I don’t take Advil or Aspirin for headaches. I don’t take medications for a runny nose or congestion. Why? Because I feel that the human body is built to be able to do all this on its own.

More and more, the media reminds us about ‘germs’ and bacteria and how they cause sickness and disease. This is why, after every activity, you should ensure the sterility of your environment, your hands and the end of your nose. Products like Lysol, hand sanitizer and anti-bacterial tissues are making a microbiological killing off of these advertisements… but they are slowly killing you, too.

In the opposition, when you were little, you ate your ‘boogers’, or dried mucus. This is called ‘Mucophagy’. As ‘gross’ as society has made the idea of eating that slime out of your nose, you have to remember that it’s a very natural thing to do. There are some studies that show that you consume about a quart of your own mucus a day anyways. After all, your snot and your food ‘go down the same tube’.

So why is the Anti-Bacterial approach potentially fatal for you and your offspring? You are depriving yourself of any chance to acquire or retain immunity to modern bacteria and other ‘germs’. If you lived in a sterile laboratory your whole life, the mere act of going outside could potentially kill you within days.

Let’s take this a step further with vaccines. Vaccines are depleted or weakened (dying) diseases, be they viral or bacterial. While vaccines have played an important role in practically eliminating Polio and Leprosy, the yearly flu shot is totally uncalled for. You are just as likely to get this ‘bird flu’ from the shot as you are from the carrier of this dreaded disease. Your immunity to the flu, in all of its varied forms, depends on your contact with it. In my opinion, skin and/or digestive contact with it sounds like a preferred method of building immunity in contrast to injecting the virus directly into the bloodstream.

While Advil and Aspirin don’t deprive you of bacteria, I feel that it is more of an issue with physiological stamina on the cellular level. If you take an Advil every time you have a head ache, the body becomes dependant on the medication and will not perform what is necessary to be rid of it on its own. Furthermore, you will become more prone to these afflictions because your body hasn’t learned to fend for itself in that regard. Let me explain.

Most headaches these days are caused by stress, called tension headaches. What is really happening in your body when you get stressed? The brain releases a chemical called prostaglandin, which is the body’s way of saying, “Ouch”. The chemical, in regards to headaches, sensitizes the nerve endings in your brain, allowing them to communicate what they are feeling (the chemical as a whole is not negative. It has many other uses in the body.). The opposite chemical that the brain produces is called serotonin, which is solely a chemical that desensitizes the body to stimuli. People who are exhibiting emotions such as happiness, determination, stoicism and other positively driven feelings are producing serotonin. People who are sad, stressed or otherwise feeling negatively driven emotions are most likely producing prostaglandin. This, coupled with the fact that emotions are items of choice, means that we can reduce the occurrence of headaches simply by choosing to relax or at least bypass that initial urge to stress out. Headaches also happen when the body becomes dehydrated. There’s a simple solution for that too. Water.

This artical is incomplete.