On a recent episode of “The Model Health Show,” Dr. Zach Bush, triple board-certified physician and thought leader on the microbiome, challenged the “us versus them” model of germ theory: “Without microbes, we don’t exist.”

Dr. Zach Bush, a thought leader on the human microbiome, challenged the “us versus them” model of germ theory on a recent episode of “The Model Health Show” with Shawn Stevenson.

“Without microbes, we don’t exist,” Bush told Stevenson. “There’s 20 years now of extraordinary answers to that question that are really bending our understanding of human physiology and more recently bending our understanding of what consciousness is,” Bush said.

Bush is a triple board-certified physician specializing in internal medicine, endocrinology and hospice care. He is an internationally recognized educator and thought leader on the microbiome as it relates to health, disease and food systems.

Bush told Stevenson:

“We believed the human immune system was keeping the body sterile, and it was ‘us against the world.’ We had to fight off the germs. We had to fight off the viruses. We had to fight off to keep a territory clean so that limited resources within the body were preserved for human use. That was our model for at least the last 150 years of Western allopathic medicine history.”

But the last 20 years of scientific discovery about how a healthy human body is inhabited by trillions of microbes, including bacteria and viruses, and how the body relies on the presence of these microbes to function, have “disrupted” this model, Bush said.