Why I Don’t Take Antibiotics

It’s slight hyperbole to say that “I won’t” take antibiotics. I would, in theory – just like I would undergo surgery (and have). But, I would place both of the above in the same category.

I would submit that most people in our civilization do not want to be healed.

What do I mean by that? I mean that they don’t actually want healing – what they want to bypass or side-step annoying symptoms, and keep doing what they were doing. This won’t heal – but they won’t have to put up with the bothersome uncomfortable consequences of their choices.

I want to keep eating quick carbs – but I don’t want to deal with inflammation and everything that comes with that. I want to keep sitting at a desk staring at a screen all day (well, maybe I don’t want to, but…) but I don’t want to deal with the consequences of languishing muscles. I want to have my headache gone now, instead of addressing the root cause (which might take time). Etcetera.

The above are all examples of what I mean – those examples aren’t healing – those are external interventions that forcibly separate your body from the natural consequences (or, rather, some of the more bothersome consequences) of your actions. Healing is where you harness your body’s own strengths, it’s own design, and help or enable it do what it is already trying to do. That’s healing. It’s tough. It’s often painful. And it takes time.

Think of what happens when you, say, Sauna (we just got a sauna, so it’s fresh on my mind). I know a Doctor who’s had two separate issues – a knee issue and a skin issue – that he’d been seeing specialists for, for literally 20+ years. No improvement. He started using a sauna, and both conditions were gone in a few weeks.

I’m sure there’s some website or scientist somewhere who could describe some of the ways a sauna heals and benefits, but I’m more and more convinced that ultimately the human system is a irreducible mystery – you can describe certain facets of it, but you as a human simply don’t have the capacity to hold the constellation of interrelations in your mind. It’s beyond our capacity – all we can do is focus on one or two facets, and emphasize those (that’s why I find the best health sources are storytellers, not technicians).

But I digress. Regardless of the mechanics of how a sauna heals, think about what happened to my Doctor friend. The sauna didn’t intervene and force his body to react in a certain way. Instead, the sauna enabled the body to do what the body already “wanted” to do – to conform to the living design that God had already built-in to the body. This is healing – something that was changed that enabled the body to finally “straighten itself out,” and be what it “wanted” to be.

By contrast, think about what a chemical, like an antibiotic, does. It intervenes, as an external force. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t necessarily bad – but it’s different, and it’s at least one distinct step further removed from actual healing. When you pop an antibiotic, you’re not allowing your body to “do what it wants to do” – rather, you’re bombing your body with a chemical intervention that forces your body, in a scorched-earth fashion, to comply with whatever that chemical happens to do (very similar to surgery). That could eventually lead to healing, absolutely. But it’s not healing – it’s not enabling your body to move towards it’s innate design. Rather, it’s forcing your body to comply – stripping out a certain spectrum of microbial life, or whatever that chemical does. Your body hasn’t “learned” how to do anything; it hasn’t, so to speak, developed any “memory” of how to heal. Instead, like any external intervention, your body now is conditioned that when “X” happens (whatever the ailment that you’re trying to correct), it shouldn’t do anything – you’ll bomb it with externally-acting chemicals and redirect your body using external force.

This is similar to any learning situation – it’s the difference between making your kid do his math problem for himself, and you doing it for him. Both get the same answer. But the former conditions the kid to be dependent on you – the external force – while the latter conditions the kid to learn his math. Sometimes you have to do the problem for the kid – sure. But that’s not learning for the kid – it’s one step removed, and may even harm his ability to learn.

So, back to antibiotics/chemical drugs. I do view these as different than, say, nutrition – because nutrition is much more like making your kid do his own math problem. Again – I think there’s absolutely a place for this: especially in crisis situations where time is of the essence. If I crack a limb, I need external intervention – sure, it’s not “healing,” but it’s still necessary. However, if I have a cut that’s getting infected (see my post about that here), I won’t take an antibiotic – because I’d rather do something that “teaches” my body to heal. If I use honey and homeopathy, those things “teach” my body to heal – like the sauna, they enable my body to do what it “wants” to do.

I by no means write any of this as a slam to individual Doctors – I’m lucky to know some of the best Docs in the trade. Doctors are doing what they are trained to do, within very specifically-defined protocols. Individual doctors are no more the “problem” than individual farmers are the problem for America’s food, than individual teachers are to the school system, than individual lawyers (yes, I’m a lawyer!) are to the legal system, etc. etc. etc. Think about it: every time Docs dip into something that not 100% mainstream, there’s a risk (especially these days!) of lawsuit – by definition. The same is true in any industry – if the average farmer decided to stop with pesticides, GMO, diversified crops, etc., the banks would funnel his money away from him, and towards farmers who were more willing. “Mainstream” Doctors play a crucial role in my opinion, especially in regards to speedy diagnosis and examination – the problem comes when people believe that strait-jacketed mainstream medicine is the only option. But I digress.

The obvious and imminent example of where I will take chemical intervention over other methods is spike, and ivermectin. I don’t know of any natural healing resource that effectively works here (absolutely not saying there isn’t one – I just don’t know of it – leave a comment below if you got some that dock to and unplug spike!) And again – by “natural healing,” I don’t necessarily mean “thing found in the woods.” Pine needle tea for spike, for example, could very well be a “drug” in it’s mechanism. I have no problem with that. As far as I can tell, even though there’s a distinction in mechanism (drug vs. natural healing), sometimes it could be just a matter of concentration – I don’t know. I can’t tell exactly when the day begins, and night leaves off – but I know for sure that day and night are different. What I do know, is that this same principle (of thinking as a “whole” vs thinking in terms of parts – again, the storyteller vs. the technician) applies to every facet of human life, and healing is no exception.

*footnote: Interestingly, I stumbled a while back on a study talking about a “new” treatment to reverse celiac – involving “nanoparticles” of gluten. For those not in the know, this “nanoparticle” idea is basically the crux of the theory behind homeopathy. Go figure.