Monomorphism

by Dennis Myers

Monomorphism is the cornerstone of Robert Koch's (1843-1910) and Louis Pasteur's (1822-1895) Germ Theory of disease. This theory professes that disease has a microbial cause that is "caught" from the outside; "that there are differences among pathogenic bacteria (ones that can make you ill), and each has a constant nature... each distinct bacterial form corresponds to a specific disease and that the form of this microbe always stays the same (monomorphism), and causes the same disease however often the disease is transferred from one animal to another, the kind always remains the same and never changes into other kinds". How You Rot and Rust by Steve Denk.

In 1878 Robert Koch wrote Etiology of Wound Infections which was the beginning of the Germ Theory of Disease. Where Pasteur's views were shaped by the study of fermentation, Koch was affected by his contact with wounded soldiers. He noted that the bodies of animals that die of artificially infected wound diseases (pus from an infected animal injected into a healthy one) invariably contained many bacteria...In each case a definite organism corresponded to a distinct disease... and that for every individual, traumatic, infective disease, a morphologically distinguishable microorganism could be identified.

In 1880 Koch built on an essay of the relations between microbial diseases and their causes from the work of Jacob Henle, his professor of anatomy. These became known as the Koch-Henle Postulates.

The following are these postulates which revolutionized medical epidemiology at the turn of the century, by laying out the standard proof of infectivity to the present day. The postulates dictate that a microbe must be:

1. found in an animal (or person) with the disease,
2. isolated and grown in culture and
3. injected into a healthy experimental animal, producing the disease in question; and then recovered from the experimentally diseased animal and shown to be the same pathogen as the original.

By the early twentieth century the whole landscape of medicine had changed. Most of the common killer diseases, including smallpox, diphtheria, bubonic plague, flu, whooping cough, yellow fever, and TB, were understood to be caused by pathogens. Vaccines were devised against some, and by the 1950s antibiotics could easily cure many others.

By the 1960s and 1970s the prevailing mood was one of optimism. At least in the developed world, infectious diseases no longer seemed very threatening. Far more scary were the diseases that the medical world said were not infectious: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. That these diseases are now considered to be "infectious" (See Atlantic Monthly, A New Germ Theory, February 1999), is what these web pages are about.

Also, no one foresaw the devastation of AIDS, or the serial outbreaks of deadly new infections such as Legionnaire's disease, Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis, "flesh-eating" staph infections, and Rift Valley fever.

"The infectious age is, we now know, far from over. Furthermore, it appears that many diseases we didn't think were infectious may be cause by infectious agents after all. These include stomach ulcers, heart disease. The first cancer virus discovered in 1910 called the Rous sarcoma virus, certain leukemias, lymphomas, nasopharyngeal cancer common in south China, cervical cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, Kaposi's sarcoma with Herpes virus 8, mammary-gland tumors in mice, childhood obsessive compulsive disorder, Sydenhams's chorea which is a rare complication of streptococcal infection. Streptococcal antibodies find their way into the brain and attack a region called the basal ganglia, causing characteristic clumsiness along with obsessions. Schizophrenia has long been considered to be possibly "infectious" in nature."
The Atlantic Monthly, A New Germ Theory by Judith Hooper, February 1999, pg. 44.

The catalogue of suspected chronic diseases caused by "infection"/bacteria to David A Relman, an assistant professor of medicine, microbiology, and immunology at Stanford University, now includes;

"sarcoidosis, various forms of inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Wegener's granulomatosis, diabetes mellitus, primary biliary cirrhosis, tropical sprue, and Kawasaki disease. Likely suspects include many forms of heart disease, arteriosclerosis, Alzheimers's disease, most major psychiatric diseases, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, cerebral palsy, polycystic ovarian disease, and perhaps obesity and certain eating disorders. Multiple sclerosis has been linked to the human herpes virus 6, the agent of Roseola infantum, a very mild disease of childhood" (ibid.)

Where do these bacteria come from...?

To modern science, this is still an unanswered question.

Regarding stomach ulcers;

In 1981 Barry J. Marshall became interested in incidences of spiral bacteria in the stomach lining. The bacteria were assumed to be irrelevant to ulcer pathology, but Marshall and J.R. Warren noticed, serendipitously, that when one patient was treated with tetracycline for unrelated reason, his pain vanished, and in endoscopy, revealed the ulcer was gone.

An article by Marshall and Warren on their culturing of "unidentified curved bacilli" appeared in the British medical journal, The Lancet in 1984. No one listened until finally Marshall personally ingested a batch of the spiral bacteria and came down with painful gastritis, thereby fulfilling all of Koch's postulates.

There is now little doubt that Helicobacter pylori, found in the stomachs of a third of adults in the United States, cause inflammation of the stomach lining. In 20 percent of infected people it produces an ulcer. Nearly everyone with a duodenal ulcer is infected. H. pylori infections can be readily diagnosed with endoscopic biopsy tests, a blood test for antibodies, or a breath test. In 90 percent of cases the infections can be cured in less than a month with antibiotics.

Where do these bacteria come from?

You don't "catch" them, so infectious is not the correct word.

Regarding arteriosclerosis;

It has recently been discovered that arteriosclerosis is also a bacterial process. Notice I did not say, 'caused by bacteria'. The plaques of 99% of patients with hardening of the arteries have the bacteria Chlamydia pneumoniae in them.

According to The Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1999, Chlamydia pneumoniae is a newly discovered bacterium that causes pneumonia and bronchitis. The germ is a relative of Chlamydia trachomatis, which cause trachoma, a leading cause of blindness in parts of the Third World. C. trachomatisis perhaps more familiar to us as a sexually transmitted disease that, left untreated in women, can lead to scarring of the fallopian tubes.

Pekka Saikku and Maija Leinonen of Finland discovered the new type of chlamydial infection in 1985 though its existence was not officially recognized until 1989. Saikku and Leinonen found that 68 percent of Finnish patients who had suffered heart attacks had high levels of antibodies to C. pneumoniae, as did 50 percent of patients with coronary heart disease, in contrast to 17 percent of the healthy controls.

While examining coronary-artery tissues at autopsy in 1991, Allan Shor, a pathologist in Johannesburg, saw "pear-shaped bodies" that looked like nothing he had seen before. Cho-Chou Kuo, of the University of Washington School of Public Health, found that the clogged arteries were full of C. pneumoniae. Everywhere the bacterium lodges, it appears to precipitate the same grim sequence of events: a chronic inflammation, followed by a buildup of plaque that occludes the opening of the artery (or, in the case of venereal Chlamydia, a buildup of scar tissue in the fallopian tube).

Recently a team of pathologists at MCP-Hahnemann School of Medicine, found the same bacterium in the diseased section of the autopsied brains of seventeen out of nineteen Alzheimer's patients and in only one of nineteen controls.

Whether antibiotics help any of these diseases or not remains to be seen. The first major clinical trial is under way in the United States, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the Pfizer Corporation: 4000 heart patients at twenty-seven clinical centers will be given either the antibiotic azithromycin or a placebo and followed for four years to gauge whether the antibiotic affects the incidence of further coronary events.

Whether the antibiotic helps coronary heart disease or not does not explain where these bacteria come from and thereby how to effect a causalor real cure. That this issue of Chlamydia in the tissues, is still being pursued by the modern pharmaceutical firms as "infectious" in nature, amenable to the treatment with antibiotics and/or vaccines, is another example of how entrenched Pasteur's and Koch's ideas are in the whole of medicine from the profit orientation of the petrochemical pharmaceutical companies on down.

The above reference to the article from The Atlantic Monthly, does add to its credit,

"Even if heart patients can be shown to have antibodies to C. pneumoniae, and even if colonies of the bacteria are found living and breeding in diseased coronary arteries, is it certain that the germ caused the damage? Perhaps it is there as an innocent bystander, as some critics have proposed."

As will be shown, the above bacteria, Chlamydia pneumoniae and Helicobacter pylori come out of the red blood cells themselves. The blood is teaming with microorganisms, especially if it sits on the microscope slide for a few hours. You can watch this process under any microscope, anywhere, anytime.

This is a funny situation really. Modern, allopathicly trained physicians can't see these things, literally. You can see all these organisms in the blood with any microscope, so its not a matter of "seeing is believing". More, it's a mater of "believing is seeing", so you can even dare to take a look in the first place.

In summary:

1. The blood is not sterile, as we were led to believe after the Second World War with Hitler's ideology of the creation of a 'pure' blooded race.
2. The cell is not the smallest living thing.
3. Organisms come of the blood and tissues to decompose those tissues when they can no longer live and support their own metabolism within the environment they find themselves in, in their internal milieu.
4. These same organisms can also come out of the blood and regenerate new tissues and organs; depends on which way we want to go. One needs a source of Protits in the diet, organ meats provide these, organ specific Protits/Somatides. (See Live Cell Therapy)

The History Of The Pleomorphism/Monomorphism Debate

Why pleomorphism is unknown to modern medicine

A dichotomy in medical speculation, an unresolved philosophical conflict, has existed from ancient times to the present. This conflict is between two theories known traditionally as Empiricism and Rationalism.

"While this conflict can be discerned in the earliest writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, from the fifth century BC, the names Empirical and Rationalist became current in Rome at the beginning of the Christian era - designating groups of physicians competing with one another ideologically and economically." (Divided Legacy, Harris Counter, pg. xv.)

The main form of medicine practiced today is of the Rationalist or Rationalist/Methodist point of view. Rationalism involves a mechanistic or chemical understanding of the human organism. It maintains that life itself can be explained by physics and chemistry, or, more generally speaking, by mechanics. Rationalism maintains that there is no essential difference between the structural chemistry of life and that of inanimate nature.

This idea of the body viewed as a machine composed of many little machines is contrary to the Empirical view that the laws governing the living organism differ from those of lifeless matter. This concept is called Vitalism.

The person as a whole is something different from a collection of viscera; the wholeness gives some extra, if undeniable, quality to the individual organs. Today we pay for our knowledge of the parts in ignorance of the whole.

Vitalism maintains that;

"the organism is reactive, at all times coping with, and attempting to overcome, the stresses which impinge upon it from outside. It behaves purposively, the nature and form of its reaction being determined by the specific environmental stress encountered. It responds to challenge, which no aggregate or assembly of non-living substances can ever do". (Divided Legacy, Harris Counter, pg. xvii.)

In 1946, the quantum physicist Erwin Schroedinger pointed out...

"that biological material has a totally different character from all other states of matter density of life - that is, the information stored per unit volume - and that of any inorganic system that has not been produced by living forms...The silicon chip must use many orders of magnitude more atoms to store the same amount of information as a gene."

This is vitalism, Quantum Vitalism.

According to Harris Coulter, no perfect Rationalist therapeutic doctrine has ever been devised. Even Galen, who of all physicians in history worked hardest at theoretical consistency, left a few loose ends. But the formulation which emerged in the late nineteenth century - the specific bacterial disease treated by the 'contrary' medicine - seemed to its devotees an almost unblemished depiction of the Rationalistic reality. The above is what 'modern', allopathic medicine has become.

The microbe and the Germ Theory of Disease became a new organizing principle in medicine, bringing much scattered clinical data together into a series of new specific entities with some cures, specific cures. The 'germ theory' was bolstered by the doctrine of 'monomorphism' - meaning again that microbial genera and species are fixed and eternal, that the form of each microorganism associated with a specific disease always stays the same and always causes that same disease.

"Monomorphism was above all, a practical response to an emergency situation in bacteriology. This concept of disease, emerged in a context of intense anxiety over the social depredations inflicted in every country in Europe and the United States by a series of diseases whose very names - tuberculosis, diphtheria, typhus, cholera--were chilling reminders of human mortality," (Divided Legacy, Harris Coulter, pg. 37)

More to the point;

"involved in the concept of Pleomorphism was the role and importance of the host organism - THE PATIENT! Microbes altered their forms in response to the patient, in response to the diet, environmental stresses the patient encountered, what poisons the patient consumed etc.." (ibid.), Harris Coulter)

Such ideas have little to do with the doctor.

Pleomorphism meant that the host organism or patient was an active participant in infection and disease - in contrast to Koch and Pasteur and the monomorphists who held the microbe to be all-powerful, the host organism a passive victim. Pleomorphism meant downgrading the microbe, since the host, by resisting the latter's onslaught, could alter its characteristics and make it return to a normal form as again. The patient had control over the bacteria, not the other way around. The microbes are the result, not the cause of disease.

Even the common "communicable" diseases, e.g. strep throat or chickenpox, can not take hold, grow, if the internal milieu is not conducive to their reproduction. This is what base powder does. As stated before, one third of people in Europe did not get bubonic plague. In treating cancer with isopathic medicine, for example, one does not attack the tumor at all, instead one changes the environment, the internal milieu that caused the cancer in the first place.

What this all means then, this pleomorphism/monomorphism controversy, is that at its most fundamental level it has socioeconomic dimensions that still effect us profoundly today.

"Accepting Pleomorphism meant acknowledging the host organism's, the patient's capacity to defend itself (him or her) against, and dominate, the microbe.

Monomorphism, on the contrary, enhanced the role of the microbe in disease, and consequently that of the physician who combats the microbe. This is the principal reason for the instinctive hostility of the majority of physicians to Pleomorphism and Wholistic/Alternative Medicine in general."(Ibid. pg. 39)

This gives the responsibility for health back to the patient... if they want it!

Pleomorphism has been a great threat to this "control" factor. This control factor means;

"control of the disease with poisons that need to be monitored and controlled, controlling therefore, the patient and their pocket book."(Ibid, pg.39)

The phenomena are forced into categories which can be manipulated to make a living from the practice of medicine. The monomorphists have identified their doctrine with science itself, as science itself, that Monomorphism is a law of nature, which it is not. This viewpoint has, through the years, taken on such an aspect of truth that to question it now seems a scientific sacrilege.

The followers of Koch proclaimed Monomorphism with 'religious fanaticism', stated Max Gruber in 1885. F. Loehnis stated in 1922 that the intransigence and verbal violence displayed by the various factions in this conflict resembled certain historic theological quarrels.

This battle has been going on for a long time!

For all these reasons, Monomorphism was at first excessively rigid, even dogmatic. Rene Dubious states that Koch and Pasteur; "overestablished" the doctrine of the specificity of disease causes and that blind acceptance by several generations of bacteriologist of the dogma of constancy of cell forms and immutability of cultural characteristics discouraged for many years the study of the problems of morphology, inheritance, and variation in bacteria.

"Upon clear contemplation, not only the cancer problem but the entire pathology, as taught by school medicine, have become unsustainable. In any case, it is extremely revealing of the insight that Prof. Sauerbruch, in following a series of cancer patients he treated isopathically (with pleomorphic medicines) in his hospital at the Charite and who, subsequently, in the closing years of his life again and again had pointed out that:

"If Enderelein, and Naessens et al, are correct, then we can throw out our entire literature".

(Blutuntersuchung im Dunkelfeld, nach Prof. Dr. Günther Enderlein, pg. 77, 1993, Compiled by Dr. med. Maria M-Bleker)

The consequences of this are profound.

Also, there are many problems that monomorphism has not been able to explain. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is one that is becoming quite critical in today's world. The bacteria don't 'mutate' into a drug resistant form, they just change, evolve, de-volve. There is a big difference between the two forms of change. Mutation occurs rarely, Pleomorphism occurs all the time.

Another problem has been microbiology's inability to classify microorganisms in proper families and the like, genera and species because the organisms do change form. Despite the inability of a century of bacteriological research to define the boundaries of these supposed genera and species, the suggestion is never heard that the search for them should be abandoned. The monomorphist conviction that genera and species do exist somewhere still retains a peculiarly tenacious hold.

In school we only cultured bacteria on very particular growth media. For example, all the strep "germs" in hospital microbiology labs anywhere are grown on blood agar (sterile human or rabbit blood mixed with agar). Therefore all the germs grow the same way, all streptococcal bacteria look like little round balls on strings, if they are grown on blood agar, at very specific pH's, pH 7.6 - 7.8, and temperatures. Change any of these conditions, the pH etc. and the germs change form.

According to Enderlein's formulations, the protits which are used as medicine actually are grown on a culture medium composed of a broth made of asparagus and agar.

In medical school we never grew anything on an asparagus/agar broth so, we never saw protits!!!

What you see is determined by how you look at something.

Is this science?

The thing is, that to classify all the different forms that bacteria can and do assume, in the terms of contemporary microbiology would be a taxicological (taxonomy- the science of classification) nightmare. We knew in school that syphilis microbes could grow as fungal forms, on old culture plates. These plates were just ignored and thrown away.

To say that the above syphilis organism began as a protit, somewhere, sometime, in some other generation even, and then went through all the stages that it would take to end up on an old culture plate in some microbiology lab, would require an impossible classification system, if done in the mono-morphistic way.

This begs a quantum system of classification, like the definition of vitalism given by Schroedinger above.

(As an aside, when these organisms do change form, for example when the protit changes into a virus, well, it just changes, instantaneously - as if it made a quantum jump. You have to watch awhile though, through the microscope, to see this.)

"If Pleomorphism were correct, scientific investigation of bacteria would be an impossibility. One grasps one's head to make sure it is still on the shoulders. The whole structure of our science threatens to collapse." (F. Loehnis, 1922)

Winogradsky in (1930) called pleomorphism;

"chaotic... truly, the whole of a researcher's lifetime would hardly be sufficient to follow directly all of the transformations indicated by [Felix Loehnis]."

Hans Zinsser in 1932 stated that;

"If the pleomorphic surmise is a correct one, acid base--the entire structure of our attitude toward the biology of disease must be changed... If these conclusions are correct, this will bring about a revolution in biology... At the present time it is dangerous for the progress of bacteriology to accept this work until it has been satisfactorily demonstrated... Nothing short of absolute proof should be accepted or we may risk making research more difficult than it already is."

To this end, the French microscopist and bacteriologist, Gaston Naessens has described the whole cycle of the Somatid/Protit, maintaining that all bacteria are derived from a single Somatid/Protit.

"Naessens demonstrates and describes each such stage, with return to the starting point, thus meeting an earlier objection as to the idea of a bacterial life cycle. In effect this view rejects all bacterial classification. The French have a proclivity for Pleomorphism, are more radical, and also more theoretical, and contend that the whole of the earth's microbial life constitutes a single collection of genetic material, "GENOME", (the self reproducing portion of a cell), adequate to supply every microbial genus and species." (Divided Legacy, Harris Coulter, pg. 197)

Sonea and Panisset, representing the French view, maintain that;

"each microorganism has access to this genome (genetic pool) and borrows from it genes as needed - employing conjugation, transformation, transduction, and other mechanisms of gene transfer which are still incompletely known. Genes are relinquished when environmental circumstances no longer require their use for survival." (Ibid pg. 196)

The German view represented by Günther Enderlein is not much different. Enderlein finds that all microorganisms originate from a Protit that, in its culminant and most degenerative phase, turns into the fungus Mucor racemosis. In going from the original Protit to the fungal form, all known bacteria are manifested, if the conditions for their manifestation, are right. This fungus then, Mucor racemosis, is the end, of the beginning. After it has decayed all the organic matter present it disintegrates back into the Protit it came from. Acid/Base/pH Balance.

Of all the impediments to the acceptance of Pleomorphism: Rationalism vs. Empiricism; the need for Magic Bullets, specific cures and disease entities in the face of the epidemic type diseases prevalent at the end of the last century; the "control" factor consisting of the contradiction between the patient healing his or herself and the doctor doing the job with allopathic, potentially dangerous drugs; the religious fanaticism and intransigence of the monomorphists; the inability of modern science to classify microorganisms into families etc. and the other inconsistencies contained in the monomorphist 'science' including drug resistance; of all these impediments I feel the most important one is the so called "complexity" factor.

"The phenomena are forced into categories which can be manipulated and named, to make a living from the practice of medicine, as easily as possible." (Harris Coulter)

It isn't complex.

You just need to know more than one form of medicine.