Building immunity

Disease gains entry to your body in various ways:

• Through your skin, from injuries, cuts, surgical incisions, wounds, injections.
• Through various openings, such as your eyes, nose and mouth.
• Many infections arrive via your fingers. You touch or handle something which has a virus or bacteria on it: then you lick your fingers or you pick your nose or you rub your eyes.
• Or you may swallow something infected. Usually your stomach acids will destroy it, but if it lingers in your mouth or throat, then it may invade your nose from inside or your lungs. Then you get a cough.

In warm, humid conditions, such as offices and houses with good central heating and a lack of ventilation, bugs can proliferate. For example, Legionnaires disease loves places like this. But if no fresh air passes through regularly, our houses become breeding grounds. So do hospitals - you'd be surprised by the number of doctors who dread going into hospital as a patient!

There's another way disease can enter. Most healthy people can fight off many conditions when others go on to suffer the disease (colds, for instance).

Those healthy people stay fit because, for example:

• They avoid foods that weaken them. Sugar and sweet food, for example, weakens what in Chinese medicine is called you 'spleen' energy. Your spleen turns what you eat and drink into blood that nourishes your body, and energy that keeps it warm and defends it.
• They get enough rest and sleep.
• They take exercise that forces their bodies to work, their heart to pump, their lungs to breathe deeply and their limbs to run, lift, press and push. Fit people get ill less often.
• They get outside when they can to benefit from sunlight. Sunlight increases Vitamin D, vital in defence.
• They eat enough of the right foods, at the right temperature, properly prepared, to provide the right nourishment.
• They eat slowly and without rushing, and regularly. For better results, they eat in pleasant and enjoyable company.
• They have learned to manage or limit stress.
• They help other people. This is often important, for reasons not understood (though there's a reason in Chinese medicine.)
• They don't abuse themselves through activities that strain or weaken their bodies. These include repetitive strains and drugs - including social drugs.
• They seek immunisation only if essential. 

So when your body is weakened by poor habits, it cannot defend itself properly. You get ill.

If you are often ill, you may benefit from acupuncture, which can put your body back into balance: but you must still do the above, to stay healthy.