There’s a revolution happening in the world of medicine, or rather, the reclamation of health. The last century-and-a-half has marked a devolution of the human race marked by a paradigm that has served to disempower people from knowing their own bodies and convincing them to settle for normalized dysfunction. We have been psychologically primed to believe that diabetes, heart disease, menstrual irregularities, chronic pain, autoimmune disease, cancer, low libido, depression, anxiety, acne, insomnia, bowel disorders, and infertility are normal. Here’s the truth, while these classified disorders may be disturbingly commonplace in our culture, there is absolutely nothing normal about them.
The twentieth century was marked by the advent of convenience food and the industrial food complex, the explosion of the chemical industry, a convergence of medicine and capitalism that destroyed the doctor patient relationship, and a mental paradigm shift that made helpless victims, otherwise called patients, out of people who fully possess the capacity to heal themselves.
HEAL/HELIOS/HELJAN
TREAT/TRACTRE
A shift occurred divorcing science from intuition and personal truth, autonomy, and intuition. We are in an age of medicine where the technological advances of Western medicine should have converged and embraced the ancient wisdom and healing traditions of cultures past, and yet we have created a global cohort of “civilized” humans who are the most inflamed, depressed, anxious, and chronically ill in the history of man and womankind. In an arrogant attempt to conquer Mother Nature, we’ve lost touch with the very essence of the things that make us human. Modern medicine, by now, should have created a healing paradigm made up of a multitude of healing modalities that honor not only the mechanics and biochemistry of the human body, but the psychospirtual and socio cultural factors that are more frequently at the root of all imbalance that Western medicine calls disease.
Most doctors enter into medical school with the intention to be facilitators of their patients healing, however, most do not sign on realizing that the system is set up to create repeat customers reliant on pharmaceutical and radical surgical quick fixes that rarely address the root cause of one’s unwellness to begin with. The insurance system altered the doctor patient relationship allowing for only short visits for physicians to make symptom check lists and reference the corresponding pharmaceutical offerings for the closest symptom suppressing chemical combination. A century ago, doctors had very personal and intimate relationships with their patients often spending hours getting to know the individual, their families, understand their work life, their traumas, their stress, and all the things that brought them joy in life. A fifteen minute visit to a local clinic or a telehealth visit cannot impart such a relationship between doctor and patient.
The goal of medicine should be to assist an individual in healing, not to make one numb, and yet the objective of many allopathic therapies is to make one just not feel pain without regard for whether or not the therapy restores one’s ability to experience their own humanness. The human experience encompasses all ends of the spectrum from joy and pleasure to grief and pain. Pain is the body’s way of telling us when something needs attending to. Anesthetizing the pain does not make the source of the pain go away, it just interrupts the signal while the underlying condition that employed the pain to garner our attention is allowed to further grow, oftentimes in to much more serious problems down the line. Whether the pain is physical or mental, a tremendous opportunity is missed when we ignore the underlying cause and skip to a pill or procedure that just disrupts the pain signal or removes the symptomatic body part without addressing the root cause.
Here’s the good news. People are tired of status quo medical standards and are departing the system in record numbers seeking true healing solutions with functional medicine practicioners, psychologists, naturopaths, homeopaths, osteopaths, nutrition professionals, health coaches, bodyworkers, physical therapists, fasciliators of mind/body healing modalities, and “alternative” healers. They are beginning to recognize that real advances in medical technology often lie in reviving ancient healing modalities in modern ways. They are beginning to tune in to their own intuition in order to empower their own healing. They are starting to accept and embrace that our biology was designed for a simpler world and we cannot merely force that biology into submission to live in a overly busy world filled with chronic stress we were not designed to handle, food we were not designed to eat, and toxins of which our detoxification pathways are not capable of keeping up. When we choose to live in alignment with our own biology, balance is a natural state and disease does not manifest. Treating the underlying conditions that cause disease rather than attacking the symptoms of the disease is a radically different philosophy than that currently employed in allopathic medicine. Mosquitos reproduce in swamps. The swamps do not form because of the presence of the mosquitos. Spraying pesticides to kill the existing mosquitos may provide a temporary solution to the presence of mosquitos but until the dampness of the terrain is addressed, the mosquitos will eventually return or, perhaps, take up residence in a neighboring swamp. Meanwhile, the pesticide may very well have unintended consequences for the quality and health of the ecosystem where it is administered. Perhaps, the immediate mosquito problem is addressed, but the terrain has not been restored to its original state. It is not whole and so the cycle of disease and imbalance continues.
If our medical system is to evolve into a gentler, more whole system that addresses every aspect of one’s health and humanness, change will have to be demanded by the consumer, and doctors, insurance companies, and hospital administrators will have no choice but to respond to the consumer demands. People are tired of being asked to settle for good enough, for status quo, for normalized dysfunction. There is an enormous difference between being alive and not being dead. The twenty-first century is here and certain global events are beckoning a radical paradigm shift that honors all of the human experience and our personal autonomy. Population medicine does not work. There is no clinical trial or peer reviewed study that can embrace the individuality of each person’s own experience, and while such protocols have their place in the system, they also have their limitations. It’s time to take a hard look at the state of healthcare in terms of the quality in one’s years. Embracing life requires promoting ourselves to being the drivers of our own wellness vehicles and bringing partners in healthcare as passengers who can help navigate the journey in a way that empowers patients and reveres their humanity.