How Immunity Works – The Terrain Theory of Health & Disease vs The Germ Theory

Introduction

Unlike the germ theory, the terrain theory explains why some people get sick while others, when exposed to the same pathogens, do not. – Ray Andrew, MD

Two Theories

Terrain Theory is also called Cellular or Cellular Terrain Theory

THE EVOLUTION OF THE THEORIES PROPOSED BY TWO 19TH-CENTURY RESEARCHERS

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)… and Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908), [were] two nineteenth-century researchers and scientific contemporaries, compatriots and fellow members of the French Academy of Science, but key differences in their views on biology and disease pathology led to a prolonged rivalry both within and outside of the Academy.¹

… Pasteur had political connections, including Emperor Napoleon III… Pasteur’s promotion of germ theory has remained “dear to pharmaceutical company executives’ hearts” up to the present day,⁴ having laid the groundwork for “synthetic drugs, chemotherapy, radiation, surgical removal of body parts and vaccines” to become the “medicine[s] of choice.”⁵ The unshakeable belief that there is one microbe for every illness is so ingrained as the “controlling medical idea for the Western world” that competing ideas about disease causation still have difficulty gaining traction.⁶… History awarded renown to the reductionist Pasteur for being the “father of immunology”¹⁴ and popularizing the theory that disease involves “a simple interaction between specific microorganisms and a host.”¹⁵ In his singleminded focus on the germ side of the equation, Pasteur ignored the host and discounted the influence of environmental factors.

Both at the time and thereafter, the public and most fellow scientists found germ theory easy to embrace, perceiving Pasteur’s model of life and health to be not only “superficially plausible” but also “financially exploitable.”³ In fact, most of the big-name pharmaceutical companies that we know today got their start in Pasteur’s era, often by merging with chemical firms, united in their goal of developing and selling synthetic products to “selectively kill or immobilize parasites, bacteria, and other invasive disease-causing microbes.”¹⁶ …

Béchamp espoused a more nuanced perspective on infectious and chronic illness — for which history branded him a heretic… Subsequent generations of open-minded researchers agreed with Béchamp’s pioneering observations about microparticles as the fundamental unit of biology, with the most recent research in this vein proposing a new genetic theory and a “universal life paradigm” involving spontaneous self-assembly of DNA.²¹

Béchamp’s various discoveries led him to conclude that our bodies are, in effect, “miniecosystems.” When an individual’s internal ecosystem becomes weakened — whether due to poor nutrition, toxicity or other factors — it changes the function of the microbes that are naturally present in the body, producing disease.²⁰ In other words, microorganisms only become pathogenic after environmental factors cause the host’s cellular “terrain” to deteriorate.¹⁵

… Realistically, we cannot expect researchers who receive direct or indirect funding from the pharmaceutical industry to suggest commonsense steps for supporting or strengthening the immune system. – Merinda Teller MPH, PhD