What Is SANUM Therapy? Enderlein's Model of Pleomorphism and Symbiosis

Part 1 of our series, "Understanding SANUM Therapy."

This article is educational in nature and does not replace personalised medical advice. If you are managing a health condition, please consult a qualified practitioner.

Look down a microscope at a single bacterium and the assumption most of us grew up with is that it will stay a bacterium — one species, one shape, one behaviour, for as long as it lives. That assumption, monomorphism, has quietly underpinned most of modern medicine's thinking about infection for more than a century. SANUM therapy begins by rejecting it.

The founder of this school of thought, the German microbiologist Professor Dr Günther Enderlein (1872–1968), spent more than forty years and over 500 published papers building the opposite case: that microorganisms are not fixed at all, but pleomorphic — capable of developing through a whole series of forms, from the tiniest sub-viral particle up to fully formed bacteria and fungi, without ever losing the thread of what they fundamentally are. It is this idea, pleomorphism, together with its companion concept of symbiosis, that gives the SANUM range of remedies its internal logic. Understanding it is the key that unlocks everything else in this series, from why a remedy is chosen by microbial species rather than by symptom, to why the Sanum approach spends so much energy on the terrain of the body rather than only the invader.

Bechamp's Microzymas and the Roots of the Idea

Enderlein did not start from nothing. He built on the work of the French researcher Antoine Béchamp, whose book Les Microzymas had already argued, decades earlier, that under the right conditions a microorganism could appear in strikingly different developmental stages and forms without losing its specific identity. Béchamp went further, showing that every animal and plant cell contains tiny particles which survive the death of the organism and out of which new microorganisms can develop. This was the seed of pleomorphism: the idea that a microbial world exists inside us that is far more fluid, and far more entangled with our own biology, than the "one germ, one disease" model of Louis Pasteur allowed for.

Where Pasteur held that microorganisms simply exist, static and unchanging, Enderlein's decades of darkfield microscopy on living blood convinced him this could not be maintained. He described mobile, almost invisibly small living forms in the blood — which he called Spermits — copulating with higher organised structures to produce even tinier, invisible products. He interpreted this as evidence of a genuine sexual process at the microbial level, and he named the resulting symbiotic, primal plant germ living inside the red blood cell the Endobiont.

A Genuine Symbiosis — Until It Isn't

The crucial word here is symbiosis, not infection. In Enderlein's model, the Endobiont lives inside us in a relationship of mutual benefit, not attack. Triggered by external factors, it can multiply and develop — a process capable of considerably disturbing the symbiotic equilibrium — but a healthy organism has the capacity to restore that balance. In this self-correcting process, more highly developed, potentially pathogenic forms of the Endobiont are broken back down into harmless primitive forms and quietly leave the body through its own organs of elimination.

Symbiosis is abandoned, according to Enderlein, when the symbiont makes itself independent and becomes a parasite instead. In doing so it passes through three basic developmental phases: colloid, then bacterium, then fungus. It develops from a nonpathogenic, non-mobile, tiniest albuminoid particle — which he called a Protit, roughly the size of a virus — through a nonpathogenic Chondrit stage, and only then into the parasitic, pathogenic stages we would recognise as bacterium and fungus. Crucially, Enderlein did not see these as separate, unrelated organisms. He saw them as one continuous cycle, a cyclogeny, all originating in the same colloidal, albuminoid substance contained inside every cell.

This upward development, from harmless colloid toward higher-valenced, more toxic parasitic forms, is what Enderlein held responsible for a striking range of everyday complaints: headaches, high or low blood pressure, poor complexion, lassitude, lack of appetite, a coated tongue, mouth wounds, pimples, catarrhs, ear noises, diarrhoea, reduced vision or hearing, low mood, and poor concentration or memory. He was equally clear, though, that disease is not simply defeat — it also represents the body's healing process attempting to restore the original, healthy state of symbiosis. Whether the organism's own self-healing forces win out, or whether the symbiont is able to develop unchecked into a parasite, depends above all on the condition of the internal milieu in which the disturbance occurs.

Why the Milieu Matters More Than the Microbe

This is the point at which Enderlein's theory becomes genuinely practical rather than purely academic. If the inner milieu is damaged — through poor nutrition, environmental toxins, constant infection, or even psychological strain — the result is a disturbed acid-base equilibrium, and the body's self-healing forces become incapable of restoring symbiotic balance. Disease follows. The cyclogenetic rise of these microorganisms into higher, more pathogenic stages is, in Enderlein's framing, always conditioned by the state of the milieu around them.

"A healthy organism is capable of restoring the equilibrium. In this process, the more highly developed pathogenic germs are broken down into nonpathogenic primitive forms... They leave the body via the natural organs of elimination."

This single idea — that the terrain governs whether a microorganism stays a quiet symbiont or turns into an aggressive parasite — is the foundation for everything SANUM therapy sets out to do. It is not a strategy of attacking a specific germ. It is a strategy of supporting the body's own capacity to keep its internal microbial population in the low-valenced, cooperative phase where it belongs, and of helping it back there when it has drifted too far into pathogenic territory.

From Theory to Remedy

Enderlein's laboratory work described the cyclogeny of two mould fungi in particular detail — Aspergillus niger and Mucor racemosus — tracing each from its most primitive colloidal particle, through the bacterial phase, up to the fully developed fungal stage. These two organisms, more than any others, became the template for what is now the best-known pairing in the entire SANUM range: Nigersan®, built from the low-valenced phases of Aspergillus niger, and Mucokehl®, built from the low-valenced phases of Mucor racemosus. Both are supplied as nonpathogenic, low-developmental-stage preparations — what Enderlein termed Chondritins — designed to support the body's own regenerative capabilities rather than to suppress a symptom directly.

That distinction, between supporting the body's own return to symbiotic equilibrium and simply attacking an invader, is what separates isopathic therapy of this kind from more familiar approaches. In the next article in this series, we look more closely at cyclogeny itself: the specific stages a symbiont passes through on its journey from harmless colloid to disease-causing parasite, and why understanding that pathway explains so much about how and when a SANUM remedy is chosen.

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Related reading

• The Cyclogeny of the Endobiont: How a Symbiont Becomes a Parasite
• Mucokehl and Nigersan: The Two Foundation Stones of Basic Regulation
• The 4-Step Werthmann Protocol: How a Full SANUM Programme Is Built

Source: SANUM-Kehlbeck Practitioner Reference Guide, Preface — "Origins of Pleomorphism," "Pleomorphism and Cyclogeny," and "The Nature of the Primal Germs and Symbiosis"; G. Enderlein, Bacteria Cyclogeny (Berlin, 1925); A. Béchamp, Les Microzymas.

Tags: Sanum Articles, Understanding SANUM Therapy, Pleomorphism, Enderlein, Isopathy