Thoughts on Germs

Let me ask you something. When you see flies swarming a dirty garbage pail on a hot summer day, what do you think caused what?

Did the flies make the garbage dirty, or did the dirty garbage attract the flies?

The answer is obvious when you look at it that way. The flies are scavengers. They go where the conditions support them. The clean garbage pail next door, unused and fresh, has not a single fly around it. Same neighborhood. Same air. Same flies. Different conditions.

That's the whole argument right there.

A germ, by definition, is simply a living thing. The word germ literally means life. And like all living things, germs are scavengers. They go where the environment supports them. They feed on what's already breaking down.

Here's an illustration that makes this visceral. Take a maggot on the palm of your hand and keep it there. It will starve. There's nothing for it to feed on in healthy living tissue. But cut off that hand, set it down, introduce that same maggot, and watch what happens. Within a very short time it has plenty of company, feeding on tissue that life has already left.

The maggot didn't cause the death. It arrived after.

This isn't just philosophy. There's a clinical observation that supports it. Take typhoid fever. In the early stages, before anyone knows what's happening, you find very few typhoid germs. As the disease progresses over twenty-eight days, the body becomes, as the teaching goes, literally covered with them on the inside. And then, in most cases, the patient gets well.

One germ made them sick? A million germs and they recovered?

If germs were the primary cause, the logic doesn't hold. What the observation actually shows is that the disease produced the germs, not the other way around. The germs appeared in response to the diseased tissue. They were doing what scavengers do, cleaning up what the body could no longer maintain.

The common thread running through illness is not the presence of a particular microbe. Germs are everywhere, on every surface, in the air, inside your body right now in enormous numbers. Most of them never make you sick. The common thread is a body that isn't functioning normally. A system under enough stress, nutritional depletion, nervous system dysregulation, or chronic overload that the internal environment shifts from one that destroys pathogens to one that feeds them.

This matters enormously for how we think about health. If germs are the primary cause, the only rational response is to avoid them, kill them, and live in a state of defense. If the internal environment is the primary factor, then the work is completely different. It's about building resilience. Supporting the nervous system. Eating real food, sleeping, moving, reducing the chronic load that tips the terrain from health toward breakdown.

I'm not saying germs are irrelevant. Washing your hands matters. Some pathogens are genuinely dangerous in ways that require direct intervention. That's true and worth saying.

But living in fear of microbes while ignoring the conditions inside the body is like being terrified of flies while leaving the garbage to rot. The flies are the least of your problems.

The body that is functioning well is not defenseless against the microbial world. It is designed to handle it. That capacity is yours by nature. The question is always whether you're supporting the conditions that allow it to work.