From Gut-Brain Secrets.
Louis Pasteur’s “germ theory” vs. Antoine Béchamp and Claude Bernard’s “terrain theory”
Louis Pasteur made the germ theory famous starting in the 1850s. He studied the growth and behavior of tiny organisms under a microscope and concluded that germs cause disease. But if germs really cause disease, all we have to do is find something to kill germs and we can wipe out disease… right? Well, not exactly. We have plenty of things to kill germs, yet disease is skyrocketing with no end in sight. Indeed, the harder we try to wipe out microorganisms through antibiotic practices, the more rapidly that drug-resistant pathogens spread.
Florence Nightingale puts the terrain theory to the test
Around the time that Pasteur was conducting his research in the 1850s, a natural health pioneer, Florence Nightingale (founder of modern nursing born to wealthy parents), was sent to look after soldiers injured in the Crimean War. When she arrived, conditions in the hospital were appalling. The plumbing didn’t work, raw sewage polluted corridors, rotting food filled the kitchen, soldiers waited days or weeks for treatment, and the mortality rate was 50%. Soldiers had a better chance of surviving the battlefield than that hospital. She wanted to help, but knew it wouldn’t be easy.
To get started, she and her cadre of thirty-eight nurses offered to clean the filthy facilities that she believed to be causing the terrible mortality. But the doctors refused her entry into the wards. Instead, they sent nurse Nightingale to the kitchen, so she started there. She scrubbed everything in sight. She telegrammed her father and had him send a shipload of clean linens, clothes, mattresses, bandages, and a cook.
Two and a half weeks later, another ship of wounded arrived that pushed the hospital further over its capacity. Staff was already overworked, so the doctors reluctantly agreed to let Florence and her nurses into the main hospital. The first thing they did was scrub the walls and open the windows to let fresh air in. She made all the doctors wash their hands between operations. She got the plumbing fixed. She put the clean linens into use. She cleaned up every nook and cranny in the hospital where germs can fester and, within six months, the mortality rate dropped to 2%.
When Nightingale returned to England, she was hailed as a hero. But she objected. To her mind, all she did was improve the sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition. Florence Nightingale knew that germs don’t cause disease. Germs are the result of unhealthful conditions. She knew what our medical science is just now beginning to accept: pathogens can’t thrive in a healthy environment. Whether through cleanliness, a strong immune system, or the presence of good bacteria, harmful germs have no purpose or place in healthful conditions. Pathogens don’t thrive in a healthy body.
Example of how an environment attracts its inhabitants
I live in a place filled with trees and shrubs. It’s basically a forest. And no matter what anyone in the community does to try and keep bugs out, they will always be around. Naturally, a few of them find their way inside and eat anything edible. So, to no surprise, the summer after I moved in, I found some ants marching around like they owned the place. Now, having learned what I did from Barbara O’Neill, I knew poisonous ant traps are one way to try and get rid of unwanted pests. But a better strategy is to thoroughly clean the place and remove all the food that they like.
I did it. And it worked. I’ve seen scouts from time to time on what seem to be reconnaissance missions. But they don’t come back with reinforcements. So instead of striking back at the ants directly, which is a person’s natural instinct, I eliminated their reason for being there: food and provisions. Once the things that attracted them were gone, being there was a waste of time. So they left and sought sustenance elsewhere.
Summary of the germs vs. environment debate
Symptoms of modern diseases – such as mental disorders, autoimmunity, and even weight problems – have no reason to be in the body when condi-tions are not right for them to exist. They are reactions to, or a product of, problematic conditions in the body. And when you fix those flaws, your fault detection/alert system called symptoms tells you by turning off the body’s responses to those irregularities. Symptoms cease to exist.