Below is a link to one of my most recent TV interviews about the flu.  I touch on something in that interview, that I often speak out about, which is the “germ theory.”

http://www.youtube.com/user/healthquestchiro#p/u/7/6lOfCjkQRqM

I get frustrated that as a culture we put so much emphasis on anti-bacterial products, and antibiotics. I suggest that we should instead focus on things like eating good food, receiving regular adjustments to promote better immune function, or decreasing sugar and ice cream intake.

The germ theory, according to wikipedia is defined the following way:

“The germ theory of disease, also called the pathogenic theory of medicine, is a theory that proposes that microorganisms are the cause of many diseases. Although highly controversial when first proposed, germ theory was validated in the late 19th century and is now a cornerstone of modern medicine.”

I contend that the germ theory is only a small part of the story, and my logic for this is simple.  If you have 20 school children in a classroom, and 1 is sick, and that sick child spends the entire day coughing – how many others get sick inside the classroom? Typically a few, sometimes none, and never all 20.  A personal example of this is a child in my son’s class recently got the chicken pox.  We are hoping that my son comes down with it, but so far, this has not happened, and they often play together and share a table.

Another example is a few years ago a man was arrested in NYC for knowingly flying on an airplane while infected with a particularly nasty strain of Tuberculosis.  All of the passengers were subjected to the airplanes recirculated air for several hours.  The man was later arrested and quarantined.  Health officials were concerned because the disease is small enough to pass right through the airplanes air filters.  Interestingly enough no one else ever contracted the disease.

The reason that I reject this theory as a sole or major cause of illness is because it totally ignores the most important part of the equation – your internal environment.  Are you a host to disease, or is your body hostile to foreign invaders?

The reason not all kids get sick, or why you can touch a doorknob after a sick person, and not get sick, has much more to do with your immune system, than which germs you touched.  In fact, we breathe in germs all day long without ever getting sick.

Now with all of that said, I do need to clarify that although I do not subscribe to the germ theory, I do subscribe to the “gross theory.”  Simply put, I wash my hands regularly and keep our home and office clean, not for fear of germs, but because that is just plain gross not to