I had no idea what can of worms (or “germs,” ​​more literally) I would open as I set out to determine the most politically correct title for a new page on my website. It started with what I thought would be a quick definition search on the internet and turned into an all night study.

My initial premise about what kind of health care one would consider “real health care” was formed during childhood and based on brief medical snapshots like these:

From my four-year perspective, it seemed that our GP’s concern about my allergic reaction to penicillin, the miracle drug, meant I was living in great danger. The doctor was so concerned that I was denied the experience of attending kindergarten. (Apparently there aren’t that many germs in first grade.)

The following medical memory was made a few years later. That time however, I was present at a school, together with the whole community. We had come as a family to queue for our sugar cubes on a Saturday morning. The sense of relief and security was evident in each family as they received and swallowed their buckets of polio vaccination and the threat of a future in an iron lung.

Now, couple my childhood memories with the fact that I tend to be a true left-brain thinker (compartmentalized facts, details, logic, rather than getting the big picture first). I think you will begin to understand why I adopted what is now more commonly known as conventional practice as “real medical care.”

You know the conventional medicine I mean: you get “sick”, you go to the doctor, they prescribe you some pills, you take them, you suffer the side effects and you recover in a week. Perhaps conventional medicine was easy to accept because we didn’t have to work at anything, like learning how to take better care of ourselves in the first place, or worrying about who to blame when we got too sick to fix.

I knew that not everyone would be as comfortable as I am with omitting alternative medicine from the “real health care” category. So I wasn’t surprised when search engine results for “holistic,” “natural,” and “alternative” medicine definitions revealed a trail of controversy between two schools of thought.

What I was surprised to find is that this trail of controversy is not a “new age” division of thought; instead, it leads to France, plunges into the 19th century, and begins with two men of science.

The name I recognized was Louis Pasteur. Pasteur did pioneering work for decades in many aspects of biomedicine. This earned him praise and much strong criticism from his peers, although he remained relatively unknown to the world at large until he came up with a treatment for rabies in the mid-1880s.

The other man, Antoine Bechamp, was also an active researcher and biologist. He taught at universities and medical schools, and was widely published on cell biology, disease, botany, and related topics.

Although both Pasteur and Bechamp studied cell biology and its relation to disease, they worked with markedly different theories.

Pasteur believed that the basic unit of any organic life is the cell and that cells are aseptic. In other words, disease comes from microorganisms (germs) outside the body. He felt that germs are designed to do one thing and one thing only: cause a particular disease; and that each disease is associated with a particular germ.

Pasteur apparently did not take into account the condition of the disease area or the person, with respect to the probability that the disease would affect them. His narrow focus led him to believe that in order to cure a specific disease, one would have to create a specific defense…by finding a drug that would kill the germs without killing the patient.

Bechamp saw a bigger picture and pointed to the “nanobe” as the basic unit of organic life, a unit with the ability to change. He believed that diseases come from microorganisms (germs) within the body.

Normally, these germs would be working to build and assist the body’s processes, but when the body or a part of it dies or is injured, either chemically or mechanically, the germs stop what they’re doing and switch to assisting in the disintegration (getting rid) of the injured area.

Put more poetically, his work showed that diseases are always processes of rescue or repair, and life; and they are only serious when the medium is in poor condition to start. The conclusion of Bechamp’s work is that disease is built from unhealthy conditions and that to prevent disease we have to create health.

So we see here in two different men of the same time, both members of the French Academy of Sciences, the very basis of the two schools of thought on health care.

Conventional Medicine, which places us like sitting ducks at the mercy of random raging germs and focuses on beating each disease after the fact, draws heavily on the work and conclusions of Louis Pasteur.

Antoine Bechamp’s studies and findings are the scientific root of what is commonly known as Alternative Medicine. Here’s the concept: make the body healthy, keep it healthy, and make it easier for the body to work as its best defense to prevent or cure disease.

When I saw it expressed in those terms, I must admit a signal went off in my logical left brain.

I read further and discovered that Pasteur’s critics believe that his overshadowing of Bechamp’s work is due to his “publicity and public relations genius”. Some have gone further, citing Pasteur’s own laboratory notes (published only after his grandson’s death in 1975) to consider him a “phony scientist” and accuse him of stealing ideas (mainly from Bechamp), falsifying experimental data, and making claims that have no basis in fact.

At this point, I am beginning to believe that my left brain has been tricked into following accepted health care practices that have little to do with science or logic. My right brain, in this case, agrees by resonating deeply with Antoine Bechamp’s thoughts on Pasteur’s theory…

“Tea [Pasteur theory] it is a monstrous fatalistic doctrine that supposes that at the origin of things, God would have created the germs of microbes destined to make us sick” ~ Professor Antoine Bechamp

Side note: Louis Pasteur, who avoided handshakes because of his fear of germs, died of a stroke at the age of 46. Antoine Bechamp still had his theory clear and gave interviews until weeks before his natural death at the age of 93.