THE BATTLE FOR YOUR BODY

Plato described health as 'a love affair between the organs of the body'. Like all such relationships, health is at constant risk of disruption — from enemies without, from conditions imposed upon it, and from mistakes made within.

In the battle for your body, medicine and its various specialists tend to concentrate on the front-line troops. They are important, for we would have no immunity without battalions of white cells, complements, antibodies, Natural Killers, and so on. But wars are won by industry. No matter how grand their uniforms, how splendid their drill, or how clever their plans, if soldiers are not supplied with weapons, fuel and ammunition, they cannot fight. They may gallantly win the odd battle, but eventually they will be overwhelmed.

Our approach to improving immunity assumes that the troops know their jobs and can be left to get on with them as required. We will concentrate on directing the way you live, so that they are well supplied, are available in sufficient numbers and, crucially, the capacity of their back-up is adequate to meet the demands that pathogens put upon the system. We start with the body's industrial capacity, the efficiency of its metabolism.

Immunity is a complex subject; many of its fine details are still being explored. Our objective is not so much to explain this complexity, as to give a series of pictures which will enable you to understand what is important in improving the overall function of your immune system. To be successful you need to know how to organize your body so that its response is appropriate, and your health retained.

We use a series of diagrams to explain the battle for your body. As with all battle plans, they only show a part of the picture. In all wars many things happen at once; there is much chaos and apparent confusion. Diagrams are static; they cannot show the dynamics of what is actually happening in reality. We hope your imagination will fill in the gaps and bring the picture alive for you.

Once you have such a picture you can exert influence over the battle. You can do the right thing without having to know what happens right down to the front line. Just as when driving you change gear to alter your speed without understanding how a syncromesh works (or even what it is), so you can affect health or illness by understanding what to do, without needing to understand details of microbiology.

Some areas of disease and immunity will need examination in detail. There will be times when influence at the molecular level will be crucial to the outcome of the situation as a whole, when small details have a disproportionate effect on the outcome. When necessary, we will pursue these details, without losing sight of the larger picture.

This integrated approach is essential. Our culture encourages us to believe that every problem has a single simple answer. The truth is that illness is a complex problem, and the battle we fight against it equally complex. The action we take to influence the battle has to complement this complexity. With your picture of what is involved in improving immunity, and knowledge of your own situation, you will be able to do this. These positive strategies will do much to ensure that the battle for your body will not turn into war, and that most of the time peace will prevail.

*2\179\2*