A couple years back I decided I’d like to write a book about my health journey. Covid was such a radical red pill experience for me, like it was for many others, that it changed completely the way I looked at my health and modern medicine with it. In fact, I started writing it but got waylaid by another book, since finished, and another one I’m now working on. So this will have to wait, but I did start writing it, and want to share some of that here. I can’t share much of the journey, but I want to use how it started and specifically motivated me to learn about where modern medicine came from. We are all born into it, and few question how it got here, or why it is the way it is. Until Covid, most of us had no reason to question it at all.

That was the reason I, and many others, have had a “health journey.” Six years ago the world lost its collective mind. Things happened I and few others, outside of the power hungry perverse, could imagine. For me it was deeply traumatic because I knew it was all a lie from the very pit of hell. It was Satanic in the creepiest sense of the word. It changed everything, in the most literal sense of that word. Hundreds of millions of people could never see things the same way again, including our health and modern medicine, but not limited to just that. I am convinced it also precipitated a great spiritual awakening which we’ve seen develop over the last several years. The story that got me here started what seems a long time ago.

I was born in the late afternoon on Friday, July 29, 1960, on a beautiful sunny day at Hollywood Presbyterian hospital in Los Angeles. California truly was the Golden State then, with people from all over the country and the world flocking there in pursuit of the American dream. It was a wonderful place to be born and raised. I don’t remember much about that day, but my mother told me the doctor scheduled my birth day, induced labor, and I came right on schedule! If you ever see the picture of me on my introduction to this cold, cruel world, you’d say, my, that baby has a lot of hair! All black. I’m Italian, after all. But you would also think I was probably a Chinese baby, a little plump Chinese baby born to Italian parents. How did that happen? Alas, I grew out of the Chinese look and ended up looking like a typical Italian baby and child. There’d be no mistaking me for Chinese when I grew up!

I was of course vaccinated. Vaccines, all agreed, were a miracle of modern medicine, and parents gladly submitted their children to the experts who told them so. At the time there were probably less than ten vaccines on the schedule, and I’m sure I got them all. There are many more today. As a late stage boomer, I was born into a world that worshiped “experts.” To question medical professionals about vaccines, or anything else, would have been unthinkable. Why would you? They’re the experts!

The rise of the expert class was part and parcel of the rise of progressivism of the early twentieth century. Holding the firm conviction that with science and technology no problem seemed too big to overcome, progressives were determined to apply this mindset to everything. Something called “scientific” management or planning by “experts” developed in the nineteenth century given it was the century of hitherto unimaginable progress. The number of inventions exploded, and it seemed there was nothing man could not accomplish with the rise of science and knowledge. By the time I was born, the expert class dominated American society, but it had been in process for almost a hundred years. As an academic, Woodrow Wilson wrote a paper in 1887 arguing for “the science of administration,” which speaks to the rule by “experts.” This rule by experts became the rage in the progressive era of the early 20^th century, and in due course the default view of American elites and the American people, until Covid brought it all into question.

My story, or that of any other person who experienced a similar awakening, is better understood when we’re familiar with the world of modern medicine I was born into, and how it became “modern.” The development of medicine as it came to be practiced in the 20^th century, was built on two things. One, certain assumptions about the human body and disease, and two, how medical education in America was established and practiced. Let’s look at the fomer first.

Pasteur, Béchamp and Germ Theory
To understand where we are we have to go back to the 19^th century and the development of germ theory, which is the foundation of modern medicine. To do that we need to become familiar with the work of two men, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who everybody has heard of, and Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908), who few people have. Their titanic battle over germ theory is a microcosm of the same battle in the 21^st century over health and modern medicine. Once germ theory became the only accepted theory of disease, the rise of modern medicine as we see it practiced today was inevitable.

I did an Internet search for, “Pasteur, Béchamp, and Germ Theory,” and one of the top results is a Wikipedia article entitled, “Germ theory denialism.” I almost laughed when I saw it. Anytime the word denialism is associated with something, you’ll know instantly the accepted cultural elite position on a topic—and it shall not be questioned! You saw that word thrown around a lot during the Covid era when cultural elites worldwide would not allow any questioning of the “Covid is the Bubonic Plague” narrative. I believe it originated with those questioning the Holocaust, so Holocaust denialism became a thing, and after that anyone questioning the accepted narrative, whatever it might be, was labeled a denier. This, of course, is meant to shut off any debate on an issue. Thankfully because of the Gutenberg Press of the 21^st century, the Internet, that is increasingly impossible. BTW, if Wikipedia claims something, I will generally believe the opposite. It’s a platform that parrots the acceptable narratives of Western cultural elites. But I digress.

Before I give you my highly simplified version of this debate as I have finally come to understand it, I will quote from a paper arguing for Béchamp’s perspective. The reason I do this before I get to the debate is because all of us have been indoctrinated from birth to believe in germ theory as the unquestioned reality that explains disease. Because of this it is extremely difficult to see it any other way, which is what I’m trying to get you to do. The author states:

We do not catch diseases. . . . The presence of germs does not constitute the presence of a disease. Bacteria are scavengers of nature…they reduce dead tissue to its smallest element. Germs or bacteria have no influence, whatsoever, on live cells. Germs or microbes flourish as scavengers at the site of disease. They are just living on the unprocessed metabolic waste and diseased, malnourished, nonresistant tissue in the first place. They are not the cause of the disease, any more than flies and maggots cause garbage. Flies, maggots, and rats do not cause garbage but rather feed on it. Mosquitoes do not cause a pond to become stagnant! You always see firemen at burning buildings, but that doesn’t mean they caused the fire. . . . [Germ theory] claims that fixed species of microbes from an external source invade the body and are the first cause of infectious disease. The concept of specific, unchanging types of bacteria causing specific diseases became officially accepted as the foundation of allopathic Western medicine and microbiology in late 19^th century Europe.

The reason I had a hard time grasping this concept was because for 60 years I had been indoctrinated like everyone else to believe disease as something primarily coming from outside of us, some little invisible thing that invades us and causes the disease. Germ theory also embraces the dogma of a single cause of disease, that specific microorganisms are the sole cause of very specific diseases. Steven Epstein wrote a book in 1996, well before Covid, titled, Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge. In it he makes this point:

The cornerstone was laid for modern biomedicine’s basic formula with its monocausal microbial starting-point and its search for magic bullets: one disease, one cause, one cure.

The idea that disease already lived inside me was hard to wrap my mind around, and the more difficult concept was that I was the one who determined whether that happened or not. Would that little invisible thing invading me have an inviting space to do its dirty work, or not? That was up to me, not the little invisible thing. Which leads us to the other theory of disease.

Contrary to Germ Theory, Béchamp developed something called terrain theory. The idea of the former is that germs are what we need to worry about, finding ways to kill them off with some kind of medicine once they get inside us. Terrain theory, by contrast, argues that if the body is well and balanced then germs being a natural part of life and the environment will be dealt with by the body without causing disease. In other words, a germ can cause sickness in one person and not another based on the “terrain,” meaning the inner workings of the body’s immune system. A compromised “terrain” means the body’s inner environment makes it susceptible to viruses and parasites, etc. This means it is far more important to work on the terrain of the body than worry about the latest germ or virus going around. It’s all about the dirt, metaphorically speaking.

You can easily infer from the victory of Pasteur and germ theory, modern medicine’s focus on, well, medicine, was a foregone conclusion. In a documentary related to this topic, a doctor pointed out there is a reason we call it medicine given we ingest or consume something as a treatment or cure. You’ll see as we talk about medical education, terrain is well down on the list of the modern medical professional’s priorities, as in pretty much invisible.

The Flexner Report and Modern Medical Education
Few people outside of the medical profession, and I’d wager not many in it, have ever heard of Abraham Flexner and his report, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. The Flexner Report, published in 1910, transformed the nature and process of medical education in America. In 1908 the Carnegie Foundation authorized a study of medical schools in the country, which were visited and assessed based on how the education was then currently practiced. From there Flexner developed criteria on how doctors would be educated and trained in America and thus made acceptable to the American Medical Association. Both the AMA, which was founded in 1847, and Flexner accepted germ theory without question. By then cultural elites in the West could see the practice of healthcare in no other way. This can be seen in many places in the report, but one quote will be sufficient to understand the fundamental assumptions of modern medicine. Speaking of pathology and bacteriology, he says the goal is “to master the abnormal,” and in that context says,

Now the agents and forces which invade the body to its disadvantage play their game, too, according to law.

Something outside of the body invades it and causes “the abnormal,” so the entire medical system became focused not on the patient’s health and enabling the body’s immune system to successfully handle the invaders, but on medicine used to defeat it. On the very next page, however, Flexner seems to contradict himself by saying, the doctor “through measures essentially educational to enforce, the conditions that present disease and make positively for physical and moral well-being.” This and only one other minor reference to a more holistic approach is about it because by that time the assumptions of germ theory were dominant among the elites in the medical profession. Science was seen as all powerful, while God’s creation, the human body and the immune system, was the victim of forces beyond its control. Man would save the day and defeat disease though his ingenuity.

Henry S. Prichett, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at the time, said the report was basically agnostic regarding which kind of healthcare the medical professional practiced, as he claims in the introduction:

In making this study the schools of all medical sects have been included. It is clear that so long as a man is to practice medicine, the public is equally concerned in his right preparation for the profession, whatever he calls himself—allopath, homeopath, eclectic, osteopath, or whatnot. It is equally clear that he should be grounded in the fundamental science upon which medicine rests, whether he practices under one name or under another.

This in practice, however, would not be the case. Once the “scientific standards” were set by the “experts,” anyone straying from them would be considered something of a quack not to be entrusted with the license of an educated medical practitioner. To that end, Flexner succeeded in aligning medical schools along the university model as the standard for all medical schools. This orientation had its origins in German medical education as American educators and physicians became enamored of university medical schools in Europe. One of the results is that schools ignored what they considered “outdated and unscientific methods,” so doctors received minimal nutritional education and defaulted to treatments primarily with pharmaceuticals. Flexner writes:

The only authoritative competent to pass on such values are trained experts. The entire matter would be in their hands if the state boards should in every state delegate the function of evaluating entrance credentials to competently organized institutions of learning.

Such institutions of learning accepted the pharmaceutical paradigm for medicine which was the inevitable result of germ theory and the rise of science, in addition to a class of “experts” believing medicine was required to heal disease. The profit motive, as well, cannot be ruled out given the financial backers of the report were two of the richest men in the world, Carnagie and John D. Rockefeller. They certainly had philanthropic motives and believed in the cause, but they also likely believed they could bring the production model to the medical profession through the primary cures of disease, medicine.

The rise of what we now call Big Pharma was built into this new university model of medical education. After the report, funding was only given to schools following its recommendations. Those that didn’t get the money couldn’t compete, so alternative schools of medicine disappeared. The challenge with nutritional or holistic healthcare is that there’s no money in it. You can’t patent something readily available from nature like you can something from a lab, which is why I was almost 61 years old before I first heard the saying, “food is medicine.” In addition to the challenge of the profit motive, insurance companies believe they have no incentive to cover anything other than medicine, and they often won’t work with holistic doctors. Keeping people healthy so they don’t need medicine or medical care in the first place is a terrible business model!

Of course, Flexner and those who supported him had the best of intentions, as do those in the modern medical profession, but they were terribly naïve about the monster they were creating. When I read this sentence I had to laugh, sadly, especially in light of the entire Covid debacle:

Scientific medicine, therefore, has its eyes open; it takes its risks consciously; it does not cure defects of knowledge by partisan heat; it is free of dogmatism and open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.

Remember, this was written in 1910 when science was the unquestioned, benevolent, and all powerful god of the age who would never disappoint but only bring untold blessings to all the peoples of the earth, or something like that. Flexner and his supporters, including the entire Western cultural elite, missed the little fact that science is practiced, and its results applied and implemented, by sinful human beings. Thus it can never be free of “partisan heat” or “free of dogmatism,” and as we saw with Covid, it most definitely is not “open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.” In fact as currently practiced, modern medicine is the exact opposite of all these. If, for example, you question the efficacy of vaccines, you are automatically discounted as a “denier.” My journey, in fact, became filled with denialism, and I realized my health is ultimately my responsibility, my lifelong journey, and the learning never ends.

This doesn’t mean modern medicine doesn’t bring blessing because it does in abundance. If you get hit by a bus, have a heart attack, or some other catastrophic thing happens to you, modern medicine is the greatest. Medicine when it’s necessary, like treating infections with anti-biotics, is priceless. We just need to realize our health is up to us, and God has provided everything we need to be healthy and productive into old age. Then we will get to spend eternity in a new resurrected body free from pain, disease, and death.