Ever since I was a kid, I suffered from a runny nose, especially during cold weather. It will take me some 20 years before I figured out what causes the problem and how to fix it, accidentally stumbling on something potentially much bigger. In summary, it appears that doctors are intentionally withholding information on the prevalence of low-level pneumonia to avoid causing a panic and a hospital rush, treating only the most critical cases. In addition, it seems that having your lower jaw constantly open can lead to a lot of health problems, especially when coupled with dry air, lowered core temperature and microorganism overgrowth on items around you.
In 2019, I did a text for a client who wanted to know what pneumonia is and how to resolve it. I read up on medical sources for two weeks and discovered something astonishing – I had low-level pneumonia. Actually, we all have mild pneumonia symptoms that flare up from time to time. It turned out that pneumonia is a serious medical condition that kills people, in particular those who are already in a hospital for an unrelated health problem.
Low-level pneumonia is called "walking pneumonia" and people can carry it around with minimal symptoms, such as a runny nose or occasional coughing. Ever had your mom and dad tell you: "Don't walk around barefoot, you'll catch a cold"? The common cold is simply a superficial symptom, a manifestation of walking pneumonia that is constantly lurking. Pneumonia can appear in childhood and basically lay low in the person for his entire life, springing into action to deal the lethal blow only when the immune system falters.
Pneumonia occurs when some foreign particle, such as a bacterium, penetrates the lungs and triggers inflammation that further blocks the airways; the smaller the particle, the deeper it can penetrate. The body immediately tries to expel the particle through coughing and sneezing, which is liable to upset the dust around us, causing us to breathe in even more particles and trigger another bout of sneezing and coughing. In an office setting, this means a single person with walking pneumonia can sneeze and cough to infect dozens or hundreds of other people, who then cross-infect one another but can't really get doctor's assistance to clear it until it's become critical enough to threaten their lives.
Doctors do not recognize walking pneumonia as a condition worth treating. Why? Because they want to nuke a disease whenever possible to save time and resources rather than gradually subdue it. The mainline treatment that nukes bacteria-caused pneumonia is antibiotics, which make bacteria resistant and could lead to fatalities in a small number of vulnerable cases if they happen to be infected with the resistant bacteria. Therefore, people with walking pneumonia are simply ignored until there's some trigger that leads to a massive outbreak of critical pneumonia cases aka. an epidemic.
To explain it in another way, imagine there are 10 patients, each with an increasingly more severe case of pneumonia and there's one doctor with one bed and 10 pills of antibiotics. There's obviously not enough resources for everyone and the doctor has to choose. The doctor would first use triage to determine which of them is the sickest and then give all 10 pills to that one, leaving the rest to their fate. This is because antibiotics don't have a linear effect and require massive doses to prevent the occurrence of resistant bacteria. Further, antibiotics disturb the existing bacterial flora inside the person and do nothing to prevent a relapse. What does prevent a relapse? Being informed.
Doctors shy away from recommending self-diagnosis and self-treatment, which is what would happen if they start discussing walking pneumonia and simple ways to prevent it, so they just pretend those other 9 patients aren't there. Hospital resources, in particular available beds, are limited as well, so doctors would want to keep quiet about what is typically a non-lethal illness to maximize resource utilization for the most critical of cases instead of harboring people with runny noses. Basically, those 9 would be told to walk it off, hence "walking" pneumonia.
Therefore, walking pneumonia is left to fester and resources are reserved for the most critical of cases, when the patients are about to die, to cure them and then release them from the hospital as soon as possible to free up space for the next patient in line, if he doesn't die before coming to the hospital. All of this sounds so evil but it's just a natural consequence of a system in which a doctor is placed as the sole arbiter of your health. This means doctors must withhold critical health information from the general public to avoid making a panic that would drain their resources and limit the effectiveness of the treatment given to #10. Ultimately, this approach still causes fatalities due to resistant bacteria and pneumonia, and if you don't have access to a doctor when you become #10, it's GGNORE for you.
Doctors thus become illness managers, people who have all the medical knowledge on what's going on and can see it play out but have no way to release their knowledge into the general public without causing a catastrophic panic. They have to juggle patients and keep quiet when every fiber in them wants to speak up, say something, reveal the truth or at the very least the underlying facts. Every barrier is put in front of the doctors who want to frankly talk about illnesses and simple ways to prevent them, for example, they can be sued if they give a simple advice and a patient intentionally abuses it just to get a chance to sue. It's so tragic what's going on but that's life for you.
Doctors want to prevent the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that would endanger everyone, which is a commendable goal, and also curb self-treatment that would cause them loss of reputation and additional workload, which is a less commendable goal seeing how prevention is the cheapest and the easiest solution to health problems. So, the truth about walking pneumonia is kept concealed and it's not even discussed but then antibiotics are used to cure #10, who is still not told about walking pneumonia and how it spreads or how to prevent a relapse, releasing him into the public where he could become #10 as soon as the next day, repeating the cycle once more for no reason.
The doctor in our example sacrifices the needs of #1-9 to serve the needs of #10, but then simply downgrades #10 to #1-9 and takes up #9, who is now the new #10. Try to wrap your head around this paradox – the walking pneumonia is irrelevant until it becomes so severe that the patient is nearly dying, at which point the treatment is focused to downgrade this lethal pneumonia to a walking pneumonia and he is let go. In hospital settings, untreated pneumonia legitimately kills people. It strikes when you've just got your heart, chest or stomach surgery and can't even cough or sneeze, which means the primary mechanism of lung protection is kaput.
The thing is, if doctors won't treat walking pneumonia, can we do something about it? There is a solution but to explain how and why it works, I have to explain why the runny nose appears in the first place. In essence, there's a premium air filtration system in our head called sinuses. They are tiny chambers between the eyes and around the nose. When you breathe through your nose, the sinuses, which normally generate mucus, fill up with air and the mucus traps almost all particles, leaving only clean, fresh, moistened air going to the lungs.
There are about 2 liters of mucus produced a day in sinuses. It's clear, slightly viscous and anti-bacterial, carrying away particles into the stomach to get burned off. Our sinuses aren't meant to be sterile and even newborns have some 50-odd fungi and bacteria varieties in their sinuses. That's the trick, though – all those invaders are left to battle one another and the mucus simply takes out the trash.
It's when one invader starts dominating that all the other contenders are eliminated and we start experiencing an inflammation of the sinuses, which leads to a blockage, just like what happens in the lungs. Since they can no longer properly eliminate the mucus, the sinuses use the emergency channel and the mucus starts running through the nose, which causes this symptom I'm all too familiar with. The reason why the dried up mucus in your nose is green or some other color is because of all the dead bacteria and fungi; the mucus should be clear. The same applies to the phlegm you cough up, except that's the dead bodies of invaders from your lungs.
So, when would a single kind of bacterium or fungus get to dominate your sinuses? When you're overly exposed to it, such as during the winter in an office or school setting where people get to cross-infect one another. As I read through that, the pieces came together in my head and I realized just how easy it is to get our airways infected and our lungs endangered. You know how people put their hands over their mouth when coughing? All it takes is touching the money or door handles they've touched or simply shaking hands with them to get the bacteria on your hands, which you will then spread out and about.
To deny the bacteria their ring of power, you should regularly use wet wipes and wipe down things you touch the most, such as your glasses, light switches etc. As you figure out these focal points where bacteria can fester to dominate your environment, you can start to easily, cheaply and happily keep them disinfected to make your sinuses much happier. Doctors recommend washing hands too but I didn't find it comprehensive enough, seeing how I could be washing my hands all day long and still get them laden with bacteria due to touching dirty stuff just once.
When we breathe through our nose, the sinuses and its mucus catch about 95% of all foreign particles compared to 50% when breathing through the mouth. If you happen to be overexposed to any given invader, it's going to eventually dominate your sinuses and attempt to invade the lungs. The key factor to keeping the balance of invaders is in having the mucus ever-flowing down the throat because that's the next trap for the invading particles. For this, you need moisture.
Dry air is the most significant cause of impaired sinus function, so when you wake up with your mouth and throat parched, keep in mind that your sinuses might have been overexposed to dry air. Staying hydrated helps too but also airing out the room to let the moist air in (depends on where you live). To clear out stuffed sinuses, take a steamy shower and breathe in until you feel the stuffed sinuses (mucus blockage) loosen up and then just push it out. Cracked lips, itchy eyes, flaky skin and even creaky door hinges (!) are all signs the air in your room has begun to dry out. Hydrate constantly to keep the mucus flowing.
Another massive contributor to impaired sinus function is the lowered core temperature. It turns out that having a "fever" or just a higher core temperature is extremely useful in fighting off invaders. So, when I researched this I discovered why having cold feet is a prelude to having a runny nose or getting common cold — the cold feet indicate a drop in the core temperature, which leads to the mucus in sinuses getting congealed and not flowing as fast as it should. This gradually leads to trash being piled up in the sinuses and blocking everything.
Raise your core temperature with a warm bath. Wear woollen socks and a scarf. Beware that your head should remain exposed to help your brain cool off, except in such extremely cold weather that frostbite is imminent (we're talking Arctic conditions here). This is because the brain is prone to overheating, which is also why infants get swaddled but their heads are always left uncovered. Drink hot tea and sniff the steam, since that also helps moisten the sinuses. Eat spices, such as black pepper and ginger. If one of these methods works, you will feel immense warmth in your core spreading out, followed by a sudden wave of relief. Do you see how easy it is to prevent pneumonia? Supremely easy and safe, so why don't doctors tell us about it?
Doctors know about walking pneumonia but pretend it's not there until it becomes life-threatening because we all have low-level pneumonia and would overwhelm the hospitals if we asked for treatment, which involves antibiotics that can make future pneumonia cases much more lethal. In short, doctors are "doing their job" by downgrading #10 to #1-9, keeping everyone in the dark and focusing their resources until some hypothetical future treatment gets developed that cures all walking pneumonia forever.
When some invader triggers a mass breakout of critical pneumonia cases, such as what happened in January 2020 with the nCov virus, hospitals simply get swamped with panicking people, most of whom can't get any treatment and simply go critical in a hospital. The real reason why the doctors and governments freak out when pulmonary epidemics, such as the one triggered by nCov, happen is that they reveal the extent of walking pneumonia in the general population.
As I pieced that together, I decided to never again breathe through my mouth but always through my nose. The runny nose gradually subsided and now I haven't had one in nearly 5 months, though there still appears to be some narrowing in my sinuses that's stopping me from getting enough air by nosebreathing alone. That's where Mike Mew came in with his information on teeth and keeping the lower jaw aligned with the upper.
I cleared my walking pneumonia by taking 2-3,000mg of vitamin C a day for about a month and maintaining hygiene by using wet wipes on door handles, desks, light switches etc. I maintain core body temperature and take warm baths. From day to day, I keep battling this low-level health problem that can spring into action at any time to deal the lethal blow.