Remember first learning about Louis Pasteur and being so thankful to learn about Germ Theory and how we could kill all the nasty germs by hand washing and using antibiotics? It seems so logical: Of course we want to kill germs! They’re bad.
But what if our bodies were strong enough to kill germs for us? That theory, formulated by Antoine Béchamp (and his contemporaries like Claude Bernard), is called Terrain Theory. Ever heard of that? Probably not. It wasn’t in the best interest of pharmaceutical companies to promote that theory, so it was unfortunately buried deep beneath a landfill of Germ Theory propaganda.
It’s rare that the average person with a public school degree would ever hear about Antoine Béchamp and Terrain Theory. Health class simply glorified Germ Theory concepts and super markets usually only offer ultra pasteurized milk. How would the average Joe learn about Terrain Theory?
Most of us don’t just stumble upon this information, but are instead driven to discovering it after a long history of illness that isn’t getting better from conventional treatments based in Germ Theory rhetoric of continuing to take antibiotics and steroids to suppress our symptoms. And of course, we don’t want our children to learn this the hard way, not how we had to.
Before we dive into this totally new way of thinking, let’s do a recap of what we already know about Louis Pastuer and pasteurization:
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist (not even a medical doctor) in the 1860s who advanced what we call Germ Theory. It’s basically the victim mentality when it comes to health, as it suggests we are all victims to germs. Based on this theory, you can be walking through a park, and catch someone’s cold from someone’s kid, and if you don’t take antibiotics to kill off the germs, you’re not going to get better. There’s nothing you can do about it, you’re completely helpless: Germs are everywhere and we need to kill them in order to be safe.
The solution is simply: kill the germs. This is the message school children and adults alike constantly get from the world around us. This is the accepted narrative. It’s a war against germs, and it’s either us or them. But there’s a problem with that.This brings us to Béchamp. Antoine Béchamp, also living during the same time and in the same town as Louis Pasteur in France, asks a different question about health: If you walk through the park and get sick from someone’s kid, but 5 other people were with that kid and they didn’t get sick, why did you get sick from that kid when others did not?
This is a critical question that Pasteur completely overlooked.
Béchamp agreed that germs exist, but that these germs only hurt us if our protective barriers allow them access to us. To Béchamp, the goal is to increase your terrain’s health, or in other words, to empower your ability to ward off and/or fight disease.
When I was researching these two scientists, I consulted a lot of texts that have their original writings. One of the books that I read outlined what I thought was a fascinating experiment that Béchamp developed using two fertilized eggs, one with a normal terrain and the other with a disorganized terrain. Can you guess what the outcome was?
The Egg Experiment:
- 2 fertilized eggs.
- Both are incubated in the proper environment for growing a chick with one exception.
- One egg was vigorously shaken and the other was not.
- The results were as you can imagine: one grew life and produced a baby chick and the other grew disease and produced a rotten egg.
What can we learn from this experiment?
- Because the shell of both eggs were left intact, each egg had the same exact enzymes, bacteria, protein and nutrients.
- Then why did one cause disease and the other didn’t?
- It wasn’t because bacteria was introduced into one egg while the other wasn’t. It was due to the disorganized terrain of the shaken egg.
What does that mean? It means that we need to keep our health in order and in balance to encourage life and health. That means eating nutrient dense foods that have natural probiotics which promote beneficial gut flora. It means sleeping well, resting enough, not overworking, having healthy relationships and limiting toxic ones.
As you can imagine, this is not the narrative kids pick up from the world, and not knowing this is a critical loss to their future health and well being.
What your entire family needs to know is that a disordered terrain creates the opposite of health. It makes the body more susceptible to illness because its barrier is weak. If one takes an antibiotic for every possible ailment, thus further disorganizing and weakening one’s overall gut flora, one continues to weaken their terrain. A disordered terrain is the result of too much stress, toxic relationships, not sleeping enough, and/or eating poorly or not enough.
How this impacts your family…
Our world today teaches our children to be victims of disease, not empowered masters over it. I have seen, time and again, homeopaths and others who are dedicated to bringing holistic medicine to others, confess to me that they were shocked when they realized that their own children grew up only to ultimately follow the conventional lifestyle. “My daughter is in college and on an antibiotic right now,” a homeopath told me. They thought their children would pick up on these principles by being raised in the holistic world. But I have learned that it is not enough to just be ‘around’ these principles. I feel strongly that everyone in your home–each and every member of your household–needs to do the work and own this information. They need to know that their bodies are designed to heal and how homeopathy fits into building up their terrain.
How does homeopathy fit into building our body’s terrain up?
Homeopathy uses remedies that help the body do what it’s meant to do: heal. Allopathic drugs (i.e. conventional drugs), suppress or kill germs. That is a very different mechanism than what homeopathic remedies employ. We want to make our bodies stronger by helping them learn to adapt to germs, not rely on medicine that kills the germs for us. Continued use of drugs that suppress and kill germs doesn’t allow the body to learn anything, and the body won’t be stronger as a result, but weakened by the destructive and often toxic drugs we’re inundating it with. It actually really confuses the body and it begins misbehaving and attacking itself. The result: An all too common ailment of the times, auto-immune conditions.
Using homeopathic remedies is just one part of the overall lifestyle of having a strong immune system, although it is a vital one.
So, if you’re new here, welcome! You’ll probably want to start with just wanting to get rid of antipyretics—like fever suppressing medicines in your life, but you’ll also want to be sure you are well-versed in homeopathic remedies that can replace these.
Want to know more about building your terrain? I have an amazing video that your entire family will enjoy watching. Meet me, my kids, my farm, and how a special friend helped us balance the terrain in our home. Click here to watch it!