Obviously before modern medicine, people were still dying in droves of relatively minor things like infections and undefined ailments. The point I am making is that medicine and pharmaceutics insist that there is only ONE WAY to treat medical problems. While on the edges of the field many highly qualified and successful physicians and researchers are finding natural remedies that work as well if not better. Curiously, drug companies hate Placebo’s because they are around 50% effective (like many drugs). Considering that many drugs are far below that effectiveness should make you ponder what is actually happening (we’ll get to this in later blogs down another branch of the rabbit hole). Many well-designed drug studies fail because the drug is only as good as a placebo it is tested against. You would think that any avenue of treatment that seems to work would be rigorously investigated, but unfortunately rigid belief systems get in the way and a system that is controlled by profit sadly debunks anything that is not under their auspices and such treatments never make the mainstream. Alternate medicine really upsets the modern medical field because they truly believe in what they do, but like any fundamentalist belief, anything outside their field of vision is treated as wrong and they wage a small war against them! The drug companies are in it for the money and many in the medical field with an authoritarian attitude do belief that they are protecting users from sham treatments. The reality? Do your homework. Wholistic naturopathic treatments are incredibly cheap and when mixed with nutritious and carefully considered diets have been shown to strengthen and enhance health and immunity better than most drugs and invasive treatments. Yet the reductionist medical field really goes out of its way to ‘save you’ and prevent ‘quackery’ from Holistic ideas. Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is a good quote. Is it, however, good to say that this works for any system in which you might invest yourself. Any belief system that actively represses ideas is always suspect, no matter how well intentioned it might seem on the surface. Work by Mark Hyman is a good start for understanding how the medical system has relentlessly pursues an agenda to keep you in place and expose ‘Quakery.’ It might be expedient to ask who benefits and who is harmed by any agenda. This of course requires knowledge of what is going on behind the ‘wizards’ green curtain.
Medical research is blinkered by a belief that the only solution to most diseases has to be a chemical or surgical intervention of some kind. A reductionist mentality. Research that actually works for prevention is discouraged since it would reduce profits from treatments designed to keep a continuous stream of profits coming in. As such (despite the increasing wellness care options) we are reactive to our bodies in that we only start thinking about health when a symptom occurs that disrupts our state of health. One intriguing aspect of holistic medical options is that now working to understand the human microbiome. There are some 100 trillion cells in the body and apparently, a whopping 90% of them are various bacterial organisms living symbiotically within the digestive system. The Meta-HIT consortium reports that the microbiome has some 3.3 million non-redundant genes compared to the mere 22,000 genes present in the entire human genome. And the genetic diversity of the microbiome is itself vast with 80-90% differences among the various species. Consider that all us humans are 99.9% similar in our genome. The microbiome is much more important to our health than we can imagine, yet modern medicine has barely acknowledged this. The ‘bad bacteria’ we encounter that create illness account for only 15% of the planets bacteria and of that number only a few of those that occasionally invade our bodies. It would seem that this microbiome we all have is unique to each of us. This would suggest that in future, doctors will analyze our microbiome as part of a more fruitful personalized medical analysis to inform healthcare decisions. This of course will require understanding of how the microbiome affects the relatively constant host genome. The good news is that this research is beginning and some doctors are already providing health support using the microbiome.
This microbiome, coupled with digestive enzymes, breaks down the food we eat through various cascade stages of fermentation before it is absorbed into our bloodstream. The microbiome also acts in various places of our body to boost the immune system itself. A healthy microbiome has been shown to keep the bad bacteria away and to also reduce the problems of inflammation, which is the bodies hard response to insults to the body system overall. Naturally, the microbiome itself is kept healthy by a healthy diet (including natural prebiotics) and a healthy stress reduced lifestyle. Unfortunately, over-prescription of antibiotic drugs are used to combat pathogenic bacterial species in us and also used in keeping feedlot animals from dying before they can be slaughtered for food. Taking antibiotics for a viral infection, besides being ineffective, also increases the growing drug resistance found in the bacterial world. The current generation of antibiotics (that still work in this world of worrying drug resistance) are broad spectrum and target broad swaths of the good microbiota as well. Then we have mitochondria within our cells that are also bacterial in origin that are also victims to many drugs. The Collateral damage from well-intentioned mainstream medical interventions is staggering.
Naturopathic medicine that focusses on the whole body is now increasing. There has been a lot of ‘debunking’ of this field that is claimed by the mainstream to be ineffective. YET, the results are often actually better than mainstream interventions. Puzzling, perhaps, but recall how effective placebos are! I end this here to emphasize that something else is going on and that this moves well beyond mainstream belief systems, although some mainstream scientists are now working to explain how this system works. I’ll get to that in future blogs. Let’s stick to the hard road for the time-being. Suffice to say, Sustainable Living will be much more than just using green and ‘better’ technology for health and living, which seems to be the road society is taking. It will encompass a whole new way of thinking about who and what we are and how we relate to the natural world and each other. Hippocrates also said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Next stop, how our food systems are killing us and what we can do about it.
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