How Conventional Medical Germophobia Ruins Health

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By Joel Edwards, Organic Lifestyle Magazine

For thousands of years, people thought disease was divine punishment for their sins. Eventually, the Egyptians and Hebrews noticed that contact with lepers could transmit leprosy, but even after this realization, knowledge of how people get sick progressed very slowly. Greeks and Indians learned to treat wounds with moldy bread, unwittingly using them as a natural antibiotic.The collective work and sacrifice of many scientists such as Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Emile Roux, and Sir Alexander Fleming changed our understanding of disease and how it is transmitted. But while germ theory tells us how people get sick, it does not tell us why some people become ill when others do not.

Cleanliness

In 1847, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis made the connection between childbed fever and doctors who worked with cadavers before delivering babies without washing their hands. Using simple logic and the process of elimination, he found lack of cleanliness to be the only difference between one clinic with a high death rate and another (run by midwives who did not work with cadavers) with a low death rate.