Many in the raw-food or alternative medicine communities would divide medicine into two main categories. Down one path, you could trace what has developed into our modern medical system back to Louis Pasteur, who helped propagate the Germ Theory of disease. Down the other path, you would find those that teach the way to avoid sickness is to have a healthy body.

While it is pretty obvious which direction the world has taken, it should be noted that several books have been written showing credible evidence that the alternate theory of Pasteur’s time period was actually the correct theory. One book, The Curse of Louis Pasteur, by Nancy Appleton, PhD, is worth reading. It shows in detail the differences between Pasteur and those who repudiated his Germ Theory of disease. Chief among these people were Antoine Béchamp, who was an occasional assistant to Pasteur.

What Pasteur taught, basically, was that blood is sterile and that invading germs from outside our bodies are responsible for human sickness and disease. What this theory lacked in scientific proof was more than made up for in the fact that people were absolved of any responsibility for their illness, and this was popular both with doctors, their patients, and drug companies. This fact, combined with Pasteur’s apparent success with vaccines and Alexander Fleming’s discovery of antibiotics, launched a multi-billion dollar industry the equivalent of a house built on sand.

What Béchamp and others taught, in general, was that the human body is full of bacteria, and that this bacteria was neither good nor bad, but able to adjust and change according to the conditions it was growing in — the human body. If the body was not properly maintained, bacteria could change into fungus or other destructive forms. To this effect, Béchamp proclaimed, “disease is born of us and in us.”

This theory would later be proven when science developed the tools to do so. In 1913, Royal Rife (1888-1971) developed the Universal Microscope, which was tremendously more powerful than the microscopes of the day, and allowed the viewing of live material, unlike traditional microscopes at the time. Through his invention Rife demonstrated that by altering the food supply and environment, normal intestinal bacteria could be converted into typhoid germs, and that it was possible to reverse the process and convert them back into normal intestinal bacteria.

Incidentally, while definitely anecdotal, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) also noted that disease was a factor of the condition of the host, not the result of invading germs. In her book, Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote:

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 or clean condition, and just as much under our own control; or rather as the reactions . . . against the conditions in which we have placed ourselves? I was brought up by scientific men and ignorant women distinctly to believe that smallpox was a thing of which there was once a specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself in a perpetual chain of descent, just as much as that there was a first dog (or a first pair of dogs) and that smallpox would not begin itself any more than a new dog would begin without there having been a parent dog. Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose smallpox growing up in the first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it would not by any possibility have been ‘caught’ but must have begun. Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up and pass into one another. New dogs do not pass into cats. I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up, and with a little more, typhoid fever, and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut. For diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives. . . 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.”

If Florence Nightingale is right, and it is a continual mistake to look upon disease as a separate entity, then how much more so is it to not view conventional medicine in the same light? Change in this area will be difficult, however, because from everyone’s earliest moment until his dying day, he are inundated with the message that sickness is out of his control; that for every ailment, there is something in a pill, a bottle, or an injection to remedy it; that if there is no magic substance to remedy the situation, a surgeon can remove the problem from our body, with the result that almost everyone now feels that the solution to any problem they face lies outside of their body. Want to lose weight? Take a pill. Want to wake up? Drink a beverage. Can’t sleep? Take a pill. Feeling blue? Take a pill.

And to complicate matters almost to the point of despair, the medical Establishment has teamed up with government to use the force of coercion to ensure that the Germ Theory is advanced — and drug company profit maintained — by the establishment of a medical monopoly. It is sad that in America, a country that prides itself on being free, that many people are forced to leave the country to undergo alternative treatments for diseases.