To appreciate the juxtaposition between this extra-cellular matrix and cellular detoxification in the context of health verses disease, it’s worth acknowledging the ongoing debate between Naturopathic medicine and Allopathic medicine.
This debate is ultimately about where disease originates from and considers whether disease starts with an infectious agent, and is therefore the cause of all disease. Or, whether the main cause of disease is in fact the result of changes in our biological terrain, that includes the interstitial tissues and lymphatic system, allowing opportunistic infections to take hold.
Historically speaking, the most recent chapter in this debate goes back to the19th Century when there was an alleged debate between Louis Pasteur, who was the founder ‘Germ Theory’ and his contemporaries Claude Bernard, a French physiologist who coined the term “milieu interieur” and Antoine Bechamp, an organic chemist who developed Cellular Theory and realised the importance of endogenous bacteria to health.
Although these three brilliant scientific minds were contempries and apparently friends, they certainly opposed each other’s advancements in science and thinking. At the time, the illness paradigm (Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory) ‘won’ the debate in ‘the principle of wellness’ and since that time it has never been disproven. Our entire medical model and ‘advancements in science’ our based upon this one landmark event.
However, Claude Bernard argued that “the microbe in nothing and the terrain is everything” meaning that the changes in the host’s biological terrain are responsible for allowing opportunistic infections to take hold. The Naturopaths of today pay attention to all factors that influence the milieu interieur which includes diet and lifestyle choices, environmental toxins, psychology and emotions.
This debate between infectious agents verses biological terrain continues to be even more relevant today with the stunning increase of environments toxicants adulterating every level of our lives; food, air, water, clothes, home environments, beauty and health products.