Message-ID: <m0taqhe-000aqPC@aztec.co.za> Date: Fri, 12 Jan 1996 23:08:00 EET From: steve worth <mailto:stevew@AZTEC.CO.ZA> Subject: traditional medicine To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Hi!Don't know if this is still topical, but I received a message from someone working in the US government who has something to add to the mortar...but cannot for personal reasons submit the information under his/her name.
The contribution follows:
Steve Worth wrote:
Where do the practices of chiropacty, reflexology, acupuncture, kenesiology, homeopathy, etc. fit? Traditional healing?
Does healing become OKAY only when Western Science has proved it? And again, I seem to recall that most of our Western medicinal compounds had their origin in some or other herb --- afterall, penecillin is a mold -- oooooh voodoo!
Our anomymous contributor replies:
I know a [former] traditional healer. They believe that there is no such thing as an incurable disease, only incurable people. My friend cites Voltaire, "the purpose of the doctor is to amuse the patient while nature does its work". My friend could take on any disease, AIDS, Cancer, Crohn's (?) syndrome, you name it, and have it gone in a couple of months. Whatever it was. It required not eating processed food, and several other lifestyle changes, which many people won't do, of course. I believe he came out of Dr. John Christopher's tradition, in part, with some Native American, Chinese, Persian, Hawaiian, and Ayurvedic stuff also.
His beliefs are consistent with what I've learned from other Native American healers. Basically, on the right diet and lifestyle, he said there is no need for modern medicine, other than perhaps trauma from accidents. Heart disease, the major killer in this country, is diet induced. Heart transplants? What a joke. Which is more cost-effective, changing the diet, or changing the heart out? A Navajo grandfather, he notes, can outrun his grandson - on a 20 mile course. We don't know what good health is, he says, because all we know is the pathology of the average.
If you want to see where our culture is at, read Herodotus on the Scythians. Just that. Because our diet is making us more and more like them. Look at perfectly embalmed foods, like Maraschino cherries, and Hostess Twinkies... Don't believe me. Do your own survey of what any criminal population eats. You'll wonder, not why society is falling apart, but what holds it together.
Of course, my friend doesn't practice any more. The FDA used to raid him repeatedly. You know, they don't care about quacks. They care about people who heal. Numerous healers in this century have been viciously persecuted by a medical community that resents competition that knows what it's doing. Homeopathy, to cite one example in this country, he notes, had a consistent track record better than allopathy, before the MD's wiped it out.
I worked in a hospital once. Oh yes, some individuals are very motivated, and so forth. I have great respect for some doctors, even if they lack 80% of the tools of the "traditional" healers they malign. Yet my friend says the system itself is a temple of death. I used to feel sick to my stomach to come to work. I will do whatever I have to to never enter that place, ever, as a patient. A friend of mine went $800,000 in the hole for experimental allopathic cancer therapy for his wife, who died on schedule. He used to ask, who do you go to for quackery on that scale. Check under the bed, in most hospital rooms. You don't need a white glove to get all kinds of dust... see if they rotate germicides, to keep down immune strains... that hospital didn't.
My friend noted that "traditional healers" ridiculed by modern medicine, at least in North America, had an apprenticeship 3 TIMES as long as what MD's get. Furthermore, they had to have a good track record. Try to get your hands on research on iatrogenic illness, though... Just try. Robert Mendelsohn, MD, noted some of the above, also.
Hippocrates said let food be your medicine, and your medicine be your food. Modern med schools typically have no nutrition courses at all. I work, in part, in community development. You know, no-one looks at the role of diet in behavior. A pity, because it is impeding a lot of good ideas. As White Man food makes its way into the developing countries, oddly enough White Man social problems follow right after. I'm told that cultures that generate epic poetry also consume dairy products... I wonder what other correlations one might make.
It doesn't really matter to me whether my friend is correct or not. I don't have time to confirm it. I do know that most of Western culture is too grossly arrogant to listen to what the traditional cultures have to say. There was some guy doing research early in this century, on how eskimos get Vitamin A or something. They didn't want to talk to him, because, as they said, "the White Man already knows everything". They did finally talk, because he told them that White Man food was bad for them, which they didn't hear from too many outsiders.
I suspect most doctors mean well. Most people in the military also mean well, but I wouldn't want to get in their way, either. I don't have to worry. Allopathic medicine is doing precisely what the auto companies say the UAW is, it is pricing itself out of the market. Alternative medicines [now that's a joke: medical practices with in some cases several thousand years of track record being called alternative] are growing by leaps and bounds, out of sheer necessity.
As to breech birth, my father was born at home, as were most babies, before WWII. My former spouse has given birth to 3 children at home. They are much smarter, she thinks because they didn't have drugs associated with the birthing process to mess up their nervous systems. I don't know about malaria, I don't live in a tropical area.
Of course, I'm not an MD, never will be, and wouldn't consider giving any form of medical advice to anyone. I just don't know. I do know what my gut says when I enter a hospital, which is to stay as far away from it as I can.
Westerners are so arrogant. I remember reading about some college types who went to teach the Hopi how to grow corn! The Hopi have been growing maize since it was developed, i.e. for a few thousand years, but the professors went to teach them! Oddly enough, their crops died, but the Hopi crops produced.
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