routes (barring direct injection into the brain, abdomen, or lungs) couldn’t directly cause disease states.
For example, Dr. Milton Rosenau assigned by the United States Health Department to experiment with the cause of influenza at the height of the 1918 epidemic, failed to show infection in any of over two hundred volunteers; first with several strains of the suspected bacterium Pfeiffer’s bacillus, and later, through direct contact with influenza patients, including sharing of blood, mucus, and breath. Rosenau remarked after the study,
“We entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.”
By the time leading up to our present day, most people recognized and accepted the fact that many trillions of micro-organisms exist in us, and germs thought to be dangerous have been found to exist in a majority of humans who are completely healthy.
I believe a growing majority are ready to make this shift—what many have called the shift from mechanism to vitalism.
In the year 1953, DNA was discovered, bringing forth a new understanding of how life could work. In tandem with this discovery, virologists who formerly were searching for a micro-toxin now became convinced that the “virus” was instead a DNA-based pathogen capable of employing the secret of life, DNA, for nefarious, parasitic purposes in host organisms.
In 1954, the suspected measles virus was said to be grown (and discovered) by way of cell-culture experiments, and various particles from the decaying cell-culture were micro graphed using an electron microscope, a device central to the preceding DNA research. Since that time, it had been largely agreed that a nefarious virus had finally been identified, a cellular product that would be held responsible for many diseases that had remained a mystery.
This story represents one chapter in a series of chapters regarding the human search for disease causality. Throughout this search, a single, fundamental theme exists: To find the cause of disease, we have to find the “pathogen” responsible for it, just as we might find the toxic agent in snake venom or the protein in plants responsible for someone’s poisoning. In other words, the search was predicated on a logical assumption that organic diseases mirror diseases caused by poisoning, in that some malevolent substance would “breach” the integrity of the living organism causing affliction.
Now, it could have been just as possible for a similar line of investigation to have emerged in history, centering and guiding our exploration of the cause of diseases. For just as we knew poisons caused clear internal affliction and death, so too was it known that injury, wear and tear, would cause affliction in the body. Whether by the blow of a sword or arrow in battle, or whether by an accidental fall, internal organ afflictions could occur anytime the body was breached or overwhelmed by a force.
Along the progression of this line of thinking, we would find hypotheses of “stress” as the cause of the elusive diseases; certain tensions that pull and tug our organism out of balance, leading to damage, and potentially lethargy, sickness, and death. Not limiting this model to physical stresses that impact the body, we’d likely consider emotional stress and negative thinking that might impact us with equal or even greater destructive force.
As living beings traversing a journey called life, we have been endowed by Nature to somehow know that we are in a story, and that our life is a story.
Over the course of scientific progress, this line of thinking would show that there are many kinds of stress, and many myriad ways they negatively impact the body. We would learn how the body receives stress, and how the nervous system is the instrument the body uses to mediate and adapt to stress.
In point of fact, this line of investigation has always existed alongside the search for poisons. And today, we have many modalities that take into account both stress and poisons. In some modalities, the emphasis is on stress, but in an effort to reduce nefarious variables to achieve health and well-being, almost always are both culprits addressed. Poisons and stress.
The world was taken by surprise when a third branch of scientific inquiry arrived, one that could find a home within the “stress hypothesis” of disease causality, but which really stands out on its own as a completely new understanding altogether. Instead of focusing on hypothesized “agents” of disease, this new model shows the role of the body’s innate intelligence, which underlies all manifestations of the body.
To illustrate how the body’s own “intelligence” could ever lead to a disease state, let’s imagine one real-life scenario:
Imagine a mother and child are out in the world, and the child becomes pinned underneath a rock or a wheel of a car. The mother, without hesitation, runs to lift the heavy object off the child. She struggles with the utmost power and strength, even going so far as to stretch and tear ligaments and muscles beyond their normal capacity. She succeeds
in what perhaps many of her strongest friends would fail to accomplish. She rescues the child, and for weeks, is constrained in bed with torn muscles before fully recovering.
That period of incapacitation in bed could be seen as a stress-induced disease. However it is plain and obvious to all who know her story that she is in the midst of recovery from an intelligent and heroic act of desperation. Her muscles aren’t “diseased” per-se, they are trying to heal and rebuild from an intelligent sacrifice.
It had never occurred to researchers observing organic diseases—symptoms that arise despite no poison or external injury—that the cause could be similar in nature to the story of sacrifice of the mother, but at the organ level. Since the mother’s affliction was not caused by any microscopic pathogen, nor was it caused by a “malfunction” in her body, we can understand that the symptoms of inflammation were the natural repercussion of her intentional choice to burden her muscles in a clear and deliberate effort to save something more important.
Could it be that organ-specific diseases are the result of an organ’s own deliberate effort to achieve something important in life for the whole of the organism?
This new premise forms the basis of a major shift out of a multi-thousand-year long paradigm of searching for a pathogen, into a paradigm of understanding how an intelligent, meaningful adaptation in the organ leads to organ afflictions.
It’s really quite understandable. Rather than a focus on toxins, viruses, bacteria, or potential genetic defects “infecting” or “breaking down” the organ, we can now say: The organs of the body adapt to life-experiences. And the natural consequence of these adaptations are symptoms. The more prolonged and extreme the adaptation (or the more intense the shocking experience,) the more severe the symptoms of recovery.
In the research and discoveries of German New Medicine (GNM) or Germanische Heilkunde (Germanic Healing Knowledge), we find the scientific verification of this new paradigm.