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The Germ Theory |
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Germ Theory |
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“The germ is
nothing; the terrain is
everything.” The germ theory is for wimps. And to prove it, let me tell you about the kid who was my
lab partner in high school biology class, and who was always, always sick. Mike came to class
coughing, sneezing and hacking on what seemed to be an everyday basis. Of
course his assigned seat was right next to me, at our shiny black-topped lab
tables-for-two that are so common in science classrooms. All through lectures,
he sniffed, snorted and sneezed. All through lab, he hacked, coughed, and
gagged. (This is a real test of my Thesaurus, and I am quickly running
out of synonyms for "coughing" and "sneezing." Write
your suggestions on a three-by-five card and mail them in, please.) Seriously,
this kid was sickly. You have got to give him high marks for showing up
at all. He had surprisingly fine attendance; just my luck. Well. The
teacher, whom we really liked, would occasionally leave the room during our
long, double-period lab sessions. After all, this was back in the sixties,
and we were an honors class. We were a particularly good class,
usually. But this one time, the temptation proved too great and the
opportunity too inviting. That day we had been
doing agar culture plates. This means you mix up some diarrhea-colored, Jello-like stuff, heat it, and pour it into shallow,
round, four-inch diameter glass dishes. After it cools, you add some
bacteria or whatever microorganism you wish to grow. We'd stocked the
incubator with a nice variety of specimens, and had a few extra, unused
culture plates all dressed up and nowhere to go. The lab manual said
to leave one out in the classroom, uncovered, and see if a culture could be
obtained from what settled out from the air. We went it one better. We used Mike. Everybody, almost
at the same moment, came to the realization that Mike was our local one-stop
source of pathogens. And, Mr. Thorensen being
at that fateful moment out of the room, our chance had come. We had Mike
cough all over a couple of agar plates. I mean, he really let it all
out. The girls turned away into their handkerchiefs. The boys
wanted to, but grimaced and kept watching, turning their heads briefly aside
when a really shattering blast erupted from Mikes capacious lungs. We knew that this
was going to be great; there had to be a Nobel just waiting for us
here. As Mike was mopping up the table in front of him, we light-footed
it to the rear of the lab, covered our forbidden new cultures, and stuck them
in the incubator, on the bottom shelf, way in the back. We zipped back
to our seats, and, as if rehearsed for a teen coming-of-age movie, in walked
Mr. Thorensen. We gave him our best cheesy
smiles and folded our hands to await his next pronouncement, or the bell,
whichever came first. Naturally, we
completely forgot about those culture plates. They were unlabeled, so
nobody claimed them, but nobody threw them out, either. You know how
kids are always forgetting to put their names on things. Considerable time
went by. When Mr. Thorensen was out of the room again one day, either at
the lav or having a smoke in the teacher's lounge,
we recalled our impromptu research project. My pal Sid
and I went back to the old gray incubator, opened it, and reached all the way
in. Ah yes, there they were, still. We brought the two dishes out
and all gathered around to see some real science. It was just
gorgeous. Big, hairy black growths, white puffballs and layers of milky
slime covered the culture surface. Ugh. It looked like you'd exhumed the
guts of a rotting carp. Gross. To nearly quote George Carlin, it was enough
to knock a buzzard off a manure wagon. Then and there, we knew two things:
first, that Mike should, by all logic, be dead. Second, that since
he all too obviously wasn't, the germ theory was complete bull. Being Mike's
closest friend, in a literal geographic sense, I had my own more personal
realization: I should, at the very least, have had Mike's symptoms in
spades. Never again did I
object to Mom giving me my daily multivitamin. Years later, I
lived off campus as a college senior. Boy, that
was fun. Four friends and I closely inhabited one third of a rented
house, near the university but well out of reach of the local Board of
Health. We demonstrated our pragmatism, our existentialism and our sloth
on a daily basis. We reduced housekeeping to its most rudimentary form.
Plan A: If the dirty dishes in the sink had more than 3/4 inch of black mold
on at least 15 of them, it was time to clean up. Plan "B" was
to throw them out. Plan "C" was to go out for pizza. Plan "C"
was the one most commonly used. We were never
sick. Sure, we were young and our immune systems were at their
peak. But we were surrounded with germs, as all people are who live
outside of a bubble. This is the whole point: we live in a world filled
with pathogens, but only some of us are sick. There are survivors
to every massacre. There are even some HIV-positive patients dating from
the early 1980's that show absolutely no signs of AIDS to date. Not a
lot of them, but a significant number, are completely free of symptoms. As a child, I well
remember sitting in my half-empty classroom during an epidemic or two,
wondering why I had to be so darn healthy when all of my friends were home
sick, watching daytime reruns of I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show,
and Queen for a Day. As a former teacher, I can attest that when
the flu comes through school, your absence rate can instantly soar to over
one-third of all students. But the other two-thirds, exposed to the same
viruses, coughs and flying phlegm of the school lunchroom, are quite well. So, with a reverent
sense of history, I offer a revisionist view of the germ theory as Abraham
Lincoln might have described it: You
can infect some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of
the time, but you cannot infect all of the people all of the time. The classic,
perhaps the ultimate contagious disease would be bubonic plague. The
Black Death killed better than one in four Europeans during the 14th
century. We are talking 30 million people now, plus 45 million more dead
in Smallpox, that vanished viral disease, is another case in point. Even
when smallpox reigned supreme, the vast majority of the population did not
contract it, and most of those that did nevertheless survived the
event. George Washington, to name one. Is smallpox all gone now
because of vaccination, or because of our natural immune systems? Can
you prove the first over the second? It is not possible to vaccinate
everyone on earth even if everyone on earth could be or wanted to be
vaccinated. Did you know that there
have been dozens of plague cases diagnosed in the southwest Unbelievably small
as they are, we cannot possibly check every square millimeter of the world
and know that all pathogenic bacteria, like the plague, and all viruses, like
smallpox, are gone. And even if we could find them all, we couldn't kill
them all. We can't even kill all the Japanese beetles in your home
county, let alone all the mosquitoes in your home country. But all
people have immune systems. Viruses are
stubborn little bastards, and are never gone for good. But they can be very
thoroughly restrained. Herpes simplex, or the cold sore virus, provides
a good illustration. People who have ever had cold sores know how
uncomfortable they feel and how unpleasant they look. It is hard to predict
their outbreak, but they are there, and in a somewhat sinister way,
waiting. The viruses are waiting for your immune system to weaken. One
of the best ways to mark such a weakening is that you are experiencing a
common cold. You have noticed that when the cold goes away, the
"fever blisters" go away, too. There is no drug cure for the
common cold virus, nor for the herpes virus. But
your body's militant immune system stopped them both. A gross but classic
experiment was once performed where the subjects played cards with a deck
that had just been handled by a first group of sickly, sneezing
persons. The second group of card players handled
these "freshly" contaminated cards and were seen to put
their hands in their noses and mouths, as people are wont to do. The
researchers waited out an incubation week or two to see if that second group
got colds. Well, they didn't. A profound
scholarly insight into disease trends in history is found in three classic,
remarkable papers: Howard H. Hillemann, PhD
(1960) "The illusion of American health
and longevity" (Clinical Physiology 2(2), 120-177);
and two monographs by William J. McCormick, MD: "The changing incidence
and mortality of infectious disease in relation to changed trends in
nutrition" (Medical Record. September, 1947) and his 1962
paper "Have we forgotten the lesson of scurvy?" (Journal of
Applied Nutrition. 15:1,2; p 4-12). I
concede that the titles are far from exciting. I first read them out of
academic obligation while a student. They changed my
entire way of thinking. It comes down to
this: If your immune system is strong (and a strong vitamin-nutritional
component therein is indisputable) you will be among the ones who don't get
the plague. Or a cold. And if your resistance were to be down,
there is something you can immediately do about it: promptly take vitamin C
to saturation, just as the vitamin C doctors mentioned at this website recommend. Vitamin therapy is
about curing the real diseases. It is not limited to prevention, and it
is certainly not reducible to a few cute platitudes about better food
choices. One bold example: At Johns Hopkins, 281 HIV-positive men were
studied for six years. One half received vitamin supplements. The
other half didn't. There were only one-half as many full-blown AIDS
cases in the vitamin group as in the no-vitamin-supplement group. If
this were a new drug that reduced new AIDS cases by half, it would have been
front-page news and even on Fox TV they might have interrupted "King of
the Hill" to announce it. The study was released December 23,
1993. I'll bet that you have not seen even one TV, newspaper, journal,
or classroom mention of this. And the medical
doctors and registered dietitians are still in a snit over what they think is
a controversy as to whether vitamin C stops the common cold? Vitamin anti-virals are good news for VITAMIN MYTH #728: "Vitamins are a promising area in
health care, but more research is needed before they can be used
therapeutically." Nonsense.
Already by 1953, there were literally thousands of studies compiled in one
textbook alone, The Vitamins in Medicine, by Bicknell and
Prescott. The vitamin quacks developed successful protocols for curing
pneumonia, fibromyalgia, arthritis, chronic fatigue, encephalitis and even
polio. The work is already done; but the word has yet to get out. Want
to believe this but can't? It is not a matter of belief. Vitamin therapy is a matter of
observed fact. There is no longer any doubt that a century of vitamin
research has demonstrated this to any medical physician who reads her or his
own journals. They don't, of course. After you listen to enough
detail men from the pharmaceutical companies, and read dietitians' drivel in
the newspapers or nutrition texts, you'll see why. I know; I've taught
thousands of students. My undergrads immediately see the value of
supplements as primary therapy. Try and see for yourself. Results are
what matter, and vitamins get them. The medical doctors and food-groups
dietitians will see the light eventually, but can you afford to wait? Again and again
relentless science meets megavitamin therapy, and again and again the
evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of using vitamin and mineral therapeutics
now. Still more proof is to be found in yet another large book
consisting of several hundred one-paragraph abstracts (research
summaries). It is called Nutritional Influences on Illness, by
Melvyn Werbach, M.D. (Second Edition). You
don't have all day to read scientific papers, and Dr. Werbach
knows it. He's done it for you, providing one of the best one-volume,
one-stop collection of summaries of well-controlled nutritional studies
ever. There simply just isn't any longer any serious argument: the
world is round, headache is not due to an aspirin deficiency, and vitamins do
cure disease. This includes
hepatitis. George had had chronic hepatitis B for seven years, and drug
medicine wasn't helping. Here is his account of it: "I haven't had many serious symptoms
over the years except fatigue. My liver function tests and bilirubin
counts remained elevated. Worse, the disease caused cirrhosis of my
liver. "I have been treated on two occasions with
Prednisone, a steroid drug. Although this did bring my liver tests down,
the side effects were terrible and the tests elevated after discontinuance of
the drug. In May, the tests were again rising to an alarming level and
the doctors (by this time I had consulted a number of them) told me there
wasn't anything else they could do. "It was at this time I came to you. Since
May, I have been taking megadoses of vitamins faithfully and have
concentrated more on fresh fruits and vegetables. I now take 25,000 to
30,000 milligrams of vitamin C a day; large amounts of B-complex; a
mega-multi vitamin; lecithin; desiccated liver tablets; chelated
magnesium; and vitamin E. "The results of
my latest tests (taken last week) show the lowest level of bilirubin and
lowest liver function scores in over a year. And this without any
Prednisone. "My doctor is surprised and still skeptical
about megavitamins. She says she can't condone what I'm doing (there's
not enough "medical" research on it) but she does say I had better
keep doing it. "Tell my case to people who remain
unconvinced. I was a skeptic once myself." George got these
results in 9 weeks. I met him again more than ten years later. He
was still taking "all those vitamins." And he was entirely
symptom-free. So skepticism
doesn't faze me a bit. I see two kinds of
people: those that are willing to change, and those that are not. There
are two kinds of people who buy Cadillacs: those
that can afford them, and those that cannot. There are two kinds of sick
people: those that do not want to change their lifestyle, and those that do,
but don't know where to start. Prospecting for gold and seeking better
health are similar in three ways: 1. You need the
motivation to get rich. By the way, using
megadoses of vitamin C, Dr. Frederick Klenner cured acute hepatitis in 48 hours. I love this job. Copyright C 2004, 2003
and prior years Andrew W. Saul. Andrew Saul is the author
of the books FIRE YOUR DOCTOR! How to be
Independently Healthy (reader reviews at http://www.doctoryourself.com/review.html
) and DOCTOR YOURSELF: Natural Healing that Works. (reviewed at http://www.doctoryourself.com/saulbooks.html
) For ordering information, Click Here .
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AN IMPORTANT NOTE: This page is not in any way offered as prescription, diagnosis nor treatment for any disease, illness, infirmity or physical condition. Any form of self-treatment or alternative health program necessarily must involve an individual's acceptance of some risk, and no one should assume otherwise. Persons needing medical care should obtain it from a physician. Consult your doctor before making any health decision. Neither the author nor the webmaster has authorized the use of their names or the use of any material contained within in connection with the sale, promotion or advertising of any product or apparatus. Single-copy reproduction for individual, non-commercial use is permitted providing no alterations of content are made, and credit is given. |
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