Medicine

I belong to a skeptics group on Facebook, and someone recently posted this image.  You’re likely to have one of a few reactions; you absolutely agree, and you wish everyone understood how true it is, you absolutely disagree, and you wish everyone understood how untrue it is, you may not care, or perhaps there’s some middle ground.

From the skeptic’s side, I can totally understand where the argument holds water.  If you broke your leg in a car accident and needed immediate attention, you’d want medicine to numb the pain while the doctor fixed the fracture.  Later, that leg wound gets infected, and you’ll want antibiotics to kill off the potentially lethal infestation.

There are few people who would take a native ritual dance in place of western medicine in this, or any other similar situation.  But I think most of us reading would agree that medicine is in fact not always the best answer.  For the skeptics out there, let me help you understand our position.

Modern medicine is great at treating acute medical conditions.  We can replace a missing hormone with a drug and get that patient bouncing back home to live an otherwise unlikely 20 years.  But what about the other scores of health conditions that people go see the doctor for?  Unfortunately for the millions of chronic disease sufferers of the world, pharmaceuticals have their share of shortcomings.

Let’s look at chronic fatigue.  Every day medical doctors scratch their heads in response to someone whose blood work shows no abnormalities, yet they’re constantly complaining about a lack of energy.  Will a cocktail of chemicals really revive their strength, or is there something more?  The doctor may prescribe an anti-depressant, anti-inflammatory, anti-this, or anti-that… but introducing these drugs along with their side effects is really only perturbing the body further, and and denying the patient what they need, or ignoring what they need to change, in order to allow proper healing to take place.

Naturopathy is growing tremendously in popularity because these are exactly the areas of health that NDs (Naturopathic Doctors) address.  They don’t (usually) look at a set of symptoms and try to find a drug to target each one.  Rather, they look at the body as a whole, and seek to intervene with lifestyle changes that will give the patient’s body an opportunity to restore its own, innate, hard-wired code back into robustness and health.

In fact, the rivalry is dying down in the 21st Century as Allopathic and Naturopathic medicine seek common ground.  Medical doctors understand the importance of diet and stress, just as Naturopaths understand the need for antibiotics.  It’s becoming less black and white, and the sides are joining forces in response to patients’ demands.

So I suppose that in some cases, yes — medicine absolutely is the best medicine.  But in the majority of daily health complaints from average Joe’s, I would wager that there is a better solution.  A much better and easier solution, in fact, that only requires a little patience, knowledge, and dedication.

Let medicine be medicine.  Let food be the cure.