You don't have an immune system

You have a body that knows how to heal itself

Now that we in the northern hemisphere are in “cold and flu season,” the term “immune system” is coming up frequently. We often hear the term from health-oriented sources on the more alternative side of things—people talking about “strengthening your immune system” by eating nutrient-dense foods, grounding yourself, getting natural sunlight, using certain herbal teas and tinctures, etc. And of course, from the maintream medical side, the ubiquitous reminders to get your “flu shot,” because vaccines are purported to impart immunity to specific pathogens.

I have written in the past about the “immune system” and the fact that it doesn’t exist any more than viruses or exist or bacteria cause disease.

In fact these concepts (the “immune system,” “viruses,” and “the germ theory”) are all linked, and that is why I keep wanting to clear up the misunderstanding about “immunity.” Especially, for the love of God, in the herbal, nutritional, and other natural healing communities. I’ve written about that before, too, and my sadness and frustration with herbalists who still use terms like “anti-microbial” and “anti-viral” to describe the medicinal actions of herbs.

Back in the late 1800s, when Louis Pasteur was advocating the “germ theory of disease” to replace previous understandings of what causes illness (for example, poison, toxins, or cold air), the “theory” was that every disease was caused by a specific microbe. Then it was mainly bacteria, though the idea of “viruses” was coming into vogue around that time, and since then the disease-causing pathogen role has mostly been filled by these fictitious entities. The “germ theory” claimed that germs were pathogenic, and that everyone was susceptible to harm or death from them, regardless of their overall state of health. (Please note this fact, if you like to think that germ theory and terrain theory can both be true. In germ theory, a healthy terrain does not make any difference to your susceptibility to an infectious disease.)

Shortly, however, a major flaw in this “theory” became evident.

(I believe the original quote that this one is based on was by a doctor in the early 20th century. If you know his name or have that meme, please send it to me. Thanks.)

Since the majority of people were clearly not being killed and not even affected by all of these different “infectious” germs, it became necessary to invent a concept to explain this. Thus was born the “immune system,” an imagined specific function of the body to kill microbial invaders and cells that have been infected by them.

Unnecessarily complicated

I have learned to be suspicious of speculation being presented as fact when a supposed system or function in the body seems overly complicated. The immune system has numerous components and explanations for its functioning that seem to be, like the immune system itself, made up in scientists’ imaginations to fill a gap that appears in the previously made up aspects. I’ll give some examples of this below.

The immune system is said to be made up of lymphocytes, or white blood cells, which are said to be created in the bone marrow and stored in the thymus gland, the spleen, the lymph nodes, the tonsils, and also the liver and the lungs, from where they are dispatched to sites of attack by microbes. These white blood cells come in several varieties and sub-varieties. The information below is from the Cleveland Clinic website.

• “Natural killer cells” (NK cells), whose mission is to search and destroy cells that they perceive as threatening.

• B-cells, which supposedly create antibodies to various pathogens. There are two types of B-cells: plasma cells, which can release up to 2,000 antibodies per second, and memory cells, which remember antigens (substances supposedly associated with pathogens and which the B-cells use to create antibodies) so they can mount a defense when those pathogens reappear.

• T-cells, which come in three different kinds: one that is cytotoxic—it kills infected cells; one that is a helper, assisting other immune system lymphocytes to kill infected cells by sending signals “that tell other cells in your immune system how to coordinate an attack against the invaders” (Cleveland Clinic); and regulatory T-cells, aka suppressor cells, whose job it is to reduce the effectiveness of other T-cells that are getting a little too aggressive, thus preventing your immune system from attacking your own body tissues.

Does any of this sound as fantastic to you as it does to me? Cells that attack invaders, cells that create antibodies to invaders, cells that signal to other cells to marshall the troops, cells that remember which invaders to attack while different cells mount the attack, cells that stop their fellow immune cells from engaging in friendly fire. I picture cells running around this way and that, bumping into each other, getting in each other’s way. It’s almost like an episode of Keystone Cops.

I have to wonder if all these different kinds of “immune system” cells have been found mainly because researchers were looking for them. If, as I believe, the entire concept of the immune system was developed as a way to explain why everyone didn’t die from pathogenic infections, it seems that all the various components of this imaginary system also have been developed to explain the body’s healing mechanisms within the war metaphor context. This paradigm which permeates western medical thought frames the body’s self-healing activities as “fighting off invaders” rather than moving unwanted substances out of the body and/or healing damage done by those substances.

And the complicated nature of the “immune system” doesn’t end with the purported existence of numerous different kinds of cells with numerous different functions. It turns out there are two whole different immune systems, not just one. We are told that the NK cells make up the “innate immune system,” designed to go into action immediately when a threat is perceived. “They begin killing within three days of an infection” (Cleveland Clinic).

Cytotoxic T-cells, on the other hand, are said to be a component of the “adaptive immune system,” as are B-cells. They are programmed by previous exposures you have had to various pathogens to recognize these when they come around again. But it takes them about a week to identify the invader and go after it. (How do the scientists know this?) Apparently memory B-cells serve a similar function except their focus is on antigens and antibodies, whereas the T-cells go after the invader directly. (Antibodies are another invention of medical science, as Mike Stone explains.)

Merrill Chase Inadvertently Disproved Antibodies in 1942

The complexity of this imagined system is a bit mind-boggling. We are supposed to believe that we have at least six different different types of white blood cells that protect the body from pathogenic invaders in different ways. The most inventive of these seems to have the same reason for being as the immune system itself: the “regulatory” or “suppressor” T-cell, which stops the cytotoxic T-cells from going overboard and creating autoimmune conditions by attacking healthy cells. So this particular subtype of T-cells was invented as a way to explain why cytotoxic cells both cause damage and are stopped from doing so. Whew! My head is spinning.

Just as an example of the immune cells’ complex actions from the Cleveland Clinic website, here is their description of the process for just one type of immune system cell, the B-cell, to do its work in your body. We can suppose the functions of the other lymphocytes are just as complicated.

Generally, the following steps occur when your immune system needs B-cells to fight invaders: (the following 5 points are also part of the block quote from Cleveland Clinic.)

1. An antigen-presenting cell (APC) attaches to the antigen, breaking it down into smaller pieces. The APC attaches the antigen pieces to a molecule called the major histocompatibility-II complex, or MHC-II.

2. Helper T cells (a type of T cell) bind to the MHC-II complex. This binding activates helper T cells. Activated helper T cells are important because they spur B cells into action.

3. An activated T cell attaches to a B cell, causing it to make copies, or clones, of itself. Some of the B cells become plasma cells capable of producing antibodies. Other B cells become memory cells that get stored in your body.

4. Plasma cells make millions of antibodies over the next several days. All antibodies are customized to destroy only the specific pathogen that produced the antigen.

5. These antibodies bind to antigens or the part of the pathogen that contains the antigen marker. These antibodies prevent pathogens from causing further harm to your body.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but this sounds like complete fiction. It’s almost like an action movie with cells.

Do these cells exist as described?

It seems that biologists believe that all of these types of immune system cells exist. They have named them, and identified cell membrane receptors that they bind to and antibodies they supposedly create. They have characterized how these cells work in the complicated and multi-layered way just described. They have counted them and determined that problems are caused when these counts are low.

Photo, or artist’s rendering, or a white blood cell

And even allowing that these identified cells do exist in the body and that low counts of them can indicate a problem, I wonder if their functions have been misidentified and misunderstood, as has happened with bacteria (the pleomorphic cycle), non-existent viruses, and the disproven notion of contagion that is inherent to anything called “infectious.” In other words, either these cells began to be found because they were being looked for, or they were already there but doing something different that could not be properly seen from within a paradigm of attack and defense.

What is the body really doing?

All of the descriptions given of the “immune system” are attempting to explain what is happening in our body when it is expelling an unwanted substance or repairing damage from injury, stress, or malnutrition. Since viruses don’t exist and bacteria do not cause disease, what the body is expelling is not a “pathogen” but a toxin of some sort. The body will initiate coughing, sneezing, vomiting, diarrhea, mucus production, inflammation, a skin rash, or other elimination pathway to remove the toxin by washing or pushing it out of the body. This may involve mobilizing bacteria to break down dead and dying tissue caused by the toxic presence. It may also involve joint pain, sore throat, headache, or other discomfort. These “flu” symptoms are not disease or illness, and they are not the operations of an immune system fighting off invading pathogens. They are the signs of your body healing itself from injury or toxic exposure.

Does the body need a special system with numerous different specialized cells, with complicated ways of acting on each other as well as on “invaders,” to accomplish its self-healing process? Since all the supposed cells in the immune system are thought to identify and go after living “pathogens” or “invaders” such as viruses and bacteria, they are not going to help with the non-living toxic substances that are lodged in most of our tissues and that the body is constantly trying to shed, such as heavy metals, plastics, volatile organic compounds, pesticides, etc.

Nor are they going to be helpful to address lack of nutrients in the body’s systems that result in poor functioning, which is another cause of distress and injury in the body and more likely than not the primary cause of what medical science labels “autoimmune” conditions. These conditions are attributed to the immune system malfunctioning and attacking the body’s healthy tissue. I don’t have research to cite on what the real causes of autoimmune conditions are. But since the existence of an immune system has not been adequately documented by experimental science, I would stand behind the statement that there is no such thing as “autoimmunity” because there is no such thing as the “immune system” in the first place.

Research needs to take its blinders off

There is so much, so very much, that we do not know about how our bodies function. The germ theory and the war paradigm and belief in contagion have put a very small box around how we understand health and disease. Since the vast majority of research conducted in the past century and more has been done inside that box, the vast reality that is outside of it has barely begun to be explored.

I find this incredibly liberating, and I also am eager for more of this outside-the-box research to be conducted. It is a certainty that each of us is unique in exactly how our body responds to various toxins and stresses and injuries. One-size-fits-all solutions will never be adequate. But there must be patterns that show up in connection with particular substances or influences, and knowing about them would help us all to know how to assist our body in eliminating those harmful substances and repairing damage.

And maybe the true purpose and function of lymphocytes will be found through this expanded research.

Thank you for reading, as always. Please leave a comment, and consider becoming a subscriber or a paid subscriber. And please share with others who you feel may be interested.

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