Human antioxidant and immune defenses are plants rooted in the soil of the bowel contents. The bowel ecosystem is as diverse and delicate as any other in nature. It interfaces with the outside world on one side and with the blood ecosystem on the other. The blood ecology, in turn, integrates with liver, kidney and brain ecosystems. Human health, in essence, is a dynamic ecologic equilibrium among the various body organ ecosystems.
    It is distressing to see little children who live on antibiotics. In so doing, food and mold allergies that set them up for recurrent infections go unrecognized. Their delicate bowel ecosystems are battered repeatedly with broad-spectrum antibiotics that violate their antioxidant defenses. When their oxidative metabolism causes behavior and learning difficulties, school psychologists promptly label them with hyperactivity and attention deficit disorders, or refer them to their pediatricians who readily oblige the psychologists with Ritalin prescriptions.
    Many women suffering from severely battered vaginal and urinary ecosystems are prescribed one course of antibiotics after another. The symptoms caused by such ecologic disruptions are vigorously suppressed with yet additional doctors. Not infrequently, they are completely unaware of the true nature of their suffering. I discuss these subjects at length in the companion volume, RDA: Rats, Drugs and Assumptions. Attempts to resolve issues of stress with therapies based on the prevailing—and simplistic—fight-or-flight notion of stress are bound to fail, and they do.
    Similarly, there are important ecologic considerations affecting home and work environments. I refer readers interested in this subject to the companion volume, The Canary and Chronic Fatigue.
    Since health is ecologic equilibrium, it can only be preserved with ecologic thinking. Until mainstream physicians learn to think ecologically, people who suffer chronic stress have no choice but to learn about ecologic balances in the body and how to preserve them.