirs of healing energy. This is the reclamation we should all be interested in. Once we understand that our symptoms and illness have meaning, that they are sending us a message, and we trust our body’s capacity to move through them when supported, we become unstoppable vessels of revolution in today’s bio-coontroled society.