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Acute inflammations like colds, flus and fevers seem to be an inescapable part of life. Everyone experiences them, but why do we get them? Many of us have noticed (if not, our spouses have) that we often come down with a cold or flu when we are overly stressed or depleted. We explain this by assuming that stress lowers our resistance to the viruses and bacteria that like to make us sick. Most of the time we peacefully co-exist with these microbes which everywhere share our environment. If we get sick it’s often because we’ve allowed ourselves to get out of balance.

This applies to children too, but only partially. In children, studies have shown that respiratory infections increase in frequency from birth and peak by age six, followed by a sharp decline after age seven, irrespective of treatment. In other words, it seems to be a normal feature of childhood to experience a variety of acute inflammations, especially of a respiratory nature, in the first seven years of life.

Prior to the advent of 20th century improvements in sanitation and living standards, children had a high death rate from these acute inflammations: measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and the common unnamed pneumonias and diarrheas. These have been the greatest threats to children throughout history, and still are in developing countries. In all modern nations, children’s deaths from such acute inflammations have been steeply declining ever since 1900. Over 90 percent of the decline occurred before the advent of antibiotics and vaccinations. Polio is an important exception to this pattern. Just before 1900, when all the other familiar life-threatening children’s illnesses were beginning to decline, the newcomer, polio, made its first appearance in medical history and continued to grow in importance until its abrupt decline with the advent of the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines in the 1950s.

In the USA today, what used to be the common dangerous infections of childhood only account for about one per cent of children’s deaths. In contrast to this, seven per cent of deaths in US children aged one to 19 are from cancer, seven per cent are from suicide and a shocking 14 per cent are from homicide!

Since 1960 there has been a sharp increase in both the frequency and the severity of asthma in many developed nations. In the USA, asthma accounts for one per cent of children’s deaths–equal to infections–and is a leading cause of childhood disability.

A growing body of medical research supports the common-sense idea that children who experience frequent infections and inflammations in early childhood will strengthen their immune systems and will be less prone to allergies and asthma than children who rarely experience such infections. This idea is called "the hygiene hypothesis." Research has revealed a list of factors which correlate with a decreased risk of asthma and allergies, including the avoidance of vaccinations and antibiotics and the blessing of growing up in a large family.

If the hygiene hypothesis proves to be correct, it will have a revolutionary impact on medical practice. We will realize that when children experience colds or fevers, they are really challenging their immune systems and developing an inner strength which will be theirs throughout life. Our job as parents and health-care workers is to prepare and strengthen our children to meet challenges, but not to remove them.

The blessing of modern medicine is that it has the tools and techniques to ease suffering and save lives when we or our children are in danger of being overwhelmed by illness. Nevertheless, suppressing illness does not create health. It only grants a respite so that the body is enabled to heal naturally and restore balance. Health and healing are mostly about developing our inner capacities to adapt, to change and to maintain balance as we move through life’s journey.

To truly foster the overall health and inner strength of children, we need to go beyond the short-sighted view of illnesses as hostile aggressors and of children as helpless victims. Children are individuals. Each child gets ill in his or her own individual way, and each illness has a meaningful part to play among the challenges belonging to that child’s life.

Just like everything else in nature, illness exists within the larger context of a balanced system. There is an ecology of human illness, and if we attempt to eliminate a single element of any ecological system, we disturb the balance of the whole in ways which can lead to unforeseen consequences. For children, this could be related to today’s dramatic increases in asthma, allergies, diabetes, autism and learning dysfunctions. What modern medicine fails to appreciate about the balance between health and illness is that when you push one side down, the other side goes up! Our present effort to eradicate acute infectious diseases in children through increasing numbers of vaccines has already long overshot the healthy balance point, and is now helping to create in developed nations more chronic disease and disability in children then ever before.

To improve public health, health policy needs to shift its focus from eradicating particular diseases to improving the social conditions which breed disease. Physicians need to learn how to help individual patients maintain a lifelong balance in body, soul and spirit. If we physicians learn that, and if we apply it to ourselves as well, then the overall health of our society cannot help but improve.

Low Risk Factors

The following are low risk factors for allergies and asthma:

• Having older siblings
• Entering daycare by six months old
• Reacting positive to a TB skin test
• Having had the measles
• Not having had DPT or MMR vaccines
• Having had little or no antibiotics, especially before the age of two
• Eating fermented foods containing live lactobacilli
• Growing up with frequent exposure to farm animals
• Not washing much

Philip F. Incao was the first president of the Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine in the USA. He has an active general practice in Denver, Colorado.

Source: alive #227, September 2001