User:EmmalynnePerron185

Kevin: Dr. Williams, welcome to the show.

Dr. Williams: Thank you so much for having me. I really look forward to the discussion, Kevin.

Kevin: Well, this is great. We got over 300 questions. I think that I've kind of filtered them out into specific categories, so we'll be able to address some of them.

But first, why don't you tell everyone just a little bit about yourself? Just tell us a little about how you got into this and why you're really just speaking very highly of all this sort of natural medicine in terms of viral and bacterial and just immunity in any sort of way.

Dr. Williams: Kevin, I'm going to just give you a quick update on what I'm doing right now, and then I'm going to jump back about thirty-some years, because your question's highly important.

I am currently working with the University of Miami Miller School of Integrative Medicine Miami, in their department of integrative medicine, and upgrading and working with them and bringing in other universities from around the world into the same areas that I work in to drive, really a scientific model. There's both intuitive and scientific model in this work.

And I think, as you know, my books are both current, up-do-date, they're science-based, but they really touch that soul of natural medicine. Now, jump back 30 plus, plus, plus years. I recognized very early on, because of my patients that were coming in, now, in the late 70s, early 80s, that was just when the tip of the iceberg of AIDS was, we didn't even have it diagnosed then, and Hepatitis C, we didn't have it diagnosed, not until '89, if you can believe that or not.

And then we were looking at chronic fatigue and environmental syndromes, increasing incidences of cancer, all types of allergies, very strange things that didn't show up. We were seeing diseases that occurred typically only in older people, some of them very rare diseases or very uncommon like MS, for example, and other autoimmune diseases, and I started to look at this.

You know, what could be the cause? And at the time, everybody was blaming viruses, and so I said, well, let me take a closer look. It turned out that it really wasn't viruses that were causing all of these problems whatsoever. It was environmental reasons, but when I looked at the viral issue more closely, and then AIDS came up, and then Hepatitis C and then SARS, and many, many, many, many, many others, I realized, and then with my latest book "Beating the Flu," about pandemic influenza, that probably our number one weakest link was our immune system.

And our number one greatest problem was viral illnesses. We had no medications. It was an undefeatable enemy. It was the smallest thing known. Viruses can even infect bacteria. That's how small they are.

Kevin: Um-hmm.

Dr. Williams: So I got on the viral trail, and I tried to educate lay people, the public, as well as physicians, because medical doctors had absolutely no idea, had zero training on viruses at the time. They have very little today.

Kevin: Right. And how has that changed over the last 30 years?

Dr. Williams: Well, unfortunately it's changed in kind of skewed way. We have kind of a limping drunk, you know, the son of a rich man, or something like that, who's gone out for the evening and has gained a lot of experience, but in the wrong things.

Kevin: Gotcha.

Dr. Williams: And immunology itself, the science of immunology, has just become revived, and we've looked at it in a much, much deeper way. We now understand that what we used to think, and the old paradigm is still in place, that what we used to think is completely not only outdated but mostly wrong. It's a much more highly complex system. It's an intercommunicative system, and it works within all areas of the body. It's dependent on hormones, nutrients, and immunity, as well as environmental pressures.

We slanted our interest in viral research onto AIDS and what we thought were the more serious diseases because that's where a lot of the research money was in, but not where the real problem was. And, for example, some of the highest incidences of viral infections is in Denge fever, but that hardly ever touches the United States, so if the poor people of the Philippines and the Brazilian Amazon are dying from Denge, we don't really fund that type of research.

But, you know, if a senator's son or something has AIDS, then we're going to fund that. So it became a little bit too political, and now thankfully, it's slanting away from that. Because what we're seeing is this idea that four or five years from now, we're going to have a vaccine. We'll have a cure. Never, ever happened.

It's now been, let's take '84 as kind of a lynchpin year, when we started to realize that viruses were becoming a more serious problem than we ever could have imagined. That's more than 20 years ago. And they were saying at the time, every four or five years, that we'd have a cure. And so that's about eight times that's been said, and we're no closer than we were 24 years ago.

So, I think we're starting to take that more seriously. Clinicians are starting to take it more seriously. And we have to upgrade our education, reeducate ourselves, and then help the public to understand that if there's any one thing that is truly a serious issue, and this is my most significant point, is that the environmental changes that we're experiencing, you know, we're looking at global warming as kind of the big umbrella aspect of it, but there's so many insidious changes that are dampening and weakening or disrupting our immune system, and that are at the same time allowing for viruses to be spread easier and to mutate easier. So we're having strengthening viruses and weakening humanity without any medications to deal with it.

Kevin: Wow. Now, the conventional approach, or the conventional thought, is that once you have a virus, you can't do anything about it. It's just there. Why don't you just go through the basics of, and very, very quickly because I want to get into a little more detail, but the basics of viruses? And what are some of the implications of having a virus? I mean, a lot of us have viruses. It's definitely more the norm. And how do they affect us generally? And then we'll kind of delve into the specifics of it.

Dr. Williams: The word 'virus' comes from Latin. It means 'poisonous fluid' and it's a beautiful word in a strange sort of way. And we use this old word because it still fits, but they have technical names to them. But they're very, very small. As I said, they're so small they can infect bacteria, which everyone knows we can't see with the naked eye. We only started to be able to see viruses with electron microscopes in the middle of the last century, and only up until recently. Still we can't see them all. We kind of guess what they look like.

They're intracellular molecular parasites, so they enter the body silently as a rule. And then the immune system, the fever and so forth, it's not the virus causing that, that's our own immune system. But many of them are stealth-like, and they enter completely silently. They don't arouse the immune system. It's like a burglar who knows how to tiptoe around your sleeping watchdogs in a way, or circumvent your alarm, and in the morning everything's gone. Some of them do cause the alarm to go off, but many of them don't.

They have no metabolic life of their own. We don't know how to classify viruses. Are they living organisms, or are they dead? Well, they're not dead, because they can come back to life. We don't know how long they can exist. Some scientists believe that viruses could exist in intracellular space. They don't need oxygen to survive, and they go into a type of dormancy where they act completely shut down, as if they were dead, as if they were stone on your driveway. They can live in ice, they can live in different extremes of temperature

with or without moisture, or even suggesting an intracellular space. And then at the right moment when they connect with the living organism- it has to be the right organism, it can't just be any, it has to have an affinity to it -then they wake up, they come alive, they rise up. And they have a remarkable intelligence and this superb ability to survive and adapt to the new environment.

They link up then, they enter the body, if it's in a human, and enter the cell itself and then penetrate the cell and enter into the nucleus of the cell and then link up with the genetic material. In other words, they access the computer program or they access the library, learn everything that there is to know about you, particularly your immune system, and then, in a way, hijack it. So that's in a brief way what a virus is. And they're essentially proteins wrapped in a kind of a slippery, fatty envelope.

Now, they're not all bad, which is important. Viruses pass from generation to generation in the embryo genetically. And as I said, they read the material, they transcript or recode or they kind of rewrite history. In some ways, which we really don't know hardly anything about how this might take place, but they may be involved in human evolution or the evolution of animals and plants. Everything, as I said, even bacteria, can be infected by viruses. So they may play a very important role. We suspect that they play a role in how the body manages disease. For example, when we eradicated smallpox, I think everyone knows that was in Africa in the 70s when the last case was discovered, through a massive vaccination campaign, but at the same time, it's not completely eradicated because we have stockpiles of smallpox live virus in several storage vaults around the world.

But at the same time, the incidence of asthma went up. So smallpox was going down, asthma was going up. And we first thought it was this pollution in the air and other things like allergies and so forth that may have caused that. But now we suspect that there's an inter-linking of even deadly viruses like smallpox that somehow retool or program our own immune system to help handle the environment in which we live, in this example, asthma. So that as we breathe the air, there's all kinds of things that come in the air, microscopic, typically, but smoke, that's something that might be visible. Also infectious elements and pollutants, and so forth. And another part of our immune system has to deal with that. If they can't, then it causes respiratory distress and closing down of the airways and irritation and inflammation. Some viruses may participate in helping our mucouso-immunity, that immune system that is highly active and that lines all of our inner membranes, to adapt to the environment in which we live.