In the Western world, we are desperately obsessed with killing things off that we feel can threaten our livelihood. Whether it is germs, terrorists, or the next-door neighbor, we seek to eliminate anything that doesn’t agree with us rather than trying to maintain a healthy balance between desired and undesirable circumstances.
When it comes to our health, the Western world has largely adopted the germ theory, meaning we need to identify and destroy anything we deem as a foreign invader as it is directly responsible for causing disease. However, there is another theory called the terrain theory, which believes that it is not the “germ” that determines disease, but rather, the state of our internal health and its ability to maintain homeostasis in the face of “unfriendly” organisms.
