My local Whole Foods store is located right across the street from the regional hospital. I was sitting in the cafe area at Whole Foods one day, looking out onto the hospital’s shiny new building, when the paradox represented by those two edifices started to seep into my awareness and the most astonishing thought occurred to me:
We are the only species that, as a matter of course, goes to someone else to fix us when we’re ill or injured.
(It also occurred to me that if we ate a more wholesome diet, we’d need hospitals less, but I'll get to that later.)
Here we are, with these marvelous bodies that are inherently designed to be self-maintaining and self-repairing, and innately wise, and yet most of the time we have absolutely no idea how to take good care of ourselves. (Or we do know, but we just don’t do it...) We seem to live in constant need of the advice of one expert or another, just to do something that the “lower orders,” wild animals especially, instinctively know how to do.
As our societies have evolved, we’ve fragmented ourselves into two groups: the healers/shamans/doctors, and everybody else. We’ve even created an aura of mystique around the knowledge and abilities of those we’ve designated “healers.” (And if you think that sort of superstition is limited to the more simplistic indiginous cultures, then consider the power of the white coat in modern medicine.)
In essence, we’ve abandoned our innate knowledge and ability to sense what our bodies need in order to get and stay well, and we’ve abdicated that responsibility to someone outside ourselves. Often to our immediate benefit (which keeps us doing it), but ultimately to our individual and collective detriment. We’ve forgotten how to be, and how to take good care of ourselves.
Of course, if I have a broken leg, I would be very appreciative of someone x-raying it for me and stabilising the fracture (not to mention dispensing some sort of pain-reliever), rather than me having to hobble around like a wounded gazelle until the bone heals or I die of an ensuing infection, predation, or starvation. I don’t want to belittle the contributions of modern medicine in dealing with medical emergencies. Where it falls down, however, is in the treatment of chronic medical conditions and in maintaining good health for life.
We've even forgotten what good health looks like - and feels like. More on that next.
Stay tuned...
No comments:
Post a Comment