Family Chiropractic Centre

TALKING AIM AT SACRED COWS

In the prairies, the herds of buffalo would follow hard on the heels of grass fires to graze on the rich new growth that sprang up soon after the fire passed.

In the scrubland of Florida, after three years without fire, quail are hard to find. In the fourth year, they are gone. Local folks will tell you: "Any cracker knows you have to have fire to keep quail."

In old pine forests, regular fires keep fallen needles and undergrowth to a minimum. Thus, when the next fire occurs it moves swiftly through the forest, never getting hot enough to affect the tree through its thick bark nor damage its roots.

We have tried to change all that. Not understanding the part fire plays in maintaining a healthy ecosystem, we develop elaborate strategies to minimize fire.

These efforts can, for a time at least, proscribe fire. It is, however, counterproductive to the goal of saving wildlife and habitat.

Our health, both individual and group, is poorly served by trying to eradicate disease. Drug reliance (both prescription and over-the-counter) acts to weaken our immune system, and is terribly expensive.

Did you know that drug-related problems:

• Account for 28% of all hospital admissions
• Cost as much as $182 billion annually
• Kill as many as 198,815 people yearly

Growing bacterial resistance to antibiotics is an alarming example of our war on disease gone wrong. Overutilization of antibiotics for non-life- threatening illness has led to the proliferation of these antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Considered a magic bullet, antibiotics are increasingly less effective:

• 13,000 people die each year in the U.S. from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections
• Strep pneumoniae resistance to penicillin jumped from 0% to 9% in the last six years in Canada (there are over 500,000 cases of pneumonia and 12 million ear infections caused by this bacteria every year)
• One strain of Staph. aureus (flesh-eating bacteria) lives in many U.S. hospitals and has infected many Canadian hospitals.

It now appears that the gun shooting this magic bullet is aimed back towards us.

With 20 million prescriptions for oral antibiotics each year in Canada -- more than half of them to children for ear infections -- we have become a people of weak immune systems fighting increasingly deadly microorganisms.

Endeavoring to destroy all disease-causing microbes is a futile and deadly pastime.

Bacteria have such short reproductive spans that they can adapt far more quickly to changes in their environment than can we. The accepted medical approach to disease is providing the battlefield upon which microbes test themselves, and the battlefield is our bodies.

We are far better served, individually and as a group, by measures taken to improve our immune status.

Those things which strengthen our immune system leave us better able to fight off infections before they even start and leave us better able to resist them if they do take hold.

Weaning ourselves from dependence on "wonder drugs and magic bullets" requires resumed responsibility for our own health, discipline to take care of ourselves, and -- perhaps most importantly -- a renew

• Paradigm Lost
• Paradigm Found
• Life Heals