This
surprises most people. Most people think that outside areas are dirty,
and inside
the home as somewhat
clean. But, if you can take the inside area of your home, the typical
home - if you can transfer that to the outside air, as the same density
of pollutants, you wouldn't be able to see for a kilometre. Now that
is a combination of outside air, plus whatever we add on the inside of
the home. We've got so used to adding our sprays, our fragrances, doing
our cooking. We're so used to the smells, and the chemicals inside
and the internal soup that we create, that we forget that's the basis
upon on which all our health problems are now caused.
We've
made homes unfit to live in. In the progress of technology the absurdity
is that
we've finally created environments that are no longer fit for humans
to live fit and healthy in. And it was all in an attempt to get us
out of the dirt which we believed was the cause of so many of
our health
problems. We now realize that our health
is dependent upon us being part of our environment. We can't separate
ourselves at all off from biology and expect to be healthy. Things
like asthma, respiratory conditions, chronic headaches,
the majority
of those can be managed very well by modifying internal environments.
There's very little that we can do on the external environment, we
can't change a city around if we decide to live in a city. Even in
agricultural
Australia, you can't stop crop spraying, even though there is a big
move to do so. So a lot of the time we're given an external environment,
and
our job is to make our internal environment, our homes, our schools,
our workplaces as safe as we can possibly make them to optimize our
health.
The chemicals that we are exposed to typically these days are cleaners,
anti-septics, volatile agents, fragrances and odour suppressors. On
the insides of homes and schools we tend to spray things. Look at what
we
go and buy in our supermarkets, what we bring home to use, apply, spray,
paint, what we use in our kitchen, our bathroom, our laundry. We fill
our lives with a total chemical mixture/soup; with each one of which
does not dramatically damage our health, but the sum total of which
does affect our health.
Let's look at washing powders, detergents and the like. These days
there is a trend increasingly to add anti-septics to these. We're having
a
fascination with bacteria free, bug free, virus free - our television
screens are filled with pictures of nasty organisms ready to attack
us. Now, the last time a person died of wearing clothing out of a normal
washing machine - I don't know - I can't imagine that it's ever happened.
But we now have an industry, which is putting anti-bacterial agents
in,
which has no benefits to a human. but will certainly have adverse reactions,
such as skin complaints.
I'm not suggesting going back to the cave.
We're not about to, we're live in homes, and we’ve got to keep them safe.
We probably want to keep them clean, but our obsession with chemical use to
keep them clean has a cost that we have so far been unaware of or we've paid
no attention
to. The cost is typically borne by children. Primarily the most sensitive,
children with a tendency towards asthma, are the ones who suffer first. Grown
ups tend
to suffer least, they've already had their insults early on in life and they
tend to not suffer quite so much with these later on. Yet sometimes the cost
is borne by adults and then we tend to get action, but when children bear it
we just wipe our hands and say, "Gee isn't asthma terrible. Aren't skin
conditions and eczema terrible! Aren't these things a problem." - without
ever realizing that we have control of it and what we do makes a big difference
to our own children.
Every person is chemically affected. 100% of us, 100% of the time are chemically
affected.
We all have to put up with chemicals, we all have the ability to manage some
and not manage others very well. So, all of us are always chemically affected.
The question is: are we able to maintain our health despite the chemical exposure.
For the majority of us most of the time our health is maintained, until it
fails. The problem with chemicals is that because they place a load on a weak
link in
our system, because our immunology, our sugar metabolism, our gastro-intestinal
function holds on by a thread there is normally no dramatic last chemical poisoning
which sees that thread snap. When health goes, it goes primarily because of
say an infection, because of trauma - say a car accident, some type of event
that
we all put it down to. And then we all focus on the approximate event, and
doctors do too, they focus on the last thing that happened, completely ignoring
the environment
and the setup. What happened before is critical to the health of all of us.
So I would say, yes that we all are affected in our health all the time.
Now my personal view is that if we can change our environment, especially our
internal environments of the home, school and our workplace, that we've got
half the battle won. The chemical soup that we place ourselves in, the products
that
we buy, the simple things that we use ,such as toothpaste, are placing a load
upon us in a modern environment, which has almost become a love affair with
chemistry. This has its cost. The answer has to be to minimize the toxic load.
You
can Dr Donohoe speak on the; Bathrooms- The inside Story,(video & DVD)
Your Health, Your Future (video, DVD & CD rom) The Nutrtion Scandal
(video & DVD) and the audio-Nutrition- How Low Can We Go?
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