By Penelope A. Domogo, MD
Last week we discussed our own body’s incredible defense and self-healing power. As a review, our bodies are designed to ward off foreigners- from toxins to bacteria and viruses. It’s incredible – but sadly, many people don’t believe it is there. They would rather worry themselves sick over the power of the virus to infect and even spread fear among their friends on facebook. Geez! It has been said “And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:27). Further, many people would rather trust the medicine and injection from the factory to make them well. And this is precisely why we are fearful at this time because we are not sure we are given such an incredible unimaginable defense and healing power. You would retort “Totoo bang may built-in power tayo? Bakit maraming nagkakasakit (if you add the figures worldwide that is) at may namamatay?”. Why don’t you also count who did not get sick or asymptomatic and those who got infected but got well. It’s easy actually, just get the total population of the area and deduct the reported cases and you get an estimate of people who did not get sick. If you are still worried, just count how many you are in your neighborhood or your facebook chat group and how many got sick.
Ganyan din ang feelings ng maraming tao when dengue fever became a national celebrity- affecting many places in the Philippines. Dengue is also caused by a virus and thus hindi tinatablan ng antibiotics. So people wore long pants, rubbed mosquito repellants on their skin and some communities even did fogging and used larvicides! The chemicals used here are synthetic pesticides (pyrethroids) and we again think its okay to use them. FYI, these are toxic. Then there was the vaccine Dengvaxia. We truly didn’t believe in our gift.
This time, we are given again a chance to believe in and value our gift so freely given by our Creator. Covid-19 is not affected by antibiotics and there is no vaccine. What’s our choice? Worry sick and continue monitoring by the hour how many got sick? or… claim this gift and harness it?
May choice naman. You cannot choose both, by the way. Why? Because these choices are thoughts. Thoughts are energies so they occupy space. So if your mind is full of anxiety and foreboding then there will be no room for the good news.
For us to fully harness this defense and self-healing power and for us to sustain this power, we, humans, have a responsibility. We have to choose wisely. According to the internationally-known doctor of Oriental Medicine, Roger Jahnke, there are three interconnected areas that affect our self-healing abilities.
First area is our choice of attitudes and mental influences. If we choose to believe that the power to heal is built-in inside us since birth, then the healer within us is automatically strengthened. It’s the law of attraction. Many times, though, we lack faith in our Creator. Let us compare our self-healing machine to that of a car engine. When you bought that car, am sure you fully trusted the manufacturer that the engine and all the parts of the car will function. Otherwise, if you didn’t have faith in that maker, then you would not have bought that car, right? Likewise, do we have faith in our manufacturer (that is God) that He designed our body to be good and wonderful? If we put as much faith in our more amazingly-designed body as we give to that car, then our self-healing power would spring to life. Thankfully, faith cannot be bought in the store so even if you are laid off from work, there’s no problem. But we need a lot of prayers to increase our faith in a loving Supreme Being. It’s Lent and lockdown so we have all the time to pray.
The second area of choice is lifestyle – diet, activity, rest, relationships, finances, work, spiritual practice, material possessions, avoidance of alcohol and cigarettes, etc. Now, this area would take a lot of discipline and is affected by the first area – our attitude and mental influences.
Diet is one thing you can act on immediately so let us analyze further how diet affects our healing power. For nature to do its healing job, there are two major conditions- 1) the cause of the disease has to be removed. Many times our problem lies in identifying the cause of the disease because we tend to blame external forces. We blame the virus, the cold weather, the change in weather, when in fact we may have been eating so much sweets, so much processed foods, white bread and drinking milk or 3 in 1 coffee. Or we may blame our spouse and children for our high blood pressure when actually it is our uncontrolled meat-eating that is the cause.
Let us again compare this to the car engine. Your engine does not start and you blame it on the cold weather. You did not check that the fuel you placed is diesel, not gasoline. Your car runs on gasoline. Are we running our bodies with the right fuel?
Why many people get sick globally nowadays is because our indigenous natural diet has been replaced by western unnatural diet – rich in sugar, dairy and meat and eggs and all those artificial additives. Our healthy local diets freshly sourced from nature and organic has been replaced by food derivatives from the factory. I have witnessed the effect of GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the World Trade Organization- before these, we, in Mountain Province, can only have Hershey’s chocolate if a relative from the US came home but after these agreements I could buy it from a Baguio supermart! With GATT & WTO, the Philippines and other countries opened their markets to imported products. And because we are so colonized by America we immediately lapped up everything US, including their diet preferences. And thus we also acquired their diseases. With free market, we became global, pati maka sakit. We are running and ruining our bodies with the wrong fuel.
Before, Igorots lived without sugar and milk, and they were well. Meaning puede pala! Flu was unknown to them in the distant past. Sugar paralyzes your defense forces. Instead of being alert to catch the virus, para silang lasing like Chi-Soo in the Korean telenovela who couldn’t shoot his target. Sugar and those refined foods and too much meat and eggs and fat make our blood sticky. If your blood is sticky and polluted how can your defense forces swim fast to catch the enemy? Compare swimming in El Nido as opposed to swimming in Pasig River. We are polluting our bodies with a lot of synthetic toxic chemicals and substances that we eat or apply in our skin/hair. With weakened immune system, of course, the virus will get the upperhand.
Aside from a weakened immune system, we need to consider another factor why infections set in. And that is providing fertile ground for the germs to grow. Have you seen those chemicalized gardens with unnaturally green cabbage and lush weeds? Aside from feeding the cabbages, the artificial fertilizers also feed the weeds. That’s what happens in humans and animals- sugar in your blood is like ammonia or food to the virus. Sugar makes your blood fertile ground for the virus, bacteria, even cancer cells to grow. Lasing na nga ang defense forces, marami pang food na nakalatag! Its double whammy! And we know how these tiny beings multiply- exponential! With so much food, they would naturally proliferate and soon overpower your defense forces. So if you analyze the ones who get complications from covid-19, they are the ones who have other diseases. Kaya mas marami sakit sa elderly kasi na-accumulate na ang kinain na asukal, gatas, karne, itlog, vetsin, etc. Lalo na kung yong nanay mo e sugar addict nung buntis siya sa iyo. Folks, sugar and cow’s milk and highly-processed foods are not essential foods. I wish LGUs now can ban the entry of those un-essentials to their provinces para healthy ang mga tao. Wala pang gastos.
2) The other major condition for nature to do its job is that you have to provide the right building and repair material. Any worker cannot do a good job with poor materials. Even the best carpenter cannot make a sturdy bench if what you give him is plywood. Our body’s building materials are the things you put inside your body- food, drink and air. Of course, the best building blocks are those provided by our Maker because those are exactly what he designed for us – fresh air, natural water and natural food (read organic). There is already enough information in this world on how we can be healthy but we choose to look away and insist that because it is in the store and FDA approved of it, it must be good. Well, FDA approved cigarettes which are proven to be carcinogenic. So, dear reader, if you have been putting in sugary, fatty, meaty, eggy, chemical-laden food in your mouth these past months and years, then it is time to clean them out and replace them with good material. So this time, my prayer is that each village be food sufficient – grow our own organic vegetables at least man lang – at ‘yon ang ititinda sa sari-sari store. Not much money changes hands but we keep ourselves healthy, make our farmers happy and Mother Earth breathe again.***
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“There are two ways to live your life. One is as though there are no miracles. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein
