I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. From the time we’re young, we’re taught to protect ourselves from nature. Sprays to keep off the bugs, oils to block the harmful rays, poisonous cleansers to stave off the offending bacteria shacked up in the bathroom.
Nature is a savage place, we’re shown on Cable TV documentaries, where malefic killer diseases lurk and there are microbe enemies in pigs and birds.
It’s so common to hear this that we can be forgiven for not questioning the accuracy of this view. You see, it was a scientific coup d’etat back in the early 1900s that launched us on the path to seeing all our health problems as coming from the microbes invading us from nature. That was Pasteur’s proposal, the Germ Theory was born, and the burgeoning pharmaceutical industry led by Rockefeller and Carnegie had found its scientific forefather. And its tool for bludgeoning contradictory perspectives senseless, and within a very short time, medical education and clinical practice was firmly on the path of seeing our problems in germs, and making billions with medications to protect us from them.
Explaining Illness and Epidemics Energetically, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.