#675: The Intelligence of Symptoms Part 2: Mucus, Cough & Skin

All right, let's get into this.

Nobody likes mucus, snot, boogers, you know, all those things.

The runny nose, the congestion, the stuff you're blowing into tissues for a week.

And you're looking at the tissue box and thinking, I just opened this thing and now it's halfway gone or it's all the way gone.

I need another one.

And because it's annoying, we do treat it like the enemy in many cases.

But stop and ask yourself, what is it actually doing? Because it's not random and it's not an illness in and of itself.

Mucus is a transport system.

Your airways are lined with it.

all the time, even when you're well.

And it's on purpose because it's sticky and it's designed to catch things, dust, particles, irritants, pathogens, and carry them up and out before they get into your lungs.

When you get sick or you breathe in something irritating, your body ramps up production, not to torture you, but because it's got more to catch and more to flush out.

The running nose is the body rinsing the threat out of the front door.

That is the whole point of it.

And years ago, in fact, I don't even know if this is a podcast episode.

This might be back from the radio days.

I did a show that grossed a lot of people out.

I decided not to focus on it here, but it is another truism.

And that is, that's not, and specifically don't, boogers, for lack of a better term, they can play a role, too.

You know, when we're sick and we have a lot of mucus, we tend to sometimes swallow a lot of that mucus, especially while we're sleeping at night.

And you'll even see kids picking their nose and eating it.

And I don't know if that's by design or not.

I have my questions about that.

But you know what mucus does trap are those things that we talked about.

And this is basically one of nature's ways of actually inoculating the system against things.