It was day three of our first lockdown when a family elder showed up for work at the family business.
He’s in his mid-80s with a number of health conditions. He had spent time watching the endless reports on TV of people in their 70s, 80s and 90s dying of COVID, and he wasn’t interested in sitting at home any longer.
My husband and I wondered what to do.
We knew we couldn’t force him back home – anyone in their 80s who gets up before 7am to go to work, six days a week, works to nourish their soul.
So we suggested that work (where social distancing could be enforced) should be the only place he go. No trips to the supermarket, for example.
I managed to do one supermarket run for him and then he was back there too. Food shopping for the family is another of his passions.
Surrounded by messages of the pandemic, my husband and I felt confused, helpless and scared, until one evening, as we discussed the responsibility we felt towards our elders, we realized how deeply we were caught up in fear.
Life had taught us that when we recognized fear was leading us down one path, we didn’t have to follow it; we knew clarity was a trustier guide.
As we fell back into remembering this principle, it became clear that perhaps not everything was as it seemed.
The pandemic was already impacting how I would work with my clients, and the pull to understand more about this virus was taking center stage.
Under lockdown, I had time on my hands. Without needing to leave my home, I set off on a journey. En route, I realized that my journey had begun many years before the pandemic.
I’d never thought to question the advice of medical doctors before I’d entered my 30s – surely they were the protectors of my health. But when I became responsible for another being – the baby, my first child, growing inside of me – something shifted and I began to stand in my sovereignty.
I “fired” my OB-GYN of the time, who only seemed interested in everything that could go wrong with a pregnancy. I didn’t like the environment of fear he created, so I refused his endless tests and replaced him.
Months later in the delivery room, I told the midwife who attended the birth to “f*uck off” when she complained I was “birthing too slowly” and wanted to prepare me for an episiotomy.
“But your baby is experiencing trauma,” the midwife tried to convince me. My husband observed the baby heart monitor and noted that the heart rate was changing in and between contractions exactly as we had learned in our birthing class. We stood our ground. Knowledge is power; it kept my perineum intact.
Then, with a baby in my arms and my mothering instinct guiding me, I felt confident to challenge the well-baby nurses who dragged up theories of breastfeeding and baby care that reinforced the idea that science knew better than mother nature.
As I raised my three children, I did my own research and largely home treated when sickness arose. Where ever possible, I kept my family distant from the medical system.
These days, as I support women through perimenopause and menopause, I’m confident in rejecting the dominant medical approach to midlife change (which centers on women’s hormones somehow getting it wrong) because I’ve spent years uncovering and debunking the myths that created it.
I’ve written about the medical scandals that have surrounded hormone therapies from their early days, and shone light on how perimenopause and menopause, natural events in a woman’s lifecycle, are manipulated for profits, with a disregard for women’s health.
In short, even before 2020, I had seen how fear, manipulation and lies had allowed medicine to evolve into an institution that far from preserving and promoting health, would often fail to even “first, do no harm.”
But I had also seen something far more important: my experience in healing my own perimenopause symptoms from within, and supporting other women heal their symptoms at midlife, had taught me about the innate brilliance of the human body.
Following my curiosity as to how this could work, not only with perimenopause and menopause symptoms, but with many other symptoms and conditions too, it became clear to me that the intelligence in the human body always strives to bring us back to balance, no matter where we find ourselves along a spectrum of health.
Our body’s drive to return to health is so unwavering and vibrant that often all we need to do is get out of the way!
Over the years, I’d also learned about the foundations of health that are so often overlooked by the medical world: beyond our essential psychological and spiritual wellbeing (the focus of my work), we thrive when we bring into our lives a clean and balanced diet, fresh air and sunshine, rest and sleep, movement and exercise, a passion for life and community.
As we continued through what came to be seen as the biggest health crisis in living memory, the foundations of health were being completely ignored by governments and most health professionals. Instead, constant fear, isolation, an obsession with testing the healthy, and economic uncertainty spread from country to country, as if these offered a promise of health, rather than a proven recipe for disaster.
Health is an inside job, but everything that we’ve been told about how people’s health is being threatened, and all of the interventions deemed necessary during this crisis, are outside-in.
Given that my body (and your body) is comprised of 90% viruses, bacteria, fungi, and other microbial matter, and only 10% human cells; and given that on the microbial level there is no boundary between what we see as me (or you) and our surroundings, because that environment is constantly in flux; then is it possible that a single virus from the “outside” could aggressively challenge my dynamic microbial makeup and test the intelligence of my body, especially when that intelligence is part of the intelligence of everything around me?
I turned to my inbox for inspiration.
Almost all of the holistic-minded doctors, scientists and health practitioners who I followed were already questioning the dominant coronavirus narrative. I opened an email from GreenMedInfo (an online library of evidence-based natural medical information) and found a video of Sayer Ji (GreenMedInfo’s founder) interviewing Dr Thomas Cowan.
What a relief it was for me to hear two critical thinkers discuss viruses in a way that didn’t contradict everything I knew to be true about health.
During the interview, I heard Dr Cowan quoting Rudolph Steiner, who described a virus as an excretion of a cell that has become poisoned. In other words, and as Dr Cowan argued, viruses are not the cause of disease but rather arise when disease is present.
Dr Cowan also pointed out the inherent inaccuracies of the PCR test when used to diagnose any virus. He described how the test could be easily manipulated to create higher or lower “positive diagnoses” depending on whether there was a political desire to declare a pandemic, or suggest it was under control.
And Sayer Ji questioned how some novel form of the common cold virus, which had yet to be scientifically isolated and identified, was considered so deadly that it required that we invoke military powers not only within states, but on a global level in a way that overrides sovereign states’ rights. He also wondered about the toxic and experimental drugs and treatments that were already being used to treat the coronavirus that could worsen outcomes, and he pointed out the significant negative impact that telling people they have a deadly virus has on people’s health – the nocebo effect.
By the end of the interview, I was buzzing with curiosity! And just to point out, this video was recorded (and I watched it) back in March 2020, when almost nobody was questioning the rates of false positives from PCR tests, the necessity of extreme lockdown measures, and the fallout from medical error (such as the overuse of ventilators).
At the time, I knew I had to follow the crumbs in front of me. Shortly after, I read this mind-blowing expose by David Crowe on why the PCR tests were completely irrelevant in terms of diagnosis. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I was already seeing the socio-political impact of the draconian health policies that were being pushed out based on PCR test results, even when those tests were telling us nothing of scientific relevance. We see this confused science today when numbers of COVID cases and numbers of COVID hospitalizations and deaths appear unrelated to each other.
I searched out more interviews with doctors and scientists who were nowhere near the mainstream media, and that in turn led me to investigate more about germ theory verses terrain theory.
Louis Pasteur, who is considered to be the founding father of germ theory, was, it turned out, a very well-connected but mediocre scientist with a knack for plagiarizing the work of others. Despite promoting a war on microbes, according Professor A. Renon, who attending to him in his last days, Pasteur declared while on his death bed: “The microbe is nothing; the terrain is everything.”
Considering what we know today about the essential role played by the microbiome and virome in our health, and considering that even in this crisis, we’ve all heard that the same virus particles (or at least strings of RNA) are found in those who are sick (symptomatic) and those who are healthy (asymptomatic), Pasteur’s dying declaration (which went against the paradigm he remains famous for) makes sense. We must look beyond a specific microbe to the terrain in order to discover the cause of disease – the microbe cannot be the cause.
And yet since Pasteur's time, the idea that a specific disease must be caused by a specific microbe and thus requires one specific cure, became ever more popular – “miracle” medicines and “miracle” vaccines created for each and every disease and distributed across whole populations have created a profitable business model.
Pasteur’s contemporary, Antoine Bechamp, a more accomplished scientist who has been almost written out of history, recognized the primary importance of terrain in preserving and promoting health. He observed that the microbes that appeared in diseased matter were present before disease onset. He thus concluded that it must be the existing health of the host that determined whether disease broke out.
In his book, The Blood and the Third Anatomical Element, published at the turn of the 20th century, Bechamp described the process of pleomorphism, the way by which microbes that were already present within the body, changed form to tackle a health challenge:
“These microorganisms (germs) feed upon the poisonous material which they find in the sick organism and prepare it for excretion. These tiny organisms are derived from still tinier organisms called microzyma. These microzyma are present in the tissues and blood of all living organisms where they remain normally quiescent and harmless. When the welfare of the human body is threatened by the presence of potentially harmful material, a transmutation takes place. The microzyma changes into a bacterium or virus which immediately goes to work to rid the body of this harmful material. When the bacteria or viruses have completed their task of consuming the harmful material they automatically revert to the microzyma stage.”
Just as firefighters arrive at the scene of a fire to help put out the fire, and yet we know they do not cause it, so do microorganisms appear in the human body when danger is detected. It’s an intelligent reaction designed to clear up the damage, not make it worse.
Pleomorphism was later seen in action via the advanced Universal Microscope developed by Dr Royal Rife. Unlike the Electron Microscope, the Universal Microscope did not require killing the tissue specimens under observation, thus live processes occurring in cells could be observed. But who has heard of the breakthroughs of Dr Rife, or indeed other doctors who built on the findings of Bechamp, such as Dr Gaston Naessens?
Interestingly, there is one historical figure that we have probably all heard of, who proposed an understanding of disease in line with Bechamp’s theory. Florence Nightingale, a brilliant scholar and the founder of modern nursing, wrote her critique of germ theory years before Pasteur claimed it to be his own (after all, ideas of contagion through germs had been around since the 17th century).
Based on her experience of caring for the sick, Nightingale wrote in her book, Notes on Nursing, in 1860:
“All disease, at some period or other of its course, is more or less a reparative process, not necessarily accompanied with suffering: an effort of nature to remedy a process of poisoning or of decay, which has taken place weeks, months, sometimes years beforehand, unnoticed.”
She continues:
“I was brought up both by scientific men and ignorant women, distinctly to believe that small pox, for instance, was a thing of which there was once a first specimen in the world, which went on propagating itself, in a perpetual chain of descent.
…Since then I have seen with my eyes and smelt with my nose small pox growing up in first specimens, either in close rooms or in overcrowded wards, where it could not by any possibility have been “caught,” but must have begun.
Nay, more, I have seen diseases begin, grow up, and pass into one another.
….I have seen, for instance, with a little overcrowding, continued fever grow up; and with a little more, typhoid fever, and with a little more, typhus, and all in the same ward or hut.
Would it not be far better, truer, and more practical if we looked upon disease in this light?
For diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.”
In a letter six years later, she wrote in more forceful terms:
“There are no specific diseases - there are specific disease conditions …. It is a grand thing for weak minds - the doctrine of contagion …. The specific-disease-doctrine is the grand refuge of weak, uncultured, unable minds - such as now rule the Medical profession.”
Has 2020 proven Florence Nightingale right? Surely the idea of specific disease conditions can explain the practical disappearance of flu in the shadow of COVID?
And if indeed this is true, that the doctrine of contagion is for weak and fearful minds, isn’t embracing sovereignty in health, and embracing the psychological, spiritual, and physical foundations of a healthy terrain, a path to freedom?
Perhaps the only pandemic that we have faced in 2020 is that of disinformation, misunderstanding and FEAR. Surely if there was a pandemic, one would expect excess deaths across the world, and especially in the poorer parts of the world, for an extended period of time, rather than what we have seen – excess death in a limited number of places over a short period of time.
I am not denying that people have died and others have suffered from a disease, and I offer love and condolences to anyone who has lost a loved one or who is still experiencing symptoms.
And at the same time, I know that to preserve our health now and in the future, we need to ask how as a society we are taking responsibility for the disease conditions that we create.
How do we care for our inner terrain when we believe stressed, disconnected, fast-moving lives are the norm? How do we care for our physical terrain when the health of our soil is so depleted, and our water systems and air are so polluted? And what exactly are we creating in so many people’s bodies following a historic move away from healing the sick, to just keeping them medicated?
As we stand here with more wealth, technology and access to knowledge than ever before, how is it possible that even in 2019 life-expectancy in the US was falling for the first time in history?
I started this pandemic concerned at the call to go to war with a virus. Now I am convinced we don’t need to go to war, or live in fear, to protect our health.
I am not saying I know everything about disease creation and I haven’t concluded whether the severe symptoms that many people have experienced in this crisis are down to one factor over another. Yet I am convinced we need to be having a much broader discussion on health than one that focuses on numbers of cases determined by a misused test, which is supposedly diagnosing a virus, which medicine has yet to prove, in a scientific manner, is the CAUSE of disease.
If this blog post has piqued your curiosity, I encourage you to do your own research (I have provided resources within this post and below). Shifting from the germ theory that we have all grown up with to something new (which it turns out is not so new) can feel like the rug is being pulled from under your feet. Luckily, we don’t need to fall. We can just research where we feel inspired to.
I wondered about sharing my journey on my blog that focuses on peri/menopause. I did so because it occurred to me that what props up the accepted COVID paradigm is so similar in structure to what props up the accepted peri/menopause paradigm.
The COVID paradigm tells us that a whole list of symptoms are created by the disruption caused by a single virus which is external to us. And yet we are told that it's possible to have the virus and not have symptoms.
The peri/menopause paradigm tells us that a whole list of symptoms are created by the disruption caused from a drop in estrogen. And yet we know that even though all women experience a drop in estrogen, not all women across all cultures experience symptoms.
It is only logical therefore that it cannot be the virus or a drop in estrogen that cause symptoms, but rather the health of our physiological, spiritual and physical terrain.
If we want to help ourselves and others, our focus and energies must be placed in creating the healthiest terrain possible. We don’t need to fear contagion; we need to nourish our beings and be guided by the intelligence of our bodies back home to our innate health.
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Edited to add this revealing quote from Israel's chief epidemiologist,
Professor Hagai Levine (Dec 2020):
“It’s incredible, that even today, with all the research, we still don’t exactly know how the flu is transferred [from person to person] and why there is more flu in winter.”
Isn't that fascinating?
Science, after about 150 years of trying, still hasn't proven the route of transmission of a respiratory disease!
Do you think it might be time to test an alternative hypothesis to the germ theory? Do you think we might be healthier if people stopped fearing their own body and the bodies of others?
Please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have.
And if you are interested in reaching 100% natural relief from permenopause and menopause symptoms, even in these extraordinary times, check out THE WISER WOMAN ONLINE COURSE by clicking HERE.
Resources: More about Antoine Bechamp and Terrain Theory vs. Germ Theory can be found HERE – I found the videos by Alfa Vedic, which are linked on the page, very helpful. Facebook groups: Terrain Model Refutes Germ Theory has interesting discussions and a great resource section here. The Infectious Myth also has interesting discussions and was set up by David Crowe.
Books:
What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong by Dawn Lester and David Parker (a real encyclopaedia!)
Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht and Claus Kohnlein, MD
The Science of Health and Healing by Trevor Gunn