Cultivating Health:
Learning and Living Your Biological Mandates
by Adeha Feustel

Bacteria: Pathogens or Agents of Decay?: An Ecological Approach to Health
by Adeha Feustel
(From the Permaculture Activist Magazine, #45, March 2001)

Suppose for a moment that 150 years ago medical scientists made a great error and set off in a tragically wrong direction, one that has caused untold suffering to millions of people, even endangering our very existence as a species, while its proponents line their pockets with gold.

Suppose also that although misinformation, ignorance, and corporate greed have obscured it, the true path to health is still open to us. Suppose that we can easily understand the superiority of this path, and that all we need to do to turn the tide is to initiate a series of small changes in our lifestyles and values? What if our survival as a species actually depended upon big changes? If we knew what they were, would we be willing to make them? Would we have the courage?

Could we, the people, person by person, decision by decision, fly in the face of medical error and corporate greed, defy our own complacency and addiction, reverse the process of decay, and regenerate not only our own health, but the health of the planet? Here is the story. You decide.

Setting the Stage: Theories of Disease
Ideas about the cause of disease have changed down through the ages. Disease used to be blamed on angry gods, or on the spells and curses of powerful enemies. Before the 1880s disease was largely seen as the result of people being out of tune with their environment. While some doctors treated disease with blood letting and mercury, many doctors relied on rest, sunshine, fresh air, and nourishing food or fasting, knowing that the body must cure itself and that the physician’s role was to facilitate that process to the best of his or her ability. Modern western medicine has another perspective entirely.

Current western medicine tends to look at infectious disease as a foreign invader to be fought to the death. Each disease is seen as being caused by the invasion of specific germs, which can reproduce themselves and travel to infect other host organisms. The treatment of disease then, consists of identifying the germs causing the disease, analyzing the appropriate weapon to kill those germs, and using that weapon effectively; killing the germs is considered the cure for the disease. This model of the Magic Bullet Instant Cure has spread contagiously from the treatment of infectious disease into every aspect of health care: eradicate any symptom with a drug or quick-fix surgery, and that’s all there is to it—you are cured.

Louis Pasteur

This understanding of disease dates from the mid-1800s when Louis Pasteur associated pathological changes in laboratory cultures with microorganisms he identified in them. He concluded that the “germs” were causing those pathological changes. Pasteur claimed that a particular microorganism uniquely caused each disease; this was the monomorphic germ theory of disease. A cure resulted when the particular microorganism associated with the disease was eliminated.

Antoine Bechamp

At the same time Pasteur was putting forth his germ theory, Antoine Bechamp held an opposing theory which was also in the spotlight: he asserted that microbes naturally evolve through different stages of development during their life cycle. These microbes respond to a toxic body by altering their normally healthy forms into forms associated with disease. But the microbes, he argued, do not cause disease. They are just responding to the toxicity of the body. This was the pleiomorphic theory of disease.

Another scientist of the day, Claude Bernard, argued that disease was caused by variations in the host’s internal milieu, or “terrain,” to which the microbes responded by changing form in order to survive. According to this theory, the vitality of the host was the principal factor in disease.Relatively small changes in the internal environment made the “terrain” attractive and hospitable to different types of invading organisms: a weak host not only “invited” invading organisms to take up residence, but actually cultured them, inducing their changes into pathological forms. A strong and vital host, on the other hand, was inhospitable and would keep pathological organisms and disease at bay. This is the pleomorphic terrain theory of disease.

Not only did pleomorphism deny the causative role of germs in the development of disease, it also claimed that bacteria actually changed form in response to changes in the bodily terrain. Benign bacteria, under suitable conditions, could change into a “deadly” form, becoming benign again if conditions in the body changed back to support the benign form. The changes in terrain could be very subtle, as little as 0.01%; the body’s pH, or measure of acidity/alkalinity, was the primary determinant of health. A neutral pH kept microorganisms in benign or even beneficial forms.

Two Roads Diverge...
The scientists debated their theories publicly at great length. Pasteur prevailed, less due perhaps to the validity of his theory than to his commanding personality: “Pasteur was a chemist and physicist and knew very little about biological processes. He was a respected, influential, and charismatic man, however, whose phobic fear of infection and belief in the ‘malignancy and belligerence’ of germs had popular far-reaching consequences in the scientific community, which was convinced of the threat of microbes to man. Thus, was born the fear of germs (bacteriophobia) which still exists today.” (Baker, p. 212) Not only did Pasteur’s theory give rise to the fear of germs, but at this crossroads an entire medical strategy was birthed, modeled on war, a strategy which resulted, like war, in untold devastation. Humanity began its War on Germs.

In his excellent book, Awakening Our Self-Healing Body, Arthur Baker aptly summed up the results of the natural evolution of this change in our understanding: “With the germ theory of disease, no longer did we have to take responsibility for sickness caused by our own transgressions of the laws of health. Instead we blamed germs for invading the body. The germ theory effectively shifted personal responsibility for health and well-being onto the shoulders of the medical profession which supposedly knew how to kill off the offending germs. Our own health slipped from our control.”

On the surface, this approach has served us pretty well. Modern antibiotics have saved many lives in the 70 years since Alexander Fleming stumbled across penicillin mold on an orange. But the crows are coming home to roost: the experiment has changed the subject. Not only has modern medicine (and agriculture) bred resistance into bugs, it has bred it out of us! As medicine has made its seductive claims to protect us from illness, we have allowed the real supports for health to crumble beneath us. Three generations of erosive chemical intensive farming has stripped both our soils and food of their vitality. During the same period we have poisoned our bodies and the biosphere with a myriad of toxic chemicals, drugs, radiation, and now feral DNA. We are just now beginning to comprehend the grim and far-reaching effects of our capitulation both to the germ theory and to the tender and lucrative ministrations of its proponents, allopathic medical doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

Pasteur Recants
Ironically and perhaps tragically, Pasteur himself, on his deathbed, recanted: he confessed his belief that “The terrain is everything; the bacteria nothing.” (Hume, Ed. Pasteur exposed: the false foundations of modern medicine. Australia: Bookreal, 1989, as quoted from Beyond Antibiotics, Schmidt et al., p.14) But even though Pasteur himself finally acknowledged the primacy of the terrain in the origin of disease, the die was cast. The disease theorists were firmly divided into two camps: those adhering to Pasteur’s original theory and those who believed the resistance of the host was primary. The discovery of sulfa drugs in the 1930s, followed by penicillin in the 1940s propelled medicine irrevocably into the chemotherapeutic age, leaving the notion of host resistance in the dust. Allopathic medicine has never looked back.

Allopathic Model Follows from the Germ Theory
The advent of antibiotics and their phenomenal initial success cemented the place of allopathic medicine as the dominant modality in the treatment of disease. Even now as the idea of dominion over microbial disease is revealing itself as sheer fantasy, and infectious disease is rejoining chronic disease at center stage in the medical arena, allopathic medicine remains myopically focused on destroying disease. It comes up dismally empty-handed when pressed for a theory of health. For allopathic medicine, health is the absence of disease, as defined by laboratory test results “within normal limits.” If you ask your doctor how to be healthy, she or he will probably say something like “Eat a good low-fat diet, get moderate exercise, and get a medical checkup once a year.”

At the yearly checkup, your doctor will test your blood and body functions to see if you are functioning within normal parameters. If you are not, if your blood pressure, liver enzymes, or blood glucose are abnormal, he will probably write you a prescription for a drug that he hopes will bring that parameter back within normal limits: the drug will most likely block some function of your body to do this. Your body is in error and the physician hopes to get it back on track. If illness prompts your visit to the doctor, he will write you a prescription aimed at altering your body’s function to eliminate the symptoms that are making you uncomfortable. Allopathic treatment pits itself against “abnormal” function of the body, which it calls disease, and feels victorious when the targeted body function falls back into line. If some other function moves into the abnormal range as a result of, or at least at the same time as the treatment, the doctor will treat that function with yet another drug: and another, and another... And, “well after all, what do you expect? After all, you are getting older...” Fast!

The Allopathic Medical Model
So, in the modern (allopathic) model, we fight disease, which is caused by invading organisms, genetic weakness or defect, or even random bad luck. This model basically uses chemical means either to suppress the symptoms that are bothering the patient, or to change a body parameter—such as high cholesterol—that the current medical model has associated with bad outcomes, such as heart attack. If we have a cold with a runny nose and cough, we take an antihistamine and a cough suppressant to dry up the drippy nose and stop the cough. This is very convenient, perhaps even essential, in order for us to pursue our hectic daily lives. In the case of test results indicating abnormal functioning of some body system, again, a drug is used to modify the body function to improve the parameter.

Actually, even “holistic” approaches such as nutrition, acupuncture, herbal medicine, and homeopathy are often allopathically inclined, in the sense that they are oriented toward symptom suppression, or at least at treating the symptom without looking at the overall balance in the body, the terrain. The difference is in the type of drug used, and in how toxic the drug is to the body. Even some of the new fringe alternative or holistic therapies (like Rife machines and colloidal silver) are aimed at eliminating the bacteria supposedly causing disease. The assumption in all these approaches is that the body is somehow in error, and that a drug or herb or homeopathic preparation can straighten it out.

But what is the effect on the body of these chemical—or herbal—or nutritional agents suppressing the symptoms of disease? Is it possible that disease is an expression of the body’s intelligence? The various allopathic models address neither the cumulative and long-term effects of interfering with body functions at a symptom level, nor the toxic effects of non-physiological substances—drugs—given to alter those functions. And as we have seen, 70 years of allegiance to the allopathic model of symptom suppression, drug dosing, and surgery has not improved our national health. In fact, we seem to be going to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

The Road Less Traveled: Addressing the Terrain
If symptom-driven blocking of bodily function does not sit well with us, if we are concerned with cumulative side effects of toxic drugs, if we are seeking the reality, and not the mere appearance of health, where do we turn? Are there alternate models that effectively address “the terrain” to which Claude Bernard pointed? There are indeed!

Even before Pasteur, many traditional disciplines addressed whole body balance: five phase Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic, and Tibetan medicines are examples. Natural Hygiene, homeopathy, aromatherapy, and Bach flower essence are examples of more recent approaches. (Of course it is important to remember that each of these modalities can also be used merely to treat symptoms rather than establish balance from a whole body perspective.) In fact before Pasteur and the advent of antibiotics, most successful medical treatments were aimed at bringing the sick person back into balance with the environment through the use of enhanced cleanliness, pure food, hydrotherapy and mineral baths, sunshine, fresh air, and, primarily, rest. The modalities that did not seek to do this, those that applied drugs like mercury and arsenic, and practices like bloodletting, tended to kill the patient.

After Pasteur, when the medical majority went off chasing the illusion of dominion over bacteria, charging down the allopathic road of antibiotics and chemical pharmaceuticals, the pleiomorphs and the natural hygienists set out instead on the road less traveled.

Pleiomorphism: Rife, Enderlein, and Naessens
Since Bernard and Bechamp’s day, a number of scientists have pursued pleomorphic study, among the most notable, Royal Rife, Gaston Naessens, and Gunther Enderlein. Because the medical establishment has suppressed pleomorphism, we in the West have not heard much about the developments in this arena, and the following reports may sound far-fetched. But before you discount them, take the time to do some research. It will be fascinating, and it may save your life!

In the 1920s a self-taught genius named Royal Rife developed an ingenious microscope capable of much greater magnification than even the electron microscope. He was also able to view blood and tissue in a live state, because he used light in a way that illuminated cells without their having to be stained. Because the electron microscope requires the use of stained cells, and because staining kills the cells, the electron microscope can only view dead material. Using super magnification of light-illuminated live cells, Rife was able to confirm the pleomorphic nature of bacteria. Because he could actually see the bacteria, he was able to track their development. He invented a method of aiming a sound frequency at the bacteria and was able to tune the pitch of the frequency to what he called the mortal oscillatory frequency—similar to the soprano holding a high note that shatters a glass. Rife developed tuned frequency treatments to selectively eliminate many types of bacteria from the body. Although his research was initially hailed as “the end of disease,” the medical establishment eventually suppressed it.

Using a microscope similar to Rife’s the French scientist Gaston Naessens has independently verified the pleomorphic nature of bacteria, and developed immune stimulating injections that can in some cases turn the pathological bacterial forms back to normal benign forms. German bacteriologist Gunther Enderlein was a student of Bechamp, and continued to research the pleomorphic organisms, observing them under a dark-field microscope, which also is able to observe the blood in a live state. Viewed under these ingenious microscopes, the blood that allopathic medicine calls sterile is revealed to be a world teeming with life forms that aren’t in the books. Microbes mutate according to the pH of the blood, and if the pH varies too far from balance, fungus and yeast overgrows first the blood, and then the body, and, unless the pH is reversed, the body dies.

See Your Blood via Dark-field Microscope!
There are many dark-field microscopists around today, and if you want to get motivated to take care of your health, go visit one! You will be able to see your live blood on video, and I guarantee you one of the most fascinating office visits of your “medical” career! You will witness the state of your moving red blood cells, and whether or not they are all clumped together, which makes oxygen exchange with the tissue difficult. You will see the activity level of your wiggling macrophages as they gobble down debris. You may see cholesterol or parasites. You will learn about the state of your liver. You may meet the endobiant, the mutating symbiotic bacteria in your blood, which serves you in a healthy state, and composts you in the pathological state! You will see how your blood ages over the time of your visit, which gives an indication of how your body is aging. Your practitioner will very likely give you a list of recommended diet and lifestyle changes as well as a video of your blood, so that you can compare it with future readings. Then later you can come back and see how those changes have changed your blood picture, and what you may still need to work on. If you can, take a friend, and at least one of you may be not so healthy, so you can actually observe the differences in your blood pictures. Your attitude toward health care will never be the same!

For more information on dark-field microscopy, see Steven Denk’s excellent website "www.biomedx.com", where you can also order his small but excellent book How You Rot and Rust, one of the most succinct, understandable, and downright helpful explanations of the pleiomorphic biology of disease I have ever read. These brilliant microscopists have developed methods for observing the blood and for interpreting what they see. This enables them to advise you about diet and life style changes that will help you improve your body’s terrain, and so discourage, perhaps even eliminate, the diseases which your present diet and lifestyle have created.

Health Theory of Natural Hygienists
Natural Hygiene proposes some extremely interesting and provocative theories. Practitioners assert that what we call disease is actually the body trying to purge itself of toxins or, failing that, to store them in the body in the way least likely to interfere with function. Since disease is merely the process of a toxic body trying to clean itself out, any “treatment” to stop the symptom is actually counter productive because it interferes with the body’s efforts to reestablish healthy balance through tissue detoxification. They believe that any medication that produces disease in a healthy body should be withheld from a sick one, and that only those conditions producing health in a healthy body—vital food, clean air, pure water, sunshine, exercise, and adequate rest—should be supplied to a sick one. Natural Hygienists deal with “disease” by carefully supporting it and allowing it to run its course, trusting the body’s innate drive to create health. In this modality, there is no attempt to cure, only to supply the conditions of health, thereby supporting the body’s natural drive to return to normal healthy function. To do anything else, the natural hygienists believe, just gets in the way of the body healing itself. Basically, that means no medication. Period.

Hygienists claim that the apparent beneficial action of medications in stopping symptoms is due to the body’s having to shift gears to get rid of the medicine, forcing the body to put its cleansing efforts on the back burner to take care of the greater evil, the drug you just gave it in your misguided attempt to “help.” By stopping the symptom, you have handicapped and burdened your body’s self healing capacity and forced the body to resort to increasingly desperate means to jettison its toxins. Any substance you would not be taking when healthy will just be one more toxin the beleaguered body must eject.

So, in the system of natural hygiene, you assist the ailing body, not by trying to make it get well, but by facilitating its being “sick”! To do this, you must both supply everything necessary to support healthy function and remove all those influences and foods that the body cannot use. And then you must leave the body alone to heal itself.

Of course, this approach goes against our every instinct, conditioned as we are by the allopaths. But when you consider that animals generally take this approach when sick, refusing food, and retreating to a cave to sleep, perhaps you will be willing to consider this theory further.

The Progression of Disease
According to natural health theory, “disease”—the body’s attempts to right itself—proceeds in a natural progression in response to the ways we moderns care for our bodies. In our modern lifestyles we accumulate many toxins. A toxin is any substance that our bodies cannot use to build health, and must therefore eject, burn, or store in some part of the body. Toxins, which our body itself creates, are called endotoxins (dead cells, used hormones, etc); external toxins, those that come to us from outside our bodies, are called exotoxins (pesticides, air pollution). Almost anything that we are not adapted to by evolution is likely to act as a toxin in our bodies.

Getting rid of these toxins is a very high priority for our bodies, because high levels of toxins interfere with normal function, and can eventually interfere to the point of death. The more toxins we accumulate, the more energy the body has to expend to get rid of them, and the less energy the body has available for other purposes. If toxins accumulate faster than we are able to process and eliminate them, our body stores them in the best place it can find at the time—a joint, fat tissue, or an area of the body that has poor circulation and cannot move the toxins out as fast as other areas.

According to Hygienist theory, at a certain level of toxicity, a vital body will make an attempt to throw off its toxins. The energy with which a body attempts to throw off the toxins is proportionate to the amount of vitality that the body still possesses. Children are usually strong and vital, and are notorious for the sudden violence but short duration of their acute illnesses. As the body ages, it usually loses vitality and its attempts at detoxification will be fewer and weaker. The body learns to live with the toxins, but only at a tremendous compromise, with corresponding loss in health and vitality.

When the body attempts a “housecleaning” and tries to throw off its accumulated toxins, fluids, and crud exude from the body and we say we have a cold, flu, fever, diarrhea, eczema, etc: we are describing the symptom or form the self-cleaning reaction is taking. But instead of allowing the body to expel its toxins, we try to stop the process, which we view as a symptom of disease. We take some allopathic medicine like aspirin, a cold medicine, an anti-diarrheal, or a skin cream. In short, rather than supporting the process of cleansing, we call it a disease and stop it as fast as possible! By suppressing the symptom, we actually interfere with the body’s attempt to heal itself. As we continue to suppress the symptoms, our vital and valiant body registers increasing toxicity and tries again to dump the growing toxic load—harder! We get a more serious symptom, which prompts more aggressive symptom suppression, and then the beleaguered body has to try harder again!

Not only is the body struggling with an increasing load of the “normal” toxins accumulating from the modern lifestyle, but now the body is being laced with even more toxins: the medicines that our modern pharmacist has in his arsenal of symptom-suppressive weapons. When a substance has no normal function in the body’s biochemical and metabolic processes—in other words, when it is not part of our biologically mandated or evolutionarily adapted environment—the body has to work at throwing it off so as not to become overloaded in a tremendous internal traffic jam. Hygienists believe that when a drug is administered to suppress a symptom, what actually happens is that the body stops trying to cleanse and directs its attention to ejecting the drug, which has become the greater threat. The body expends its precious vitality getting rid of the drug, and then has to rest while it accumulates enough energy to try to cleanse again later. But instead of being stronger, as it might have been had it been allowed to decrease its toxic load through the cold or flu, the body is now weaker. The vicious cycle of symptom suppression continues, and the body wastes its precious vitality in a struggle that is futile in the face of our continuous suppression of its cleansing efforts.

For example, a body overladen with toxic debris musters the energy to attempt a housecleaning. When it chooses the mucous membranes of the head as a dumping vehicle and the nose as exit, we have a cold. We suppress the symptoms with antihistamines, leaving an accumulation of toxins in the body while the body rallies its resources for another attempt at cleansing. Now perhaps the body tries for a flu, which is an escalated pathway, enabling the body to dump toxins faster than a mere cold. So we take cold and flu medicine with a nice fever suppressant.

After we have suppressed the flu, perhaps the body will try a chronic sinus infection, or perhaps pneumonia; or, unable to jettison the toxins, maybe it will try to store them in the joints as arthritis or in the tissue as cellulite, or even cancer. The process of escalation continues, and our body uses up its limited vitality in a pointless, destructive, and ultimately futile war with our efforts to suppress the symptoms. Eventually the body lacks the energy or vitality even to try throwing the toxins off, and we move from a series of acute diseases into the chronic degenerative diseases from which most of us eventually die.

We have all been so conditioned to think in terms of the dominant allopathic paradigm, that it is very difficult to wrap our brains around the idea that disease symptoms are actually the body’s attempt to heal, and NOT the evidence of bacteria winning a battle for our bodies.

Logical Flaw in Germ Theory
If you think about it carefully, you will realize there is actually a logical flaw in the idea that germs cause disease: all people exposed to these “causative” germs do not succumb to the disease. If germs actually cause disease, then anyone exposed to the causative germs should get the disease. In fact, healthy individuals usually have many if not most of these “causative” germs constantly residing in their bodies, and yet continue to be healthy. So the germs themselves are not in and of themselves causative. As the scientists say, germs cause disease in susceptible individuals. This statement actually puts the causative factor squarely in the arena of host resistance: if you are healthy, if your terrain is balanced, you will not develop disease, even if you are exposed to, or even harbor, the associated germs.

We must note here that medical commerce is driven by the profit motive. There is little profit on the side of this equation that has to do with increasing individual resistance, thereby decreasing susceptibility. There is a great deal of profit to be made on the side of the equation that is pushing the war on germs and the chemical suppression of symptoms.

So of course the vast majority of the research by western scientists (largely funded both directly and indirectly by pharmaceutical companies) has been aimed at the germ side of this statement, identifying the germs as causative agents and finding the correct weapon, a medicine/drug, to kill them off, often ignoring that weapon’s potentially damaging or even lethal effect on the host!

This is very similar to the way we conduct modern warfare: we often seem willing to demolish a country in order to “liberate it”! In fact most of the language of modern medicine reads like a war story, with valiant researchers continuously inventing and adding more and more powerful drug/weapons to the doctor’s arsenal against disease. Each new weapon causes escalation of the warfare, which becomes more and more horrific, and the use of the ever-escalating weapons more and more unthinkable. Western medicine is indeed very much like western war, with iatrogenic or physician-induced illness now among the leading causes of death!

Rather than focusing on the germs and the weapons, how much more appropriate and effective to look at what makes some people susceptible and others immune. If we learn to build and support immunity, we can avoid the chemical warfare of modern medicine and the resultant poisoning and crippling of our bodies by toxic medicines which have no natural function in the body, and which so often produce multiple side effects, sometimes unto death. By making the neighborhood (the bodily terrain) unattractive to pathological organisms, perhaps they will simply leave, or better, not show up in the first place.

This approach to health and disease parallels ecological approaches to pest control or agriculture. If you have cockroaches in your house, you can spray for them with poisons and pesticides, which also poison your home, your pets, your children, yourself, and eventually your planet—or you can put all the food in jars and keep the place clean—control their food supply! As organic farmers have learned, pest outbreaks are related to monoculture cropping patterns and to plants weakened by loss of soil fertility. Modern agriculture pumps itself up on chemicals and biocides, yet produces food devoid of vitality while wasting the natural world.

Could we, by adopting healthy patterns of living, cleaning up our environments, and strengthening our natural immunities, avoid the war all together, and spend our precious lives in better health and with time for more interesting and rewarding pursuits than fighting cockroaches, spraying weeds, or popping pills? With an emphasis on keeping the terrain healthy and balanced as opposed to killing the enemy germs, we can begin to see the world as an interdependent web of organisms, each contributing to the vibrant and balanced life of the other; building sustainable health, perhaps we can create peace.

Copyright Adeha Feustel 2001. All rights reserved.