Everything in Excess is Opposed to Nature

One major factor driving COVID’s deadliness has been staring us in the face since the outset. Few have been willing to name or report it. Fewer still have paid attention to those who did. If we continue to ignore it, things will only get worse.

At MoMA © Anthony Fieldman 2021

Hippocrates—the “Father of Medicine”—literally founded the practice, including the use of prognosis, clinical observation and the systematic categorization of diseases. He famously observed—correctly—that “Everything in excess is opposed to nature.”

With his insight, he was pointing us toward one of Nature’s two most enduring features: that its closed-loop, zero-waste, efficiency-driven ecosystem allows for no excess. Rather, it is in constant motion, endlessly transforming, rebalancing and restoring equilibrium to its myriad constituent parts, at every scale.

Everything that Nature has produced—humans included—is hard-wired to maintain this state of innate balance. Countless evolutionary tools, most of which remain a mystery to us, exist for no reason other than to ensure our continued foundational health.

Here are just a few miracles in the human body that we do understand:

• When your skin is cut, platelets in your blood clot to stop the bleeding, white blood cells remove the dead, injured cells and new healthy cells repair the damaged tissue.
• Mucus traps foreign materials, acids in various organs kills organisms, and a type of white blood cell called phagocytes engulf and destroy invaders.
• Air intake through the nose is supplemented with nitric oxide which is also an anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal, helping to fight disease—COVID-19 included.
• Natural killer cells recognize when one of our own cells have been invaded by a virus and destroy the infected cell.
• Inflammation, while seemingly problematic, is actually your body’s reaction to an injury or infection, allowing your immune system to focus on restoring the injured or infected area to health.
• A fever is your body raising its temperature to levels that will…