The human microbiome is being addressed as a unit like an organ, but one that requires management by authorities who presume to know best how it should function. The goal is to control it much like a modern-day tame forest is managed. 

by Heidi Stevenson

Modern medical science is making a major tactical diversion.  There’s a plan afoot to study the human microbiome as if it can and should be managed in the same manner that we attempt to manage ecosystems. If we look at what’s happening to the earth’s ecosystems, it’s hard to imagine that anything good can come of such a plan.

Just harken back to the last century, when massive and devastating wildfires came into existence because of our attempts to “manage” forests to prevent them. We suppressed every little fire, until a massively hot and completely uncontrollable fires became inevitable. These super fires were so ferocious that they destroyed the soil on which forests depend. They killed off the seeds that are dependent on more frequent and milder fires for germination.

Even today, with the knowledge that fire is part of the normal ecology, control freak humans are still trying to “manage” the fire cycle. Just how much damage is likely to be done to humans in this new learning curve to “manage” human micro organisms?

The Plan to Manage the Human Micro Biome

Modern medicine has traditionally treated microorganisms as, at best, useless for health, but primarily as dangerous things that need to be stamped out at all costs. That has, of course, been a miserably mistaken view.

Just as with any other health problem, modern medicine treats the organ or system that’s most obviously affected. The human microbiome is being addressed as a unit like an organ, but one that requires management by authorities who presume to know best how it should function. The goal is to control it much like a modern-day tame forest is managed.

If you’ve ever walked through an old wild forest, you know that managed forests are a shadow of the real thing. The tame forest contains only a fraction of the wildlife and plant variety that exists in a wild forest. The mystique of an old forest is lost when humans step in to manage it. That’s what medical science proposes to do to the human micro biome.

The Traditional View of Micro Organisms

Mainstream medicine sees health as being akin to repairing a machine. Everything is compartmentalized, so that health problems are seen as the malfunction of individual parts, which can be individually repaired. This mechanistic view also blinds practitioners to think in terms of repair rather than maintenance. A more rational view realizes that no body part exists in a vacuum, that health cannot be restored simply by fixing or replacing a single part.

As a result of modern medicine’s distorted view of health, our symbiotic micro organisms have been treated as the enemy. Indeed, doing anything and everything to destroy them has been a primary focus over the last century. Vaccines, antibiotics, antifungals, and antivirals have been the mainstay of medical practice.

For a few decades, it seemed like a modern day miracle. It was even believed that most disease would become a thing of the past. Instead, though, we’re facing massive epidemics of chronic diseases—and diseases that seemed to be beaten are now not only making a comeback, but are returning more virulent and deadly than ever before. Consider:

• Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is far more virulent than staph infections ever were prior to the age of antibiotics. MRSA is the disease that first made lurid headlines as the “flesh eating bacteria”.
• Africa and India are seeing new polio epidemics, which are the direct result of vaccines.
• Recent outbreaks of whooping cough are the result of a vaccine-induced strain that’s twice as deadly as the original form.

Blindness to health being related to the whole organism has resulted in missing the truth about micro organisms: They aren’t the enemy. They are, in fact, a necessary part of what we are.

Unfortunately, mainstream medicine hasn’t learned its lesson. The new focus on microbes is being handled in just the same way that all health issues are handled: The microbiome is thought of as equivalent to another organ. The goal is to manipulate it, to force it into a definition of what the latest theory states it should be. To this end, anything that’s profitable will be used to tame this new organ, to bring it into line.

The Necessity of the Microbiome

We cannot exist separately from microflora, and can even be thought of as walking sacs of symbiotic microscopic organisms. Some of those organisms are our cells. They are so tightly bound to each other that they can exist only as part of a single human body.

Mitochondria are literally separate life forms that exist inside every cell in our bodies. They have formed a symbiotic relationship with our cells, providing energy in exchange for sustenance. However, their life cycle is separate from that of every cell in which they exist.

Other organisms fill the entire digestive tract. Without them, we would be unable to break food down for absorption of nutrients. Gut flora also keeps out invading microbes. It acts as part of the immune system. In fact, at least 70% of the immune system is in the gut!

Mice raised in isolation, devoid of intestinal bacteria, develop systemic lymphopenia, which is a lack of white blood cells required to fight invading microorganisms. Their lymph systems are underdeveloped and tubes through which immune cells are transported are badly formed.

We  have a teeming biosystem on the exterior of our bodies, and bacteria also live in the skin’s layers. We don’t know much about it—but if it were inherently harmful, we certainly could not survive. Even the surface of the eye is covered with bacteria. All mucus membranes are loaded with microscopic colonies that include bacteria, fungi, and viruses.

The infamous yeast infection that so many women battle is most often a direct result of the loss of bacteria from medical treatments, which disturbs the microbe balance, leaving fungi that also coexist—normally with no adverse effects—to multiply into not only a nuisance, but a serious health threat.

Did you know that breast milk is teeming with bacteria? Infants that don’t receive Bifidobacteria from breast milk have underdeveloped thymus glands, which are important in launching an immune response.

Are you aware that virtually all of us harbor harmful bacteria all the time? The infamous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, MRSA, lives on the skin of many people—yet usually there’s no problem. It’s when the natural bacteria balance is disrupted that MRSA runs rampant. The same is true of staph infections in general. Our bodies are loaded with staph germs, but it’s only when something does harm to the balance of bacteria that staph infections become diseases.

The Importance of Balance

Bacteria and other micro organisms that populate our bodies are generally thought of as good or probiotics – or bad, meaning disease-causing. But it isn’t that simple. Yes, it’s true that much disease is the result of an imbalance allowing the disease-causing germs to run rampant.

However, the bad bacteria do serve a useful function. They keep the probiotics in check. An overgrowth of good bacteria in the small intestine is often associated with inflammatory bowel diseases like irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease.

Excessive “good” bacteria in the intestines can literally eat too much of our food, so that nutrients can’t get to our cells. Leaky gut syndrome may be related to excessive amounts of “good” bacteria—and leaky gut syndrome can be related to or cause neurological problems. There are also indications that celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis are associated with excessive amounts of “good” bacteria.

Therefore, it doesn’t do us any good to try to eliminate the “bad” bacteria, because they do serve a critical function: They keep the “good” bacteria from running rampant.

Medical Harm from the Narrow View

We’ve seen how much harm comes from this approach to health, this focus on individual body parts instead of the whole. Most treatments for most diseases result in damage to the body. For example:

• Steroids, casually used to treat asthma, skin problems, and many other conditions, cause a wide range of devastating damage, including, but certainly not limited to, diabetes and Cushing’s syndrome.
• Antibiotics result in deranged gut biota and increase the chance of developing cancer.
• Statins, given out like candy to most people on reaching a certain age, are cytotoxic and can lead to kidney failure.
• Vioxx is now the standard example of a drug doing more harm than good. It’s credited with killing tens of thousands of people who took it for pain reduction.
• Diflucan, used to treat fungal infections, is now known to cause birth defects.
• Neuroleptics, used to suppress symptoms of psychosis, may reduce life expectancy by 25 years, and cause some of the worst possible neurological damage, including akathisia and tardive dyskinesia.

Intriguingly, many of the conditions these drugs are used to treat are directly or indirectly related to deranged gut biota, much of which is the direct result of medical treatments!

So, scientists are now organizing to do extensive research on the human microbiome because of their new-found realization that it’s so critical to health. Their goals, though are not to find out why the natural microbial balance goes awry. Of course not! That would be counter to the single most important product of modern medicine, profits.

Certainly, there are occasions when this radical focus is more beneficial than harmful. Nonetheless, the wholesale view of humans as nothing but conglomerations of organs and body parts, each of which can be treated as a separate unit, has proven to produce immense harm. Rather than taking that lesson on board with respect to the microbiota coexisting with humans, they seem to have doubled down. Our microbiota will be treated as if they are nothing more than a previously unknown organ that should be managed and controlled by every means available to modern medicine.

Graphic obtained from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Sources:

• NIH Human Microbiome Project
• Microbiota-Targeted Therapies: An Ecological Perspective
• Role of Commensal Flora in Mucosal Immune Development
• Tending the Body’s Microbial Garden
• Gut Flora and Your Healthy Immune System
• The Psychiatric Drugging of America’s Foster Children
• The Effects of Too Much Good Bacteria in the Intestines
• Human Skin Alive with Bacteria