Microbes live in us and around us, on our skin, in our guts, and in the air, water, and soil of our natural environment. And yet, we’ve been taught by medicine to fear them. We’ve been told that they make us sick, that their presence is the cause of disease rather than an outcome of disease— a sign that a disease process has already occurred as the body fought for its health and restored its homeostasis. In Germs Are Not Our Enemy: Why the New Terrain Medicine Is Best for Optimal Health, Marizelle Arce, N.D., a naturopathic physician, will explain why “germs” are not what people commonly believe them to be. Not our enemy. Then she’ll posit an alternative, preventative approach to health and healing that is a better way than conventional medicine, which relies overmuch on toxic chemicals and invasive practices. Louis Pasteur got it wrong.
Naturopathic medicine is an old-fashioned (in the best sense of the term), common-sense approach to strengthening the body’s innate resources and homeostatic balancing mechanisms so disease does not occur. The core idea is that if we support the body, the body can overcome challenges itself. Until the twentieth-century, naturopathic practitioners were recognized as the peers of medical doctors and osteopaths in the United States, and worked in the same institutions. But American culture has a fondness for overriding nature with technology and synthetic substances that can be patented and sold. Our medical and pharmaceutical system became such a big business that physicians treating people by promoting a healthy lifestyle based on good nutrition, clean water and air, sleep, and other routines that are just being remembered now—because we desperately need them—were pushed to the side. Today, more and more
Germs Are Not Our Enemy © 2023 by Marizelle Arce, N.D. 3
people in the United States and other industrially developed nations are clamoring for a change that brings us back into harmony with nature. This book will reveal a path to freedom which begins by restoring suppressed knowledge about what makes us sick and how we stay well. Health experts, parents, and wellness enthusiasts all want the madness to stop.
There are a lot of people feeling afraid for their lives because of public policies that were enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic and messages that indicated they should feel threatened. There are also a lot of people feeling fed up and angry because they believe they’ve been lied to by a government that is too controlling and subjected against their will to efforts by a medical system that is pushing bad and dangerous products on them in pursuit of profits. Germs Are Not the Enemy is for these people.
Nature is around us, and within us. To honor and support our inherent natural healing mechanisms, we must first shift the mindset and attitudes that get in the way of doing what is best for our bodies. Why do some people become sick when exposed to pathogens and others do not? Because healthy, resilient individuals have an internal terrain that is impervious to them. The terrain is more important than the pathogens that grow in it.
The new terrain medicine takes advantage of contemporary tools that can help us analyze the physiology of blood for nutritional imbalances and the presence of toxins. But in many ways, its essential practices are quite similar to those of our forebears in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Science has advanced in its ability to peer into the microscopic world. So, it is now time to correct the mistakes we’ve made in our society based on wrong information.
Terrain medicine is built on recognition that human health and the health of the world are integrally linked in every regard. Our bodies are one with the environment that surrounds us.