Germs Are Not Enemies

10. Germs Are Not Enemies

Bacteria are ubiquitous—they are with us all the lime. Life on this planet would be impossible without them.

Specific “disease” bacteria are commonly assumed to be the primary cause of specific diseases. These much maligned microorganisms are, in truth, friends and scavengers that need nourishment to reproduce. They go into action immediately when there is a dangerous accumulation of toxic materials which is threatening body integrity. They perform the useful function of “cleaning up the mess” and then resume their more passive state, after their work is done.

There is no denying that bacteria are intimately associated with many serious diseases. They contribute secondary or tertiary complicating factors. They elaborate certain powerful toxins. They have factors which add to the primary causes.

There is no denying the importance of bacteria in the evolution of disease. But they are not the fundamental and primary causes, as so many people believe.

It is the disease condition that creates an environment favorable to the mutation of bacteria into those associated with that particular “disease,” and favorable to their proliferation and increasing virulence. The disease condition springs from improper living that begets toxicosis.

There is no denying that in the disease process, the work performed by bacteria as scavengers is unpleasant and exhausting to the host, but it is necessary for the preservation of health and life. After the cleansing is complete, the organism again makes its energies available for normal activities.

10.1 Diseases Are Not Entities Traveling From One Person to Another

We hear about infectious diseases, contagious diseases, communicable diseases. But nobody has even seen a disease travel from one person to another. There is not an iota of evidence that this happens.

In 1860, the world-famous English nurse, Miss Florence Nightingale, published an attack on the germ theory of disease. She said:

“Diseases are not individuals arranged in classes, like cats and dogs, but conditions growing out of one another. Is it not living in a continual mistake to look upon diseases, as we do now, as separate entities, which must exist, like cats and dogs, instead of looking upon them as conditions, like a dirty and clean condition, and just as much under our control; or rather as the reactions of kindly Nature, against the condition in which we have placed ourselves? I have seen with my eyes and smelled with my nose smallpox growing up in first specimens, either in closed rooms, or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been ‘caught’ but must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen disease begin, grow up and pass into one another. Now, dogs do not pass into cats.
“True nursing ignors infection, except to prevent it. Cleanliness and fresh air from open windows, with unremitting attention to the patient, are the only defense a true nurse either asks or needs … The specific disease doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unstable minds, such as now rule in the medical profession. There are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.”