An End to Upside Down Medicine

Last year, I reviewed the classic 100-year-old study of Béchamp and Pasteur by Ethel Hume, where the nexus of their disagreement was the relationship between the germ and what is called in French terrain in relation to the causation of disease. I quoted the cellular biologist Rudolf Virchow as saying: ‘If I could live my life over again, I would devote it to proving that germs seek their natural habitat, diseased tissue – rather than being the cause of the diseased tissue.’ (my italics) Interestingly, Florence Nightingale was another who shared a scepticism about ‘the specific disease doctrine’ when she stated that ‘there are no specific diseases; there are specific disease conditions.’ Béchamp’s view was that only when the medium has become unsuited to the operation of normal ‘microzymas’ [through toxicity] do they develop into bacteria, ‘thus proving the latter to be the consequence, instead of the origin, of the disease condition.’ And at the end of his life, Pasteur admitted in relation to the work of Claude Bernard that ‘le terrain est tout, le microbe n’est rien.’ In spite of this, modern medicine is still dominated by the germ theory of disease, cited as a single cause requiring a single intervention – vaccines or expensive authorised treatments in the case of Covid-19.

This book is one of a series that all begin ‘An End to Upside Down….’, the first of which examined the status of consciousness. Mark is an open-minded and well-informed critical thinker who examines fundamental beliefs and assumptions such as the role of bacteria in causing disease. He asks instead if they are part of the bodies clean-up crew that appears at the scene of underlying toxicity or injury. Western countries in general, and the US in particular, have high levels of chronic conditions. Even the percentage of children with such conditions is 54%, up from 12% in 1986. In the case of adults, 60% have at least one chronic disease, and 40% have two or more chronic diseases.

Mark argues that the reductionist, allopathic model of medicine is deeply flawed and based on outdated assumptions, while the overall system has evolved into a medical-industrial complex – an intricate web of interlocking financial interests underpinned by regulatory capture. More fundamentally, modern medicine is based on a physicalist and mechanistic understanding of the human being that has been called into question by leading post-materialist researchers and by the existence of the biofield exhibiting more subtle energies recognised by Indian and Chinese systems. In addition, electro-biology has been neglected in favour of biochemistry, and the nature of spontaneous healing and possible discarnate influences receive no attention whatsoever. It is also crucial to think multi-factorially about disease causation, natural immunity and our inherent capacity for resistance: not everyone who is exposed to a pathogen develops the condition, and some may be asymptomatic. Importantly, correlation does not imply causation, and ‘consensus’ cannot be equated with scientific truth.

Readers will find their minds stretched in unusual directions as they travel through the book, beginning with an analysis of HIV/AIDS analogous to that set out in RFK Jr’s book on Anthony Fauci, where it is abundantly clear that treatment using AZT was often fatal, despite Fauci’s bland assurance that scientific trials had proved it to be safe and effective (where have you recently heard that phrase?) while the outcast Dr Peter Duesberg insisted that AZT was definitely toxic, ‘killing virus-infected and uninfected T-cells alike.’ It turns out that the trial had been halted after only four months. This chapter introduces the whole question of virus isolation, and explains that researchers have made many unsuccessful requests to agencies for isolates, and even Luc Montagnier admitted that he had not in fact purified the AIDS virus – a separate chapter is devoted to this topic. Critics claim that viruses are not physically isolated in virology experiments, and that virology studies lack proper controls. Many scientists assume that viruses have been properly isolated, but much of this turns out to be hearsay, and all these considerations feed into the germ/terrain debates referred to above. The question that arose for me in relation to the no virus position is how one can then conduct gain-of-function studies.

There is undoubtedly a tendency to interpret evidence to fit a preconceived theory and, as Mark points out, this may lead to the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent: if P, then Q. Q, therefore P. This translates into: if there is a disease-causing virus in a sample, then it causes cells to break down; we observed that cells broke down in an experiment, therefore there was a virus. (p. 42) Moreover, antiviral drugs may in fact be more generally anti-metabolic. In one study by Dr Stefan Lanka, he found characteristic cell breakdown on day five without having added any pathogenic virus to the culture. Mark goes through Koch’s postulates and those more recently developed by Thomas Rivers – this goes to the heart of the theory that bacteria cause disease rather than being a toxic clean-up crew. (p. 68)

He then revisits the history of infectious disease through this lens, highlighting other possible toxic causal factors such as DDT in the case of polio and the role of vaccines in relation to the Spanish flu. (p. 90) Mark argues that ‘non-germ factors always need to be considered, such as sanitation, toxins, electricity, wireless signals, radiation poisoning, overall lifestyle, nutrition, medications (including vaccines), and many more.’ (p. 108) He also discusses vaccine safety, drawing on the significant work of Dr Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bystrianyk, authors of the recently updated Dissolving Illusions. US children now receive 73 doses of vaccines, compared with 25 in 1986 and three in 1962 – see Harald Walach’s review above. There is no doubt that the stakes are very high in relation to questioning this sacred cow. Mark could also have added that many vaccines are being developed in response to gain-of-function research as part of the ongoing biosecurity agenda. See my review of The Wuhan Cover-Up.

There is no doubt that we need a new paradigm of health, and that it needs to be based on a deeper understanding of the human being where the fundamental role of consciousness is acknowledged. Writing in 1937, the New Zealand surgeon-turned-naturopath Ulrich Williams identified disease as mostly a gradual degenerative process going on within, and was critical of mistaking the symptom for the disease, which the body is trying to detoxify. We should pay more attention to the maintenance of health, and here (p. 177) Mark gives sound advice, also warning that future pandemics may follow the same authoritarian pattern. In this respect, we should be ready to question the consensus narrative and engage in independent critical thinking. A provocative read.