Hygiene as Medicine: Simple Practices that Protect and Restore health.
Hygiene is often reduced to things like brushing your teeth and washing your hands, but it is much more than that. And, far more important than you think.
In modern discourse, the discussion surrounding personal hygiene is often reduced to a few common practices:
Brushing teeth
Washing Hands
Showering/Bathing
We do these things to avoid cavities, foul smell, and consuming toxins or pathogens.
This, in my opinion, is a very narrow view of hygiene and its role in maintaining health and vitality.
To appreciate the vital role of hygiene in maintenance and restoration of health, we first need to explore some concepts integral to optimal body function. We will discuss:
Anatomy, both macroscopic and microscopic
Humoral theory
The connections between our body and the environment
Hygiene practices which have survived for millenia
Role of Exercise in Hygiene
While we explore the concepts below, I want you to keep in mind one of the most circulated and effective health practices that even the covid hysterics could not deny or suppress.
Nasal irrigation.
Used for everything from preventing ‘infection’ to reducing the symptoms in those already infected.
Zero risk. All gain.
In my opinion, this modern application of an ancient hygiene practice effectively encapsulates the point I want to convey in this article.
Let’s dive in.
Anatomy: A Complex Network of Channels and Tubes
In the standard medical model, the human body is segregated into organs, bones, muscles, fat, glands, connective tissue...and so on. The only element of this framework that pervades the whole body is the last one, connective tissue, as the name suggests.
There is a distinct and modular view of the body in this school of thought. So much so, that this school deems it appropriate that a physician can only specialize in one organ or body part. This trend toward organ specialization has been growing in recent decades.
But, consider another view of the body. One that captures the functions more completely.
As a brief note, let’s preface this with the following. Broadly speaking, a living creature has a drive to life - that is why they live. They have a vital force, which drives the basic functions of their organs. These principle organs are often considered to be the heart (which generates and disseminates the vital force), the brain (the sensory and action-related organ), the gonads (the generative organs used to keep the species going), and the liver (which harvests what we eat to replenish and grow the body).
The principle organs, accessory organs, the blood vessels, skeletal system…even the microscopic anatomy of cellular connections and the life inside of the cell, depends on an complex interconnected network of channels and tubes. Pores and ducts.
However you want to term or describe it, we will simply use the word channel to refer to all the types of luminal connections between large body parts, and tiny cellular components.
The important thing to realize is that these channels make up the network of life at every scale.
Take a look for yourself:
All of these organs and tissues ultimately interface with the circulatory system which is used to transport all of the substance of life, whether nutritive or excretory.
What are these substances?
The Humors
For thousands of years, the great physicians of various civilizations have known that the substances which are produced and circulated throughout the body can be conceptualized as semi-gaseous fluids called humors.
If you were to look up humoral theory, you’d find an incomprehensibly stupid Wikipedia article which states:
Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers.
Humorism began to fall out of favor in the 17th century and it was definitively disproved with the discovery of microbes.
Note the words “supposed makeup.”
First of all, it isn’t supposed - it’s the self-evident makeup of the body.
Humoral theory posits that it is a composition of fluids which circulate throughout the body, and exist in certain proportion. To realize that this is the case, all you have to do is draw blood, make a surgical incision, urinate, or vomit…and you will see that it is a gel-like semi-gaseous “fluid” which pervades the body.
This is incontrovertible.
Furthermore, humoral theory posits four primary fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
To know that this claim is also true, you could go about it in two ways:
Hard way: Study physiology.
Easy way: centrifuge blood.
The easy way is illustrated below. You take a sample of blood, put it into a centrifuge and spin it at thousands of cycles per minute until the components of the blood separate into distinct layers.
With centrifugation, blood separates into distinct layers:
Plasma (55%) - The yellowish top layer
Buffy Coat (<1%) - The thin, clearer middle layer containing white blood cells and platelets
Erythrocytes (45%) - The red lower layer containing red blood cells
At the very bottom, dark sediment/debris
These layers clearly correlate with the four primary humors:
