Treating health based on one part of the human body is a very new phenomenon.
The rise of allopathic medicine has persuaded the world that health is achieved by controlling individual symptoms with its own medication. When one medication fixes a problem but creates three new problems, allopathic medicine prescribes three more medications, and the cycle continues.
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According to the CDC, 69% of Americans take one or more medications every day; 22.5% take five or more daily medications:
“Among adults aged 40–59, the most commonly used drug types in the United States were antidepressants, lipid-lowering drugs, and ACE inhibitors” (Hales, 2019)
Common side effects of antidepressants: weight gain, sexual dysfunction, insomnia
Common side effects of lipid-lowering drugs: diarrhea, constipation, nausea
Common side effects of ACE inhibitors: dizziness, low blood pressure, fainting
Allopathic medicine saves lives every day and it has improved human existence in many ways. Also, allopathic medicine, with its reductionist model of attempting to change one part of the complex human body, does not work for everything.
Most people would thrive if they knew how to better take care of their bodies from a whole-person perspective. Rather than trying to change a symptom of a dysfunctional lifestyle, change the lifestyle and the symptom will get better. Or better yet, leading a healthy life will prevent many diseases of the modern lifestyle from ever arising.
We tend to be incredibly spoiled with our health. We want to give the most minimal amount of effort for the greatest short-term benefit.
Why should we change our lifestyle to lower our blood pressure, if we could keep doing what we have always done, but take a pill every morning to make our blood pressure go down?
If we return to a traditional medicine point of view of our health, we can remember that our bodies are an integrated web of systems that all function together. When one function starts to slow down, there is always another system that must pick up the slack. When we put a Band-Aid over the slow system but ignore its over-worked friend, we are only delaying the future collapse of the second system!
Traditional medicine is powerful because it contains an understanding of how the systems of the body work together. This understanding is priceless for promoting health and limiting the number of prescription pills needed every morning.
Traditional medicine utilizes the power of herbal decoctions, within these decoctions are a team of herbs that create a multi-pronged effect with the human body.
Science is frustrated by the difficulty in studying the hundreds of interacting chemicals present in an herbal decoction because, it becomes impossible to isolate a single chemical that they can package and sell as a prescription pill. But this complexity is why it works so well!
The web of relationships that the herbs in a decoction contains is a direct reflection of the relationships within the human body! Why would we try to fix a complex problem with only one tool? Why not fix the problem by using a team of tools that can work together!
This is the root of the whole-person perspective of health. For a long-term, high quality of life, traditional medicine that works on the relationships within the body is the most powerful method we currently have.
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