Toby Rogers

In the medical freedom movement we focus a lot on the wisdom of the body’s innate immune system. But that’s just one (very complicated) piece in a much larger and more interesting system.

For the first year of life, infants don’t have much of an immune system. But nature already solved this problem. Infants are messy. They touch everything and so they are introducing a constant stream of dirt, bacteria, viruses, saliva, feces, and urine to everyone in their orbit, especially the mother. In the process, the mother is exposed to microdoses of a wide range of, for lack of a better word, germs, for which she develops immunity that she then passes on to the child through breastmilk. 

But this process of building a shared microbiome starts long before that. The microbiome is the community of microorganisms such as fungi, bacteria, and viruses that exists in a particular environment. In humans, the term is often used to describe the microorganisms that live in or on the body, such as the gastrointestinal tract or the skin. But the individual microbiome exists within a community microbiome and the larger microbiome of the planet itself. Sometimes these microbes are beneficial, other times not so much, but life itself involves the interaction and exchange between our cells and the microbial cells in us and all around us.

Image: Jay Chen @ Unsplash