Exposing the Myth of the GERM THEORY
نویسنده
چکیده
In 1864, French chemist Louis Pasteur fathered "The Science of Bacteriology" and "The Germ Theory of Disease Causation" by demonstrating the existence of various micro-organisms— and concluding that these germs cause pathogenic changes in living cultures within the laboratory setting. The germ theory states that diseases are due solely to invasion by specific aggressive microorganisms. A specific germ is responsible for each disease, and microorganisms are capable of reproduction and transportation outside of the body. 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 that invaded the body. The germ theory effectively shifted our personal responsibility for health and well-being onto the shoulders of the medical profession who supposedly knew how to kill off the offending germs. Our own personal health slipped from our control. Almost everyone in the Western world has been nurtured on the germ theory of disease: that disease is the direct consequence of the work of some outside agent, be it germ or virus. People have been educated to be terrified of bacteria and to believe implicitly in the idea of contagion: that specific, malevolently-aggressive disease germs pass from one host to another. They also have been programmed to believe that healing requires some powerful force to remove whatever is at fault. In their view, illness is hardly their own doing. The 'germ era' helped usher in the decline of hygienic health reform in the 19th century and, ironically, the people also found a soothing complacency in placing the blame for their ill health on malevolent, microscopic 'invaders', rather than facing responsibility for their own insalubrious lifestyle habits and their own suffering. 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 the microbe to man. Thus was born the fear of germs (bacteriophobia), which still exists today. Before the discoveries of Pasteur, medical science was a disorganised medley of diversified diseases with imaginary causes, each treated symptomatically rather than at their root cause. Up to this time, the evolution of medical thought had its roots in ancient shamanism, superstition and religion, of invading …
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