Germ Theory and Pleiomorphism

Béchamp in a nutshell

Kuno van der Post B.Ost.

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. It does seem reasonable that we would have developed some kind of harmony with our little friends sharing planet earth with us. The clinical answer is that it matters how we interpret symptoms, and what we do about them. If we separate the idea of 'symptom' from 'disease', we realise the two are not the same, yet without the insights of Béchamp, we are helpless to do anything with this all-important knowledge.

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. In the meantime, here is our rough guide to Béchamp, hopefully it goes some way to sorting 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. Today microbiology recognises endogenous viruses that come from our own DNA; the current theory being that they planted their coding there as a ploy. But if we forget man-made ideas like self and non-self then endoviruses and bacteria can only be a manifestation of our own physiology, as much our own envoys as eggs and sperm. But there are surprisingly few hard facts about viruses, most of the modern understanding about them is based on guesswork, many believe that what has been observed is really nothing more than cellular debris. 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 best described as our own healthy proteins corrupting each other in a game of 'physiological Othello', and have really only appeared on a significant scale following some pretty unnatural practices. And bacteria, fungi, and countless other microorganisms that we don't even have names for are part of the lifecycles of our own cell sub-components, just as we are part of their lifecycle that happens to be a colonial phase. The second challenge is to the cell as the basic unit of life. The cell in turn is sub-dividable 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 building blocks.

These sub units are sub-dividable smaller and smaller, RR Rife observed 16 stages beneath the cell - that's a whole universe that microbiology barely acknowledges. The smallest unit discovered is known as the microzyme, and these appear not only to be non-subdividable as life forms, but are incredibly enduring. Béchamp used matter from ancient chalk beds to ferment sucrose in solution, just as if it contained living yeast. This same was not achieved using sterile calcium carbonate made in the lab. 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.

The organisation into cells remains while higher life persists. Sub-units support the higher structure until death, and then they become 'liberated' and feed on the remains 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 lifecycle, 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 colonies of fungal hyphae, which break down into an amorphous soup with no dividing membranes, before regrouping into a different fungus. Béchamp observed cacti that had been frozen in winter, and found bacteria deep within them where nothing could have penetrated from outside, and he performed tightly controlled lab versions that showed the same phenomenon. 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 lifecycle, 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.

Moreover, Béchamp showed us that the bacteria and fungi are vital in reorganising the breakdown products of the now disorganised tissue into a new state. From this we can infer that the body can use tissue in a sacrificial manner, if there is some kind of toxic load, providing the bugs are there to clean up the muck. This is vital, because it is the lingering breakdown products that are the most harmful, not the bugs that live on them. If that link in the chain is taken away, then this pathway is thwarted and the general disease state deepens. Hence, antibiotics may be one way to improve the 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 vancomycin resistant strains, for example; in effect superbugs are man-made organisms whose ideal niche is medically weakened subjects on antibiotics.

As osteopaths, then, our dual aim is to maintain organisation within the unity of the body and clear the pathways for elimination of waste. 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 (go look at fungi growing out of a tree stump). Life within us endures, even after what makes us 'us' has gone. The smallest units are incredibly hardy, capable of living in desert, 60 million year old chalk, polar ice caps, and perhaps on comets and asteroids.

What Béchamp destroys is the anthropomorphic, anthropocentric, 'us and them' vision of health and disease, which is a completely artificial construct of the human mind. Yes, we have all kinds of relations with microbes. Yes there is communication and transmission. 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, and gives us explanations which fit what we see in clinic and daily life, and gives us routes into problems that leave Pasteur worse than useless. What Béchamp doesn't give us is something we can easily package, patent and market to a public that in the midst of illness can't deal with a biology lecture.

Perhaps it gives us also a use for all that 'redundant' DNA, and, looking at the work of Lindlahr, an entirely different way of understanding the immune system, including the functions of the spleen and other tissues which are not otherwise easily understood.