Is Your Downspout Full of Leaves?

This is an excerpt from Chapter Three of Dr. Chlebowski’s upcoming book:

The Virus and Host: How to Protect Yourself from Infectious Disease by Reducing Toxicity, Improving Immunity and Minimizing Chronic Illness.

Published by Chelsea Green and on store shelves by Summer 2022.

I often describe detoxification to my patients using the analogy of a rain gutter. The rain gutter and downspout symbolize the enzymatic detoxification processes that happen inside our cells. When we are overburdened with toxins it is as if our downspout is full of leaves. If you have ever cleaned gutters, you know that if the gutters are full enough you must reach in and pull out the old soggy leaves before water will flow out. If you don’t, the water will overflow over the sides of the gutters. This is a detoxification crisis. Many patients come into my clinic and describe how they have tried to detoxify but they feel horrible and can’t do it. These people have downspouts full of leaves.

In order to turn on these peoples’ detoxification processes, we need to slowly pull leaves out of their gutters. These folks often need lots of magnesium, B6, minerals, and anti-inflammatory herbs before we can use the “hose”—high-powered detoxification treatments like glutathione, milk thistle, and chelation. Don’t give up if you can’t detoxify. You might have to spend a few months cleaning out leaves by hand before you can run the hose through.

The Fallacy of Genetic Determinism

Toxins are to blame for weak immunity. It is the natural consequence of unbridled growth and industrial development around the world. Governments have allowed it to happen because it is profitable, and it drives growth. It is one of the reasons so many died during the COVID-19 pandemic. And it is going to happen again if we don’t take responsibility for our health and improve our odds.

And why aren’t we improving our odds? The root of this problem goes back to the current medical paradigm and its antiquated and pedestrian ways of looking at illness and the human body. It is unlikely that your doctor believes that your autoimmune disease has an identifiable cause, or that getting the flu can be avoided, or that detoxification is a necessary or worthwhile process. These ideas are not taught in conventional medical schools. In fact, most doctors have been trained in a model, due to the influence of big money on medicine, that teaches the opposite. 

In 1910, the Carnegie Institute produced the Flexner Report, which attacked the legitimacy of traditional healing practices, such herbalism, hydrotherapy, detoxification, and homeopathy, and instead promoted a model based on symptom suppression with patentable petrochemical based drugs. This report was funded by the Rockefeller family—the largest financial stakeholder in the manufacture of these new drugs. Not satisfied with just profiting from the selling of the drugs, the Rockefellers also sought to determine medical school curriculum. They did this by running the hundreds of homeopathic hospitals and schools out of business and funding the building of new hospitals and medical schools based in the newly created allopathic model. Today’s doctors are still taught an allopathic model of disease that relies largely on the use of such medications. At the turn of the century old money altered the way mankind saw the cause and treatment of disease—and we are still under its spell today.

 Industry and government also have a vested interest in keeping this big profit generating machine rolling so information contrary to the mainstream medical narrative continues to be maligned and suppressed. Many conventional doctors trained in this model claim outright that detoxification is unnecessary. They say we don’t need to do it. They claim that our livers have all the ability we need to detoxify anything that comes along. This is not true.

We are all also indoctrinated with the disempowering belief that our genetics determine our health (known, aptly, as genetic determinism). You may have heard a doctor tell you that something “runs in your genes,” and it may have led you to believe that there was nothing you could do about a particular problem. This idea is woefully incorrect. How we turn our genes on and off with diet, stress, and inflammation is vastly more important. Just because your mother had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and obesity does not predestine you to the same fate. If you eat the way she ate, fail to exercise the way she did, and expose yourself to hazardous compounds the way she did then you are likely to develop the same issues as her. But if you choose another path by exercising daily (yes daily), keeping your weight down, cutting out the CRAP (Chemicals, Refined Sugar & Flour, Artificial Stuff and Preservatives) you can have a completely different health story.

Hiding in Plain Sight

To protect ourselves from viral pandemics such as COVID-19, we must reduce the toxic exposures that weaken our immunity and damage our organs, allow chronic stealth infections to take hold, and produce inflammation that makes us vulnerable to the poor outcomes of acute viral infection. Bottom line: it starts by dealing with the toxic exposures, and to effectively deal with toxic exposures, we must do two things, stop them from coming in and then get them out. Part 2 of this book is dedicated to the nuts and bolts of that process. But first we need a deeper diver of what happens physiologically when toxicity allows chronic stealth infection and inflammation to take hold—and why it makes us so very vulnerable to viral infections like COVID-19.