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Saving Rich Part 2
So when last we spoke, I was in the middle of trying to save my husband Rich from a lethal superbug infection, and doctors didn’t have any more help to offer us. None of the antibiotics were working.
I was flipping madly through all the medical research I could find, and I noticed the insistently aggressive FRAME of all the medical research.
Kill the bacteria…the war on infection…the front line defence. All written in the language of war. They had turned my husband’s body into a battle zone.
And this battle – I was reliably informed by experts – we were going to lose.
So –– I would have to do something different. At the time, I didn’t get fancy about it. I just thought, “Ok, so what’s the opposite of war?”
(Field note – the really scary thing here was that nothing inside the box was effective. I had to get entirely outside the box. That’s not easy when everything you know, think and believe was created by the box. How to even begin to get outside it?)
So I thought … erm, opposite of war … rainbows? Free love? Unicorns? Marshmallows? Day drinking? Dirty dancing? Reggae? (Don’t judge me…it was late and I was tired…)
But I kept going, because the alternative was unthinkable. He was not going down, not on my watch.
Hands across the ocean? Friends? Connections? Allies?
Hang on… allies. That could be a thing.
Because allies on the microbial level, I had. Microbial-sized allies were in the kefir, which we were making outside in our little stone barn.
What I knew about kefir was that it acts inside the system to suppress pathogens. Not kill them off – just contain them and put them back in their proper place. There are so many beneficial living microbes inside the kefir that they take over the space and push the pathogens down, like planting so many flowers that it suppresses the weeds. Bringing them back into balance inside the ecosystem.
Because here’s the thing – there are always pathogens in your microbiome.
Always. And that’s as it should be.
Just like wolves in Yellowstone, or jaguars in the Amazon. The things that we consider “bad” are generally working parts of an ecosystem. It’s only when they get out of control, that they become a problem. And if you simply kill them off, you destabilise the entire ecosystem. (Field note – they took the wolves out of Yellowstone. The ecosystem collapsed. They put the wolves back in. The ecosystem restored itself. Real world success frame.)
So the idea is not to kill off all the pathogens – which only wrecks the whole system – but to strengthen the system so that the system itself can contain the pathogens. Restore the working connections.
So – looong story short – I put kefir on Rich’s skin. Not his 10-inch abdominal incision – I wasn’t that brave. But on all the rest of his skin, where the MRSA had colonised.
And the weird part? It worked. The nasty little red holes gouging deeper into his wound every day, dried up. His wound healed. He got up out of bed and got onto his tractor, and he is there still.
My own private miracle.
Sometimes, something happens, and you spend the rest of your career trying to work out why.
That’s what this was for me.
Because once I got over the sheer giddy relief of the fact that my husband wasn’t going to die on my sofa –
I started wondering about the mechanism of what happened. Why exactly did it work?
I spent the next ten years searching for answers. When I finally discovered the answer, it was not in medical texts or even microbiology, but in complexity science. And it looks like this:
Your body is a complex system. Your skin is a complex system.
A complex system, in its simplest definition, is a set of many interacting parts that together create patterns and behaviour you cannot understand by looking at any one part in isolation. And it’s not controlled by one leader.
Think of a flock of starlings. There’s no one boss bird, telling everyone where to fly. The intelligence of the flock emerges from the connection between the members.
If you start looking around, you’ll see that you are surrounded by complex systems everywhere. The Internet is a complex system. A forest is a complex system. A coral reef. A traffic jam. A family. A country. The global ecosystem. Your own brain.
You don’t get the truth of the system by pulling it apart; you get the truth by seeing how the relationships work. These systems adapt, respond, and self-organise, changing over time through feedback rather than control. Which means you can’t control them in a top-down “do this, get that” way. You can only influence them, participate in them, and shift the conditions they’re living in.
That’s why your gut, your skin, your brain—and your garden—behave the way they do. They’re not machines. They’re living systems.
And living systems don’t respond to force; they respond to relationship.
Living systems have rules. And those rules can be learned.
It’s just that apart from a few very clever scientists, we’ve never really bothered.
Maybe it’s time.
To be continued…
Hugs,
Shann.x
Shann Jones MBE, Founder/Director Chuckling Goat
The Most Influential Woman in Business to Watch in 2026, The Enterprise World
ps – Curious about how kefir works, or anything else to do with gut health? Our Nutritional Therapists are disco-ready, studded with sequins and ready to boogie – or – you know – just answer your questions. Either way. Grab them on live chat 8 am to 8 pm weekdays.
