Disease can be good for you.

A "Novel" Idea: You May be Better Off Getting Some Diseases in Childhood

The issue of vaccines potentially causing adverse reactions in the body is one issue. Another, often-overlooked, one is that some of the diseases vaccines are used to prevent may actually have a place in childhood – and may ultimately be beneficial for the child's future health.

Dr. Palevsky explained:

"…many of the illnesses that we vaccinate against are actually important illnesses for children so that their immune systems, nervous systems, and brains mature. I learned this back in the 1980s when I was a medical student being taught by physicians who practiced pediatrics in New York since the 1940s. What they said was that the kids in their practice who would get their measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, and flu illnesses, if they were left to their own devices, not medicated, and just left to be supported through their illness, after the illness was over, the physician always saw a developmental growth spurt.

What it speaks to is an understanding of virology, why viruses actually exist, and what they actually do in the body. They're meant to actually help protect the host, to clean the body out of waste, and to remove obstacles for optimal cellular function. This is what we're supposed to learn in medical school, but don't necessarily.

There are so many ways to support a child through many of these childhood viral illnesses… Many of them or most of them are actually pretty benign. They may not be benign in areas of the world where there's poverty, poor nutrition, poor sanitation, and war, which means that the conditions are not viable for optimal healing. But in a community of the United States where optimal healing is pretty reachable and pretty obtainable, most of these diseases are pretty benign."

The measles is a classic example, as in many cases it causes fever, runny nose, cough and rash, but clears up in a few days without serious consequences. In rare cases, however, measles can lead to encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) that can be serious and lead to deafness or retardation… and this was the impetus for developing the measles vaccine. But as Dr. Palevsky explained, what actually happened was that cases of encephalitis increased dramatically after the vaccine was introduced:

"…When it was said that the reason the measles vaccine was implemented in 1963 was to prevent against the massive cases of encephalitis that occurred as a result of slow viral re-ignition of a measles infection months or years later, I went into CDC. I looked it up to see what was the incidence of subacute sclerosing panencephalitis or SSPE.

It showed that it was .0061 percent. There was .0061 percent incidence rate of encephalitis after measles infection. Well, that's not a massive number of cases of measles encephalitis.

But now, we have one in 88 children with autism, and it is pretty well documented in the literature that one of the hallmark pathologies in autism is brain encephalitis or brain inflammation. One in 88 is 1.14 percent brain inflammation or 1.14 percent encephalitis. We've now gone from a .0061 percent encephalitis after measles infection to a 1.14 percent encephalitis rate in children.

Now, I don't know how much measles vaccine plays a role in that, but we have more cases of brain encephalitis after vaccination than we had before we started the measles vaccine. So, how successful are we in reducing some of the bad side effects of the diseases?"

What to Do if Your Child Has a Viral Illness

If your child does get sick, your first inclination may be to go the emergency room. This should be done immediately if your child is:

• Not alert, responsive or interactive
• Has a change in mental status
• Has a change in urine output
• Not breathing
• Skin color is gray or blue
• Limp or lethargic
• Under 3 months old with a fever

If these signs are not present, and your child is stable, Dr. Palevsky suggests the following:

"…one of the most important things that a parent can do is to stay with the child, so that they can monitor the progression. This is because things can change immediately… stay with the child. If the child is breastfeeding, breastfeed the child. If the child is not breastfeeding, hydrate. The best thing you can do for a child who's sick is to hydrate with either room temperature water or broths. If they eat chicken, a chicken broth. Again, nothing that's too strenuous.

I believe in what's called a starvation diet for kids when they're sick. Mostly because they're in such a state of stress that blood flow to the gut is diminished during a state of stress. Therefore, digestion is less efficient in their bodies.

Really keeping the food to a minimum – almost starvation. Really keeping it to broths, teas, soups, clear liquids, and observe. You want to keep the hydration going, open up the kidneys, allow for the flushing of fluids, and put them in warm baths, which will help to relax them and which will encourage bowel movements, which again is another way to get rid of wastes. Most of the reason that kids get sick is to move or get rid of wastes anyway.

The idea is to not put more waste in. You don't want to overfeed them. You don't want to over-stimulate them. You want to keep them in a room that's darker, that has less noise, less sound, and less visual input. You want to really lower the amount of information and activity that's feeding the nervous system and that's feeding the digestive system. And you watch. You continue to watch. You stay with the child. Studies will show that if the parent actually holds the child and breathes with the child, the child's breathing pattern will synchronize with the parent, and healing will occur faster.

…It's really a matter of supportive care, and this is old school. I mean, this is the way in which the pediatricians who taught me took care of their families in the 40s and 50s. They would sit next to the bedside of kids in their homes when the kids were sick. Obviously, physicians can't do that as much, but the parents can. And there are ways to stay in touch with the physician to make sure that things are going properly.

But families in my practice will see shorter durations of fever, shorter durations of illness, if they don't interfere with the body's physiology to get rid of the wastes from that illness, and if they don't overfeed the children, and keep things quiet."