What is “Terrain theory” – and why do fruits often rot from the inside out, rather than outside-in?
If germs are what cause this, how come the decay starts on the inside?
Two important ideas have competed for centuries:
Germ Theory loosely says that exposure to microorganisms is the cause of infection.
Terrain Theory, many would say, is that germs merely exploit the unhealthy, that microbes are the product of disease not the cause; they are the flies around the dung-heap, but they didn’t produce the dung. so to speak.
So, who is right? And why does it matter?
The important point is that microbes need a suitable habitat in which to live, so if you want to stay healthy, fighting germs will only get you so far: you have to maintain your inner health. From this common-sense perspective, Terrain Theory is a clear winner already. But it goes much deeper than that, and the ramifications are huge.
Bechamp or Pasteur?
We’re often asked if it matters whether or not Pasteur got it wrong, and whether or not germs cause disease. Clearly it does: if a quarter of all city dwellers have faeces on their hands http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7667499.stm then it’s jolly lucky that Pasteur wasn’t, um, quite right. Taking an ecological view, it seems perfectly reasonable that we would have developed some kind of harmony with our little friends sharing planet earth with us.
And if we regularly ride on London transport, we are surely exposed to many very deadly pathogens, and yet, contrary to what the frankly loopy Boris Johnson might think, we aren’t all about to die from our commute. It certainly isn’t the biggest challenge to most people’s health.
Who was Antoine Béchamp?
Béchamp was Pasteur’s lesser-known contemporary, who really brought the study of microbes into the scientific age. Pasteur was familiar with Béchamp’s work: he took the bits he liked, rejected the bit he didn’t like, and, being well connected, he monetised it all in the most convenient way he could think of. In short, while Béchamp tried to understand the place of germs in the ecology of humans. Pasteur merely declared war on them; a “hold no prisoners” war we have been fighting at great cost ever since.
Symptom does not equal disease.
We really need the insights of Béchamp to grasp the full significance of this fact in matters of infection.
Béchamp offers more than a different viewpoint, he actually turns germ theory completely inside out. I really would urge anyone who is confused to read Ethel Hume’s ‘Béchamp or Pasteur’; this explosive history is vital reading for any natural therapist, and, I suggest, for any doctor serious about purging medicine of its limiting superstitions.
In the meantime, here is our rough guide to terrain theory. to sort out the confusion.
The first challenge is to the idea of self and separateness.
Germs do not just live in us, but they are part of us, even at a genetic level. We are an ecology, that inhabits more or less the outline of our bodies, and exists within a much larger global ecology. What is us and what is something else is unclear. Our tissues can become “not us”. You only have to get athlete’s foot to know this is true.
Today microbiology even recognises endogenous viruses that come from our own DNA; the current theory being that they planted their coding there as an adaptive ploy. But if we forget man-made ideas like self and non-self, then endoviruses and bacteria are nothing more than part of our own physiology.
Virus Schmirus
Contrary to what you may believe, there are surprisingly few hard facts about viruses. Much of the modern understanding about them is based on guesswork and frankly atrocious science. Many believe what has been observed as virus is really nothing more than cellular debris, or the emissions of cells that need replacing (exosomes). But the broad point remains that there is no outside and inside world – it is certainly impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.
Prion diseases are a conundrum that have really only appeared on a worrying scale following some pretty unnatural practices. Importantly, the idea of the infectious agent in scrapie, BSE and Kuru has some very good rival theories. Certainly the cannibalism theory of Kuru has a strong element of myth in its basis. BSE and scrapie are effects of modern farming. Some say copper deficiency is the culprit. Others say that BSE follows the use of Warble Fly spray on cattle. Since pesticides are neurotoxic, it’s a good hypothesis. The truth is, many things could potentially be the cause of the neurological degeneration seen, and they all accord with bad terrain. Even the conventional prion theory is still essentially bad terrain; tainting the body by eating things not normally in the diet.
Pleiomorphism is where it starts to get strange..
And talking about pleiomorphism is not a recipe for acceptance in science and medicine. But here goes. Bacteria, fungi, and countless other microorganisms that we don’t even have names for are part of the life-cycles of our own cell sub-components, just as we are part of their life-cycle that happens to be a colonial phase.
In case you didn’t catch that, let me rephrase.
Our cells, bacteria, and fungi are the same stuff, made of the same smaller elements, just doing different things under different conditions. And crucially, what Béchamp realised is that they turn into each other and back again as conditions change. The components of a cell can reorganise to make a bacterium. This flies completely against accepted modern biology, which says that one thing can only consume another, it cannot change directly into it.
There are many possible objections to pleiomorphism, but none are fatal. The bottom line is to be found in evidence, and that means research. Try getting funding for a project to study human cells turning into bacteria and back again, and you’ll see a problem. To the scientific establishment this is as heretical as turning lead into gold.
And so, the second challenge is to the cell as the basic unit of life. Since we were all taught at school about cell inner structure, clearly the cell can be divided into smaller elements.The cell is in fact sub-divisible into smaller units – some of which even have their own DNA (eg mitochondria). We see disorganisation and reorganisation take place as part of normal cell activity. That much isn’t even controversial, so we should no longer talk of cells as the basic building blocks.
These sub units are sub-divisible smaller and smaller. Royal Raymond Rife observed 16 levels of division beneath the cell with his Rife Microscope. That’s a whole universe that modern microbiology barely acknowledges. The smallest unit according to Béchamp is the microzyme, and microzyma (plural) appear not only to be indivisible as life forms, but are incredibly enduring. Béchamp showed that chalk from ancient rock beds could initiate fermentation in sucrose solution, just as if it contained living yeast. This same was not achieved using sterile calcium carbonate made in the lab. His experiments were rigorous. It seems as if microzymes contain enough information somehow to at least kick-start the reorganisation of primitive life-forms from basic molecules, and possibly direct the process also.
There is nothing dead in this picture, just life reorganising itself.
The organisation into cells remains while higher life persists. The microzyma support the higher structure until death, and then they become “liberated” and reorganise as the building blocks for a new kind of organisation. They don’t commit suicide just because we die – they march happily onwards to the next phase of their life-cycle, becoming bacteria, fungi and so on. You don’t need a Rife microscope to see this – try cutting open an over-ripe avocado. You will see rings of decay as the fruit rots – the decay takes place as a reorganisation from within, not consumption from without. Slime-moulds are organisms appearing as little more than an amorphous soup with no dividing membranes, yet they behave as if highly organised, highly coordinated, and with what appears to be some level of intelligence.
See this incredible 1954 film about slime molds.
Béchamp observed cacti that had been frozen in winter, and found bacteria deep within them where nothing could have penetrated from outside. The frozen tissue is not dead, it is just disorganised, and so it automatically begins reorganising itself. He performed rigorous lab versions that showed the same phenomenon.
What are the implications for health?
When our tissues become diseased, the components of the cells act as if we are dead and switch prematurely into the next phase of their life-cycle, becoming bacteria, yeast and so on. So, significantly, bacteria are not creators of the disease state, but the result of the disease state. Kill the bacterium and the disease remains, to re-emerge in some other form later.
Moreover, Béchamp and others have shown us that the bacteria and fungi are vital in reorganising the breakdown products of the now disorganised tissue into a new state. We can produce from our own tissues, the very precise bugs we need, to clean up the waste from metabolism and other accumulated toxins, package it all up and either help transport it out of the body or otherwise contain it safely for recycling. Quite clearly it is the toxins within tissues that are the most harmful (since they lead to disorganisation) and not the bugs that live on them. If the microbial link in the elimination chain is taken away, then this pathway is thwarted. Toxins must be returned into the system and the general disease state remains or even deepens.
Hence, antibiotics may be one way to improve the apparent condition of diseased tissues; not because they kill bacteria, but because in doing so they force the body to stop putting out waste through that route. But they leave the patient with other, more insidious, problems afterwards. We know that the body can kill bacteria selectively, so it is reasonable that far from being bacteria’s victim, we are cultivating them and farming them to meet our needs. On the other hand, antibiotics reduce secretions that kill antibiotic resistant strains and disrupt the ecological balance within us.
In effect, therefore, hospital superbugs are man-made organisms whose ideal niche is medically weakened subjects on antibiotics.
And so, all that toxic hand sanitiser and scrubbing of door handles is utterly missing the point. It certainly doesn’t seem to have solved the problem of antibiotic resistant strains, and how can it? In fact this over-emphasis on germs instead of dirt may be adding to the dangers of being in hospital in various ways. Hospitals are toxic places already, and over-sterility is in fact incompatible with life: animals reared in completely aseptic conditions (without germs) do not survive more than a few days. There is no way to keep them alive.
As holistic practitioners then, our aim is to promote healthy living, assist the systems of the body to remain organised and coordinated, and keep clear the pathways of elimination. In death we see life continue on a smaller scale, but a loss of the organisation of the whole. We see new organisation arise from within the old: there is nothing dead inside a corpse. Life within us endures, even after what makes us “us” has gone. The smallest units are incredibly hardy, capable of persisting in desert, 60 million year old chalk, polar ice caps, and perhaps on comets and asteroids.
“Every complex problem has a solution that is neat, simple and wrong”.
What Béchamp destroys is the anthropocentric us and them vision of health and disease, which is a completely artificial construct of the human imagination. Yes, we have all kinds of relations with microbes. Yes there is communication and transmission of systemic behaviour, which we might call contagion. Yes, there are life-threatening disease states involving the presence of microbes. But the Béchampean view gives us a new way to understand these things and to help in those areas. The explanations it provides fit just fine with what we see in clinic and daily life, and give us routes into problems that leave Pasteur worse than useless. What Béchamp doesn’t give us is something we can easily package and market. It leads to careful, painstaking solutions, that won’t make one rich and famous, but that work.
Further reading:
Bechamp or Pasteur, a lost chapter in the history of biology, by Ethel Douglas Hume
Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics, by Henry Lindlahr
Sick and Tired, by Robert and Shelley Young