Liberation Wellness

In just 50 years antibiotics are well on their way to becoming obsolete. And the reason is that nature adapts faster than we can innovate. Antibiotics first came out as a nearly miraculous cure for common infections. But little thought was ever given to two key questions:

1. Why do some people get infections and others do not?
2. How will infectious agents respond to antibiotics over time?

The history of antibiotics and the antibiotic-age that they ushered in involves several historical figures, some famous, some not so famous. Men like Pasteur, Bechamp, Koch, Bernard, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Fleming, all had a hand in it.

Whenever there is an outbreak of disease there are always people that never get sick and sick people that don’t die. So why is that? The answer is nutrition. But unfortunately modern medicine and nutrition researchers don’t see it that way. And this is the core of a long brewing controversy in science.

In France during the 1870s, three scientists were conducting experiments with yeast, and the newly discovered micro-organisms called bacteria. All were conducting similar research and there was a great deal of borrowing in the competition for novel discoveries. There were two french men, Louis Pasteur, Antoine Bechamp, and a German, Robert Koch. These individuals worked independently and each knew that he was onto a whole new area of human discovery, and the race was on to influence the medical world and make a fortune.

Pasteur won the race of politics and influence and today students memorize that Louis Pasteur “discovered” the Germ Theory. Not only is this inaccurate, but Germ Theory itself is unsubstantiated even today. Pasteur himself, recanted the theory and admitted that his rivals had been right, and that it was not the germ that caused the disease, but rather the environment in which the germ was found.

The Germ Theory

Germ Theory states that there are separate diseases and that each disease is caused by a particular micro-organism. It is the job of science to find the right drug or vaccine that would selectively kill off the offending bug without killing the patient.

Sounds like a good idea at first. But nature is a moving target–both the infectious agent and host.

Bacteria and viruses are “environment-specific.” That’s why some people get the flu and others do not and why some die and some do not. That’s why some doctors and nurses are immune to disease even though they’re surrounded by it day in and day out.

Deepak Chopra tells a story where the influenza virus was isolated and implanted directly onto the mucous membranes of a group of subjects, with only 12% of them getting the flu. If it was the germ and not the environment (subject), then more people should have gotten sick. Instead what happened is that 88% of the subjects were able to fight off the virus.

The Germ Theory is weak and Pasteur knew it, hence the death bed confession. But Pasteur had a gift for self-promotion. He would never let his research keep him from an opportunity to address royalty or a medical society at a prestigious university.

He was well published, frequently quoted, and given practically every honorary title and chair in Europe. The record establishes fairly clearly that Pasteur “borrowed” research for some of his most famous discoveries, and then capitalized on his celebrity of being there first.

Before his death, Pasteur left instruction not to release over 10,000 pages of lab notes after his death. It wasn’t until 1975, after the death of his grandson, that the secret notes were finally made public. Professor Geison, a historian from Princeton, made a thorough study of the papers. He presented his findings to The American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston in 1993. Dr. Geison concluded that Pasteur published a great deal of fraudulent data and was guilty of multiple counts of scientific misconduct, violating rules of medicine, science, and ethics.

Both Koch and Pasteur were motivated by money and fame. In the race for an anthrax vaccine, not only did Pasteur not test it on animals before using human subjects; it was also established that Pasteur actually stole the formula from Toussaint, a colleague. Toussaint died a few months later of a nervous breakdown after being unable to prove his claim at the time.

Part 2