So Much to Learn About Our Health and Medicine
Saturday, March 31, 2007 at 03:31PM If you’re coming to this blog for the first time, or you haven’t read my previous post, I strongly suggest you take a look and focus especially on the exchange of comments following that post. They are not only tremendously informative, but also quite moving.
I commend Mary McGonigle-Martin and Tony Martin, the parents of a young California boy who became quite ill last fall after drinking raw milk, for their willingness to engage in this kind of open discussion. I commend others for their sensitivity, as well as their enlightening comments.
A few things that come out of this exchange for me:
--That “holistic” medicine, by viewing the entire body-mind system, is so totally at odds with how our culture views health as to be nearly from another planet. How easily we (yours truly included) may look to holistic approaches for answers, yet still fall into the traps of our conventional system, sometimes without realizing it, of misunderstanding and misinterpreting illness and turning it into something to be avoided at all costs. So I could especially appreciate the notion of our society having turned occasional serious illness into ongoing chronic illness.
--How much there is to learn about health care, and how the learning should be a positive thing, rather than something to be disparaged. I say this from the perspective of how the subject of raw milk is treated by public health authorities: that it’s dangerous, to be consumed at your own risk, case closed. That many of these public health individuals are scientists makes their attitude even more unpsetting. Why not further exploration as to why raw milk is so powerful in easing various conditions, and under what conditions it potentially becomes a danger? Maybe some of the lessons about its power can be transferred to other areas of health and medicine.
--The danger of extrapolating major conclusions from individual situations. We do that a lot in our culture, and as a media person I’m as guilty as the next journalist. Not unexpectedly, the individuals affected—whether by raw milk, an auto accident, a crime—extrapolate from their own experiences. Individual examples can be helpful in explaining complex situations, but they also run a danger, well articulated in the comments.
For additional discussion, take a look at the Honest Human by Suzanne, who launched the exchange on my previous posting.
Reader Comments (2)
As always, this post is thoughtful and well said. I am especially interested in your first point, as "holistic" health often finds itself using natural remedies in the same fashion as allopathic medicine.
This herb for this aliment, this treatment for this malady -- certainly, this method is less toxic than the approach by conventional medicine, which at this point has devolved almost entirely into pharmaceuticals, but in this little-bit-of-this, little-bit-of-that approach misses the beauty and simplicity of what the holistic paradigm has to offer.
That is treating the patient as a whole being, and recognizing that different symptoms are all reflective of the same underlying dysfunction, unique to that individual. Allopathic medicine treats all eczema the same way, with the same cream, but the root cause for me and the root cause for my neighbor are often quite different, and thus the remedy may need to be quite different, as well.
Mental and emotional symptoms, almost uniformly dismissed by our medical system as irrelevant to our physical condition, are often the most important signs of what ails us and ultimately can lead us on the path to cure.
Cure itself is an interesting word, and one we don't often hear in conventional medicine, because it doesn't really exist. There are many cures in truly holistic modalities, however, because at its best holistic medicine works with the body -- which wants desperately to heal itself, and, with some guidance, knows how -- instead of against it.
For an amazing read on the science behind body-mind medicine, and also a captivating look inside the medical research establishment (and its strong resistance to investigate holistic therapies for fears of rocking the conventional model to the ground), I highly recommend a book by Dr. Candace Pert called Molecules of Emotion. I am 2/3 the way through it right now, and it's captivating. I wrote more about it on this post:
http://www.honesthuman.com/?p=457
Thank you for the lively discussion,
Suzanne