Sunday, June 11, 2006

Thanks Shelley For Not Killing My Good Bacteria

Holly and I did a 2.5 hour "consultation" with our friend Shelley Pagitt regarding our diet, exercise and overall nutrition. Shelley is a good friend and she has recently been "ordained" as a wholistic nutritionist. She knows her stuff.

So, she's helping us to understand the way the wholistic perspective works versus how the Western medical perspective works. She tells us that there is, you know, good and bad bacteria in you body. When you take antibiotics, it kills the bad bacteria...but it also kills the good bacteria...which is bad.

A naturalistic (is that the right word? perhaps homeopathic?) approach says that the good bacteria, if nurtured, will eventually "overpower" the bad bacteria and will define the environment more fully. Shelley said killing both in order to kill the bad is not such a swell idea. Better to nurture the good.

Now there are certain situations where a bacterial infection is so bad that antibiotics might could end up being a sort of "necessary evil" (it irks me to say), but you run the risk of the creating an environment where the good will never be able to overcome the bad on it's own...a person's immune system will find itself always needing to bring out the big guns in order to heal a body that was created to heal itself.

Jimmy and Carla (our lovely hosts this past week) shared with us that it's not so different in gardening. The roots of the good and the bad are so intertwined that to spray them all with weed killer or to begin to pull up the weeds would be so very dangerous to an already sensitive ecosystem.

Perhaps that's what the Master meant when he said Pull up the weeds and you might take the wheat along with them. Hmm.

2 comments:

Scott said...

These are very good points. It might be valid to extrapolate further. For example, Thomas Moore takes a homeopathic approach to soul care. He suggests that toxic symptoms like jealousy and envy might signal important messages the soul is trying to send up from our depths. Dismissing or repressing or medicating stuff we don’t like about ourselves might make us decreasingly able to discern urgent memos germane to psycho-social health.

Emma said...

you know, once i ruined a lot of potatoes in a farm because i kept pulling them up instead of the weeds... i was so excited farming, but i didn't have a clue. and it wasn't even my farm. that might be an analogy too... christians who pull up the good stuff outta jesus' own farm all because of ignorance and zeal. i am such a dork.
anyway, hope you guys are doing good.