Creating Waves of Awareness
It is not uncommon among medical men that homeopaths are considered not up-to-date and old fashioned in field of present day knowledge regarding the cause of disease. The miasms theory for cause of disease was apparently refuted by many physicians worldwide starting from Girolamo Fracastoro who proposed in 1546 that epidemic diseases are caused by transferable seed-like entities that could transmit infection by direct or indirect contact or even without contact over long distances.
Microorganisms were first observed by Anton van Leeuwenhoek and he is considered the father of microbiology.
IN 1854, John Snow further contributed towards the germ theory by tracing the source of the epidemic cholera in London. He determined through statistical data that the cases of the disease was not consistent with the miasma theory but he identified drinking water as the carrier for transmission of the disease. He found that cases occurred in the homes which obtained their water from the Broad Street pump located almost in the center of the outbreak.
Though back in 1668, Italian physician Francesco Redi provided early evidence against spontaneous generation. He devised an experiment in 1668 where he used three jars. He placed a meat loaf in each of the three jars. He had one of the jars open, another one tightly sealed, and the last one covered with gauze. After a few days, he observed that the meat loaf in the open jar was covered by maggots, and the jar covered with gauze had maggots on the surface of the gauze. However, the tightly sealed jar had no maggots inside or outside it.
In 1860s Louis Pasteur further demonstrated between that fermentation and the growth of microorganisms in broths came from outside in form of spores rather being generated from within the broth.
But the truly resultant effort came form Robert Koch in 1890. He was the first scientist to devise postulates and conducted experiments to verify the germ theory of disease.
The postulates are mentioned below :-
1) The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy animals.
2) The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
3) The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
4) The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.
Dear reader, these, very clear and crystal, four postulates are very important for consideration, evaluation and application of Germ Theory.
However, the results of the findings against these four very important postulates, never became the subject of debate among the medical scholars.
Lets examine the few;
"The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy animals."
This postulate was abandoned by Koch when he discovered that asymptomatic carriers of cholera are rather abundant, people who are healthy but do have cholera microorganism and even of typhoid. So this became common feature that there are many people who are simply, the healthy people but carriers of many infectious diseases, especially viruses such as polio, herpes, HIV and hepatitis C and yet they are healthy.
We would come to the 2nd postulate later, let us see the 3rd at this moment.
"The cultured microorganism SHOULD cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism."
Great postulate, we would all agree, because this is the base of the germ theory. The word capitalized in above postulate is "SHOULD". Actually, Koch started with the word "MUST" intially. The postulate would have read as "..that a microorganism MUST cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism...".
But the findings of Koch proved that for tuberculosis and cholera, not all organisms exposed to the infectious agent acquired the disease or infection. This non-infection or failure of Postulate#3 might be due to many reasons like general health and good immune functioning or acquired immunity or genetic immunity.
So the postulate was not formed to become a cutting edge evidence that germs are causes of disease in organisms, due the fact that it do not assert a "MUST" statement, rather was proved otherwise by the great scholar himself.
returning to the second postulate;
Postulate # 2:
"The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture."
So the last of the four;
Postulate # 4: "The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent".
This forth postulate that was the required proof that a certain disease was caused by a certain microorganism by re-isolation of the initially introduced microorganism from the subject organism and comparing the two never infact was proved.
Therefore, the evidence that satisfies Koch's postulates is not-sufficient to establish causation of the disease by microorganism.
We would also like to comment on the experiments of Francesco Redi and Louis Pasture as both used dead things for their experiments and we do not challenge the germ theory if it is based upon the dead things.
Homeopathy consider Living Organisms as bench mark testing and Biological assay of living organisms for all of its evidences and efficacy.
Homeopath Dr. Syed Furqan Ahmed
DHMS - RHMP
P.S. References Available.