SS: I would like to introduce to you Philip Incao, M.D. Philip graduated in 1966 from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He went on to study something called anthroposophic medicine in England and Switzerland. Since 1973 he has been in private general practice in rural upstate New York as well as serving as the medical director of Camphill Village, a unique model community with mentally handicapped adults in Copake, N.Y. His special interest is children’s health. He’s here today to talk about a very exciting topic: “Inflammation the Natural Enemy of Cancer.” Please welcome Dr. Philip Incao.
PI: Good morning. Thank you, Susan. Ifs a pleasure and an honor to be speaking at this FACT Convention. When I saw in the program this title, “The Role of Fever in the Immune Response,” I ,thought, that sounds like an expert talk; I wonder who’s giving that one.
So the title that I’ve chosen, “Inflammation the Natural Enemy of Cancer,” fits my talk better and I hope it can get us closer to the truth of the matter. Okay? I’m not an expert.
In order to understand how to prevent and treat cancer, we really need to study the opposite of cancer, the natural enemy of cancer and that is inflammation. The word “inflammation” comes from flame and flammable. Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician who’s considered to be the father of medicine, said that inflammation is the flame that cleanses the body. Nowadays, we use the word “infection” which is really misleading, and I’ll explain that later. All of the so-called infections, everything from a boil to a cold to measles to pneumonia, are really inflammations or inflammatory diseases.
The best way to begin to understand these inflammatory diseases is to look at their history. I’ve drawn a chart on the board. This (on the vertical axis) is the death rate from inflammatory diseases. On the horizontal axis the time from 1860 to 1980 and this is in the U.S.A. As you can see, the death rate from inflammatory diseases has gone way down. This includes TB, pneumonia and all the other childhood illnesses: the old scourges of childhood like diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, and all of the so called infectious diseases.
Now, this is a very dramatic drop; ifs actually a very interesting drop. What makes it so interesting is that the experts don’t know why that rate has dropped like it has. Now that may seem very surprising because it looks like it’s obvious why it has. I mean isn’t it obvious that it must be the antibiotics and immunizations that have done this? After all in 1860 we had no antibiotics. Now we have antibiotics, we have immunizations; we have modern medical care so that’s what’s made a drop?
But the experts who study this say “no.” They say that the antibiotics and the immunizations and the medical care came around when the rate was already dropping. Then as modern medical advances were introduced the rate continued to drop at the same rate. So it’s not that.
All right, so people said, well, it must be the sanitation. After all, in the old days there was garbage in the streets and everyone was getting typhoid fever. They said, well, let’s look at that. They looked at that and said, no, it’s not sanitation because even the diseases that had nothing to do with sanitation were dropping just as much as the diseases that had to do with sanitation. And also, what they found is that even with the sanitation, people got the diseases just the same; only they didn’t die from them. So they still got all these diseases, but their resistance to them was better. They didn’t die from them.
Well, then someone said what about nutrition? It must be the nutrition. After all, isn’t the nutrition today a lot better? Well, the experts looked at that and they said, “no”, ifs not the nutrition because in the old days the rich people who had good nutrition died just as much as the poor people who had poor nutrition. Nowadays, with the over refinement of food, its probable that nutrition is even worse than it was in the old days. So better nutrition is even worse than it was in the old days. So better nutrition is not the cause of this drop.
Now let’s see if there are any other factors. The greatest part of this decline has been the decline in children’s diseases, especially the greatest killers throughout history have been the common viral pneumonias and diarrheas that young babies have. These are still the greatest killers in third world countries.
Along with the decline in inflammatory diseases, life expectancy in modern countries from 1960 to 1980 has gone up, not quite as dramatically but it has gone up. In the pre-modern countries, the life expectancy is lower mainly because they have a high death rate from infectious inflammatory diseases in children.
But when they modernize and they improve their medical care one would think, well, the countries that spend the most on medical care should have the best life expectancy. The U.S.A. is the number two country in the money spent on medical care, so we should have one of the highest life expectancies. Instead, we have the 19th highest life expectancy and countries like Greece, Iceland and Spain, which spend a fraction of what we do on medical care, have a better life expectancy than we do.
Now let’s look at the opposite of the infectious or inflammatory diseases. Lefs look at chronic diseases. The chronic diseases linger. The chronic diseases are primarily heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and many other diseases. In civilized countries, at least since 1900 (the statistics here are not as good as on the other diseases), these have been slowly increasing. That is chronic disease in general. Cancer in children has been increasing more rapidly in modern countries.
To summarize, epidemiologists have looked very hard for a factor in civilization which changes at the same rate as life expectancy and which may, therefore, be the influence that causes life expectancy to improve. And they’ve looked at financial wealth, at access to medical care, at use of immunizations, at use of antibiotics and nutrition and at many other factors which seem to have little or no effect on life expectancy. But they did find one, one factor which in all countries and in all civilizations shows a direct positive correlation to life expectancy. Would anyone like to guess what it is?
Audience: Stress?
PI: That may be, but it’s very hard to measure that and I don’t think they’ve found a way of measuring it. A: Pollution. (inaudible) … water …?
PI: That goes along with sanitation. Pollution is a factor but pollution if anything should be making our life expectancy go down, right? So what’s been making it go up? And don’t forget this is in history from 100 years ago until now and it’s also in modernization.
When a country modernizes, there’s something about modernization that makes the life expectancy improve. Education is what it is. It’s literacy. If you measure the literacy in any country, it will have a direct correlation to the life expectancy. Now isn’t that amazing? There’s something about educating children and teaching them to read that seems to improve their resistance to inflammatory disease. Now, we’ll come back to this later.
Just to summarize, as Susan said this morning, cancer has been slowly going up. The war on cancer has had no effect at all on the cancer statistics. The picture in the U.S.A. today is something like this: the last year for which I could find complete statistics was 1986, and that year the six major chronic diseases — heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver accounted for 75% of all deaths. By contrast 7% of deaths were from accidents, suicides and homicides. One-half percent was from AIDS and 8% was from all inflammatory diseases only 8% compared to 75% from the chronic diseases.
Now, if you’re a good mathematician, you’ll see that that adds up to 901/2 %, but I couldn’t find out what the other 91/2 % was that’s miscellaneous!
I’m sure you hear we have the best medical care system in the world; we have a great life expectancy. But the disturbing fact is, recently there are signs that the overall health picture in this country is worsening. In some places, like New York City, for example, since 1982, the life expectancy is going down again.
Another measure is the infant survival rate. The infant survival rate is the measure … the percentage of infants who survive past their first birthday. Okay? Now the infant survival rate in this country is much better today than it was 100 years ago. 100 years ago many of these deaths were infants. But since 1950, when our infant survival rate was the 7th highest in the world, now it’s the 19th highest in the world. So it has dropped.
And most dramatic of all and, I think, most disturbing of all, is that just in the past 20 years, the incidence of chronic, disabling conditions of children under 17 years has doubled in the U.S.A. That means every chronic disease that could disable a person, including cancer, including respiratory diseases like asthma, nervous and mental diseases. Again, the medical profession doesn’t know the reason for this great increase in chronic disease in children. We will come back to that later.
So to summarize once more, there’s something about modernization, and education that gives a person resistance to infectious disease or inflammatory disease and at the same time may make him more prone to chronic disease because chronic diseases have been increasing. We don’t have good statistics from the third world countries, but I think if we studied them we would find that they have less heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer than civilized countries have.
I’d like to read, just as an example, an article from the NY Times last year, December ’88. Ifs called, “Baffling Rise of Intestinal Disorder in the Young:” “Crohn’s Disease, a serious disorder of the intestines appears to be increasing sharply among children, a trend that may reflect some unknown influence of Western industrial civilization; a British scientist said yesterday. He said, “It was possible that the decline of many childhood infections might allow children in the West to grow up without the development of their immune defense systems which such infections would ordinarily provoke. This theory was partly based on finding Crohn’s Disease in children of Indian and West Indian origin who had grown up in Britain. In India and the West Indies, he said, the disease is very, very rare indeed.” Crohn’s Disease is an example of one of the chronic diseases and Crohn’s Disease, if it lasts for a long time, increases your risk of cancer.
Another example of this inverse relation between inflammation at the beginning of life and cancer, or chronic disease at the end of life or in adulthood, is that studies of cancer patients, simply questionnaires of cancer patients, have shown that they have, on the average, a history of much less inflammatory and infectious disease in their childhood or in their younger life than the non-cancer patient. And we also know that in the individual cancer patient a high fever or a very strong bacterial infection with staph or strep can make the tumor break down and we know that this has something to do with the immune system. Nowadays we all hear a lot about the immune system. We hear about the T-cells and the B-cells and the killer cells and the suppressor cells all those cells thrashing around in our bodies.
But if we concentrate only on the cells, then we will lose the forest for the trees. And so I think we need to ask the question, what is the immune system as a whole really doing? The job of the immune system is to prevent anything foreign from getting into our system, whether it’s germs or pollen or a splinter in your finger or even the food that we eat. The immune system will react to prevent any foreign substance from entering your blood stream.
Now what happens if, despite our immune defenses, something foreign does get into our blood stream? Then the immune system has another job and that’s to eliminate as quickly as possible every last bit of foreign substance from our body and it does this by discharging, by discharging pus or mucus which carries away the foreign particles, or by provoking vomiting or diarrhea, or by provoking a rash in which molecules of foreign protein are brought out to the surface of the skin. If these methods of elimination aren’t enough, then the immune system will provoke a fever which speeds up all the metabolic processes so that any foreign substance is burned up, just like Hippocrates said and just like, for example, creosote in a chimney is burned up by a chimney fire.
Now these discharges, especially of pus, are what usually scare people into taking antibiotics. But all of the acute inflammatory or so-called infectious diseases, must discharge in order to be healed!
I’ll give you an example of a study that was actually done on measles in African children. The measles death rate in third world children is much higher than in American children. Measles is a viral disease which cannot be killed, cannot be knocked out by antibiotics. It just has to run its course. The standard treatment for measles in this country, in Africa up to that time, was to give aspirin to bring the fever down, to give antibiotics to reduce the secondary bacterial complications which could come after the measles. But they would give these things right from the beginning of the measles. Despite this treatment, 30% of the children died.
Then a doctor, who had some holistic leanings, had an idea. He said, I bet these children would do better without any aspirin or antibiotics. His colleagues didn’t believe him, so a trial was done. Some of the children were treated with drugs and some were not and this is what they found: the children not treated with drugs had a higher fever and had a stronger rash and were initially sicker than the other children and a few of them died. But in the great majority, after the fever broke they were fine. They did not go on to develop the complications of pneumonia or measles encephalitis. The children treated with aspirin and antibiotics had a lower fever and less rash and were initially not as sick as the children without drugs. But then many of them did go on to develop the complications of pneumonia, encephalitis and many of them died, about 30%, while only 7% of the children not treated with drugs died.
The reason for this is something that in former times every grandmother knew: that in measles or any childhood rash, the rash needs to come out! Old folk treatments were designed to bring out the rash and if the rash can’t come out then it may go back in and come out on an interior surface of the body such as the lungs or the brain and that will cause far more damage there than on the skin.
Or the rash may not come out inside or outside the body and may simply remain stored in a latent form within the body. Storage is another way that the body deals with unwanted foreign matter. When the body can’t discharge it, it will store it. Now storage is usually only a temporary solution. Matter will be stored until the next opportunity for discharge. That is, until the next inflammatory illness that provokes a fever, or a rash, or diarrhea or a big mucous discharge.
But sometimes there isn’t another opportunity for discharge, and sometimes what the body means to discharge is treated with antibiotics, or anti-inflammatory drugs and then most of the discharge is pushed back into storage. Almost all modern drugs tend to suppress discharges and push them back into storage. And so for whatever reason, a person goes for many years without any discharge, without a cold, without a fever, without a bad attack of diarrhea. Such a person usually feels fine and is thought to be very healthy. But such a person is at great risk for getting cancer!
And now we finally come to the point. Just as inflammations are discharging diseases, cancer is just the opposite. Cancer is a storage disease. When any foreign substance is stored too long in the body, it causes an irritation which may stimulate cancer growth. Any chronic irritation can cause cancer. For example, if you breathe in asbestos dust, it settles in your lungs and the body is unable to get rid of it. It’s unable to discharge it. These sharp, spiney little asbestos fibers are stored in your lungs and cause a chronic irritation which after many years may result in cancer.
Its fairly easy to understand why years of irritating asbestos or tobacco tar in your lungs may eventually cause cancer. But what does that have to do with childhood diseases, diseases like strep throat or earaches? Don’t they need to be treated by antibiotics in order to destroy bacteria? After all, aren’t the bacteria the foreign matter that has invaded the body?
In my view, the answer to both of these questions based on my experience of treating childhood illnesses for the past 17 years, is no. Earaches and strep throat do not need to be treated with antibiotics because the bacteria are not the cause of the illness! The body simply discharges what it needs to discharge and the germs, which live on us and around us all the time, are attracted to the discharge and feed on it. If you throw garbage on the front porch of your house, it will attract vermin And germs are nothing but vermin, mini-vermin. And if you discharge what is garbage for the body into your nose into your throat, into your sinuses, it will attract germs. You can culture the germs there but the germs are not causing the discharge, they’re only feeding on it.
The next question is, why does a person, especially a child, need to discharge at all? Many people think that if a child lives in a pollution-free environment and avoids junk food, he should never get sick. That is not true. Ifs part of a child’s normal healthy growth and development to have a certain number of childhood illnesses like measles, German measles and scarlet fever, impetigo and other rash-illnesses of children, including sore throats, earaches, colds, and even whooping cough. These are inflammations, but they are not “infections.” The illness is not going in, ifs coining out!
You can compare the growth and development of a child’s body into an adult’s body with something like remodeling a house. Growth is not a simple process of adding on; it’s a process of remodeling and when you remodel, you have to do a little demolition, so you create debris. A child’s body is remodeling all the time as it grows and his body creates debris in the normal course of his growth and development. And the debris is garbage for the body and makes the child sick. The job of the immune system is to get rid of the debris, to discharge the debris and when it does, it causes the normal childhood illnesses like measles and strep throat and so on and so on. That is the real cause of these diseases, not the germs.
And if you don’t want to let the child have his discharges of measles and strep throat and you routinely suppress these discharges with immunizations and antibiotics, then you will most definitely increase that child’s chance of getting cancer in later life.
Now this doesn’t mean you must never use antibiotics or immunizations. If you use them sparingly and with understanding of what they’re really doing, then maybe you’ll be all right. The antibiotics and immunizations are powerful and effective tools for modifying the immune response and they can be absolutely life-saving when used appropriately. But if used indiscriminately, as they are today in America, they will increase the tendency to cancer and chronic disease, which they already have. That’s one of the reasons why cancer in children is increasing and why chronic illnesses in children under 17 years old has doubled in the last 20 years.
I think the most important thing to understand is what health really means. How can one be healthy? We all know the factors that improve health: like good nutrition, good habits, good parenting, but we don’t really have a definition of what health is. We know ifs got to be more than just the absence of disease. The World Health Organization defines health as “mental, physical and social well-being.” But that doesn’t really define it either because well-being is just another word for health.
I would like to give a different definition of health. We spoke about these two tendencies: the tendency to inflammatory diseases, to discharge, which is greater in children, greater in Third World countries and was greater in our own country 100 years ago. And then- we spoke about the opposite tendency the chronic disease tendency, the storing or the retention tendency. That’s more common in civilized countries. It’s more common in older age, and it has been increasing in the past 100 years. Actually, every single one of us has both disease tendencies going on in our bodies all the time, under the surface without causing any symptoms. The inflammatory or discharging tendency appears whenever we get a cold or it even appears to a smaller extent whenever we cough or sneeze. And the storing tendency occurs whenever we absorb a detrimental influence without neutralizing it, without resolving it and without discharging it. In other words, when we take something into our bodies that’s very negative, and it can be anything from asbestos to a hateful thought, and we just store that but we don’t work on it, don’t resolve it, and don’t discharge it, then that increases the burden of foreign storage in our body and it makes us more prone to cancer and chronic diseases.
So health is not the absence of disease. Health is keeping a balance through your whole life of the polar opposite tendencies that exist in you all the time: discharging vs. storing.
If we are able to keep remodeling our body our whole life long and if we keep discharging our debris when we need to, then we will be healthy and mentally alert until we die. If we don’t remodel and if we don’t discharge then our bodies and our minds will get stiff and hardened as we age. The balance between inflammation and cancer is the same as the balance between discharging and storing.
And another way of looking at it, it is also a balance between hardness and softness and this is an area where the physical and the emotional meet. This whole new field of psychoneuro-immunology is really about hardening vs. softening. If we show our emotions, if we open ourselves to everyone that we meet, if we laugh easily, if we love a lot, and if we are very uncritical, then we are said to be soft. But these are just the qualities which Bernie Siegel and many others have found to be therapeutic in cancer patients.
By contrast, if we close ourselves off to everyone, if we are afraid or unable to show our love or our sadness, if we are resentful and unforgiving, then we are hardened emotionally. When we open ourselves we become softer, when we close ourselves, we become harder and the truth of psychoneuro-immunology is that our emotions and thoughts have a direct effect on our immune system. Negative emotions can influence the immune system to store and the positive emotions influence it to discharge.
So when we’re in the habit of holding everything in emotionally, then this becomes a habit in our physical body too, so that we hold our foreign or toxic matter. We store it instead of discharging it and this leads directly to cancer and other chronic diseases.
Now in the old days when inflammatory diseases predominated or in Third World countries where inflammatory diseases still predominate, people were or are much more open, more emotional and less educated. They were more likely to die of pneumonia than of cancer. In the old days in order to make a child healthier when they were very vulnerable to inflammatory diseases and in order to make them less likely to die of pneumonia, some cultures like the American Indians understood that a little hardening by exposing their babies to sunlight was beneficial. Of course, now we know that sunlight produces vitamin D in the skin and vitamin D is a very hardening agent. Again, it’s a matter of balance and of understanding that’s needed under the circumstances.
The hardening that comes with modernization has been responsible for this drop in inflammatory diseases. Too much hardening will cause a further increase of chronic diseases and cancer. The hardening factors in modernization are not only antibiotics and immunizations, although these are very important ones. They are over-refinement of food, excess vitamins and minerals, pollution of air, water and food, pollution of the environment from radiation, including nuclear radiation, microwave radiation, electro-magnetic radiation.
Two hardening factors that are very prevalent, especially in this country: vitamin D, which is present in all the milk, and fluoride which is present in the water, although hopefully that will be less soon.
So, it should come as no surprise when we find it confirmed that fluoride indeed causes cancer because fluoride is one of the most hardening substances known. It doesn’t harden only the teeth, it hardens the bones, and the connective tissue. It hardens the immune system and causes premature aging of the whole body just like John Yiamouyiannis said. Likewise, it should come as no surprise that too much hardening by sun exposure causes increased skin cancer which you’ve heard a lot of recently.
So in conclusion I would say that the best way you can prevent or treat cancer is to avoid as many hardening influences as you can, to open yourself to as many softening influences as you can, and to rejoice every time you get a good juicy cold and even more so if you get a fever. Thank you.
PI: With my patients when they go to the dentist and the dentist prescribes penicillin, I usually have them cleanse their system after visiting the dentist; maybe do a fast or a colon cleansing and I have them take echinacea, which is an herbal anti-infectious herb.
I was struck by your suggestions, sounds very reasonable that the discharge aspect of inflammatory processes in children is an essential part of the development of the child, of the physiological.
Margaret Muller and other great developmental psychologists -looking at that side of development have suggested that there are phases of development of the psychological nature in the child. She even went so far as to say that the child is born twice, once physically and about at the age of 3, psychologically. I’m struck by the possibility that she is looking at the same process in a different prism, in that there is a strong correlation between the psychological development of children and beyond because development is a lifelong process of this discharge phenomenon you’re talking about.
Q: Do you have recommendations on the treatment of periodontal disease? Isn’t that an inflammatory disease?
PI: Well, there’s a book called “The Tooth Trip” by Thomas Mcquire. It was published by Random House. I usually recommend that book to my patients who are trying to treat their own periodontal disease, but it you can get your body to discharge in other ways, in healthier ways like having colds and fevers, maybe you won’t need to have the periodontal disease. The periodontal disease is like a chronic discharge that your body has because it can’t have an acute discharge.
Q: Can you go over the softening effects?
PI: Softening effects are just what Bernie Siegel talks about. They are just what’s published in the brochure from FACT that connect mental attitude and cancer. All of those will soften you. And basically it’s not being afraid to get sick. But you have to recognize what the good sicknesses are.
Q: If the immune system attacks everything that’s foreign, what about the basic concept of transplants which are foreign. Do you have questions about the whole philosophy of transplants and if so, if not, which transplants might be better than others?
PI: I have a patient who would be dead, would have died 20 years ago, if it wasn’t for a transplant. She’s had two transplants and I think you have to look at each case individually. Transplants are one of those modern advances that has enabled people to stay alive longer, to make a contribution to life, but you do pay a price for them. You have to take an immune suppressant your whole life-long to prevent your immune system from rejecting the transplant.
Q: (inaudible) tinnitus?
PI: That’s usually a chronic problem of the inner ear. And again it’s one of these conditions that happens when, to put it briefly, toxicity can’t get out so it settles somewhere inside. That can then cause a low grade chronic inflammation in the inner ear. I can imagine that kind of thing happening if you’ve had many earaches which were an attempt to discharge. For instance, the child will have an earache, pus will start draining out of the ear, the doctor will say, “Oh my God, that’s terrible; there’s pus coming out. You’ve got to take an antibiotic.” But if you don’t do anything as Robert Mendelsohn wrote in his book, and especially, if you understand how to help the body to cleanse, then the pus will drain out, and the eardrum will heal up perfectly well, in the great majority of cases. If that happens, that may prevent future problems in the inner ear in later life.
RS: We’ve had some other experiences that cause tinnitus. I’m not in disagreement though with what Dr. Incao has just said. That is absolutely on target. But sometimes there’s poor occlusion of the teeth. When the jaw which hinges at this point just in front of the ear is out of place. In other words, when the ball and socket is out of place it will lean against a nerve there and that will begin to create that sound which is tinnitus. That would have to be corrected by a dentist, using a splint in the mouth to push the joint back into place. Tinnitus can be caused by both things.
Q: What is the role of fever for treatment of cancer? Is that hyperthermia? And if so, who gets better results from it?
PI: This is a question I should really let Ruth answer because I don’t know. Are we going to be talking about hyperthermia at some point?
RS: Her question, of course, was which was the best way to get a fever, through trying to create a spontaneous fever or to do it artificially? Sometimes you can’t create a spontaneous fever, sometimes ifs impossible. That’s when the system of creating a fever artificially by using hyperthermia is useful. That’s where they use water-filled blankets which are heated to a high temperature so that the body temperature rises to 107.5∞ F. In other words, it’s not taking a chance that the body can’t generate the fever, but it’s creating it regardless.
Q: Which way do you consider more effective?
RS: I think a spontaneous fever would be an easier way to do it. I can’t say more effective. It would be slower and easier, but the hyperthermia can sometimes dissolve a fairly large tumor in one treatment, not always, but it can.
Q: What about bacterial vaccines, like BCG or mixed-diptheria vaccine?
RS: Those don’t always generate a fever. Very often they can’t and it’s not the right way. That’s actually immunotherapy. You’re not talking about fever therapy, you’re talking about a type of immunotherapy and that type of immunotherapy can add more debris to the system. It can add more stored garbage to the system instead of eliminating it. There are different ways to use immunotherapy and that’s to use substances that the body in a state of health could produce on its own, like thymus material, interferon, interleukin, some of those things they’re more normal, more natural.
Q: I would just like to make a comment about the life expectancy data…. I’ve seen that life expectancy is increasing right now. It’s a little misleading and I think you need to make a distinction….
I: I said it increased until 1980.
Q: Right, I’m not disagreeing with you about that. You have to make the distinction of the life expectancy for children who die before they reach the age 5, and people who have reached the age of 40.
I: Right, the average of those two.
Q: The average according to insurance records, which I think people will agree are pretty valid because it’s their business to know exactly how long people are going to live, would indicate that adults, once they reach the age of 40, over the past 200 years, their life expectancy has increased 2 years. The data that help support, actually better, your decrease in inflammatory disease with children whose life expectancy before they reach the age of 5 has gone back incredibly.
I: So over the age of 40 it’s only increased 2 years.
Q: I mean we could even go back the last 200 years or so.
I: That supports my thesis even better.
Q: Exactly, that’s why I wanted to screen that out. You can even go back 2000 years, for example, the time of ancient Greece. Certainly, when Hippocrates and Aristotle were living to the age of 80 and 90, and that sort of thing.
I: Right, right. Thank you.
RS: I think what is creating the rise in life expectancy is sometimes done quite artificially and although life is there, the quality of life is not necessarily as good as one would want.
Q: Could you discuss some of the sinus problems that are going on in so many cities now?
I: Well, I think you just, ifs pretty obvious … why.
Q: Pollution?
I: Sure.
Q: About 58 years ago I was treated with penicillin. My doctor insisted that was the thing to do. He gave me 15 injections. Finally, on the 16th I got sick, and how! Now today I’m allergic, they tell me I’m allergic to penicillin If I should get an injection, I get deathly sick. Can you explain the relation to the immune system and the allergy? Why should I be so allergic, it seems like the body never forgets that, never. Every time it recognizes penicillin, that’s it! I get sick! Well, what is the relation to the immune system? Can you explain that since that is our main topic?
I: Yes, that kind of thing happens a lot. I think it’s that the defenses of your body were just overburdened. You got 15 injections and your body could tolerate that, but then on the last injection the straw that broke the camel’s back your body couldn’t take all of that foreign material, couldn’t digest it, couldn’t assimilate it and now your body has an allergy to that. So that’s actually good. Your body rejects that. It won’t allow itself to get poisoned anymore.
Another way, another thing that could happen, is that the penicillin was given to you because you had debris in your body that was coming out. You must have had some kind of so-called infection which means pus was coming out of your body or you had a fever or something like that so they give you penicillin which pushes all that garbage back into your body and that then makes you sick also. So there’s two reasons to get sick: 1) because it’s all being pushed back in and 2) because of the penicillin itself. That doesn’t mean that a little penicillin isn’t good sometimes, but when it’s overused, it can do this.
