Symptoms are not all bad.
By Dr. Lon Jones, D.O.

          Symptoms are those things that we tell the doctor are bothering us. Fever and pain are common symptoms when one is ill or injured. They come from the interaction of the body with an insult. When the insult is an injury, like a sprained ankle, the body seeks to splint that injury so it triggers the inflammatory reaction in the area that results in swelling and pain. The swelling splints the injury and the pain keeps us off it so it doesn't get injured any further. Rather than bleeding a person to block the inflammation we have learned it is best to support our body so we splint the ankle from the outside and use crutches to rest it.

          It is a little different with infection causing agents. There is an interplay of germs and their host that leads to a variety of symptoms that are placed in three categories based on who benefits: defenses, manipulations, and side effects. Defenses are symptoms like fever that enable the host to better deal with the infection—giving us a survival benefit. Manipulations by the infecting agents to facilitate their spread include the prostration of malaria, which makes one an easy target for hungry mosquitoes, and the enhanced diarrhea seen in cholera epidemics that introduces more bacteria into the contaminated water supply—the agent benefits. Side effects are things like the tooth decay that results from the acids produced when some bacteria on the teeth feed off the sugars we eat—neither the host nor the agent benefits. The classification of symptoms into these categories is crucial to the practice of medicine in the light of evolutionary. Defenses, that help us to survive, need to be honored and supported. Manipulations, that help the infecting agent to survive, need to be prevented, usually by public health measures that interfere with the agent's transmission, such as mosquito netting and clean water. Side effects can be treated without problems.

            A few of our more commonly recognized defenses are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, and rhinorrhea. While we often block these bothersome symptoms they do have use. A fever boosts the immune system's ability to cope with the infection. Snakes, experimentally infected, die more frequently when they are prevented from moving to the sun where they can induce a fever, as do rabbits when given drugs to block the development of fever. Vomiting and diarrhea remove irritating and infecting substances from the gastrointestinal tract. Blocking diarrhea when the person is infected with Shigella leads more commonly to systemic illness. These and other examples are discussed by Nesse and Williams in their book, Why We Get Sick. They ponder, but never pursue what happens when we block defensive symptoms. We did this with blood-letting and more people died. The same result is likely when we block a fever, diarrhea, or a runny nose. They are all defenses and should be honored.

These ideas are pursued further, with references, in the sections on "increases" and "helping" at www.nasal-xylitol.com