Parasites are not the reason for sickness, why?
- **Failed causation test:** If organisms cause disease, introducing them into healthy hosts should reliably make them sick. Controlled attempts to transmit illness to healthy subjects repeatedly failed, even for emblematic “highly infectious” conditions .
- **Host conditions come first:** The body permits organisms to colonize only when specific local conditions exist (e.g., toxins, dead tissue, repair). Remove the underlying condition and the organisms recede—no “eradication” needed. This flips the causal arrow from “organism → illness” to “condition → organism” .
- **Correlation is not causation:** “Trichinae” and similar cases appear with or without symptoms; literature that equates raw meat with “infection” relies on associations, not decisive causal proof .
- **Paradigm-level failure of contagion:** The broader “germ makes you sick by transfer” model fails its own stress tests; without reproducible transmission under control, the premise that “parasites” are primary causes lacks foundation .
- **More parsimonious model:** Organisms are context-dependent responders within the host’s equilibrium, not initiating agents of disease. Address the underlying condition, and the organisms withdraw accordingly .