Modern Medicine: The Non-Healing Art.

An old problem, with a deceivingly 'modern' name.

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

My family is on the brink of new horizons: a new state, new home, new job, and InshAllah a healthy new life welcomed into our growing tribe.

It is therefore fitting for me to embark on becoming familiar with yet another lost and denigrated healing art.

Before we get into that, some mood-setting…

The Problem

It may surprise you to know that modern or conventional medicine is far from modern, and not so conventional.

From an educational perspective, the term used to describe what MD’s practice is allopathy or allopathic medicine.

Before the adoption of the term allopathy, this practice of medicine has been referred to as “heroic,” derived from heroic depletion theory. This framework refers to a method of therapy advocating for the rigorous treatment of humoral imbalances with bloodletting, purging, sweating and even surgery. The works of ‘heroic’ medicine can be seen as early as 17th-century France - which is fitting as most modern medicine has its roots in French medical thought.

If you read this Substack, you will be firmly familiar with the shortcomings of allopathic medicine. One of its biggest problems has been the increasing role and influence of corporatism in the development and dissemination of ‘heroic’ medicine.

A ‘Solution’

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

In 1993, a group of doctors and researchers formed an organization called the Cochrane Collaboration - developed in response to a call for an up-to-date, rigorous and systematic assessment of evidence from all randomized controlled trials in medicine.

It has since developed and maintained a reputation for being the most reliable source of medical literature review than any other. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end.

Of the co-founders, Dr. Peter C. Gøtzsche, was ‘expelled’ in 2013 for his increasing criticism of modern medical practice as well as the degenerating impact of financial interest on the integrity and validity of the Collaboration.

In 2013, Gøtzsche published a book entitled Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare. One of the points he argues is that prescription drugs are the 3rd leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer. At the time, he estimated that around 200,000 people die per year a a result of side-effects or errors in dispensation of medicines.

An Old Problem

In 1810, a German physician by the name Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann first published a book entitled The Organon of the Healing Art, the final (6th) edition of which was completed in 1842.

Many contemporary doctors, myself included, drone on about how ‘modern’ medicine has it wrong…it treats the symptoms instead of the cause…it is in bed with big pharma…and so on.

I would like to present to you an excerpt (with commentary) direct from Hahnemann’s 6th edition preface:

Medicine as commonly practiced (allopathy) knows no treatment except to draw from diseases the injurious materials which are assumed to be their cause.

As it turns out, it was Hahnemann who coined the term allopathy in reference to the increasingly popular practice of ‘heroic’ medicine.

In order to give a general notion of the treatment of diseases pursued by [allopathy] it may be observed that it presupposes the existence of…excess blood…and morbid matters…hence it taps off the life’s blood and exerts itself either to clear away the imaginary disease-matter or to conduct it elsewhere (by emetics, purgatives, sialogogues, diaphoretics, diuretics, drawing plasters, setons, issues, etc.), in the vain belief that the disease will thereby be weakened and materially eradicated…

We can see that even in the 19th-century, there was recognition of the misguided assumption that the body is somehow wrong in its response to disease, and that the only way to ‘cure’ a person is to rid the body of its own creation.

It assails the body with large doses of powerful medicines, often repeated in rapid succession for a long time, whose long-enduring, not infrequently frightful effects it knows not, and which…makes unrecognizable by the commingling of several such unknown substances in one prescription, and by their long-continued employment it develops in the body new and often ineradicable medicinal diseases.

The ‘heroic’ medicine of the time is accused of endangering the body with highly potent chemicals, often for extended periods of time and in combination with other such chemicals…eventually leading to new and incurable diseases.

Whenever it can, it employs, in order to keep in favor with its patient,* remedies that immediately suppress and hide the morbid symptoms by opposition…for a short time (palliatives), but that leave the cause for these symptoms (the disease itself) strengthened and aggravated.

It considers affections on the exterior of the body as purely local and existing there independently, and vainly supposes that it has cured them when it has driven them away by means of external remedies, so that the internal affection is thereby compelled to break out on a nobler and more important part.

Treating ‘affections on the exterior’ - aka symptoms - ultimately results in the internal causes manifesting as disease in other body parts. Effectively, instead of curing a disease - you divert its symptom-causing capacity to another body part.

For the same object the experienced allopath delights to invent a fixed name, by preference a Greek one…in order to make the patient believe that he has long known this disease as an old acquaintance, and hence is the fitted person to cure it.

Yeah, Hahnemann was a savage.

It seems that the unhallowed principal business of the old school of medicine (allopathy) is to render incurable if not fatal the majority of diseases, those made chronic through ignorance by continually weakening and tormenting the already debilitated patient by the further addition of new destructive drug diseases.

I told you. Savage.

When this pernicious practice has become a habit and one is rendered insensible to the admonitions of conscience, this becomes a very easy business indeed.

This non-healing art, which for many centuries has been firmly established in full possession of the power to dispose of the life and death of patients according to its own good will and pleasure, and in that period has shortened the lives of ten times as many human beings as the most destructive wars, and rendered many millions of patients more diseased and wretched than they were originally – this allopathy, I have, in the introduction to the former editions of this book, considered more in detail.

A ‘New’ Hope

You may be wondering who this intriguingly aware and thoughtful Samuel Hahnemann really is.

Dr. Hahnemann is credited with first elaboration and codification of the practice of Homeopathy. In fact, the Organon of Medicine/Healing Art is one of the original western treatise on the practice of homeopathic medicine.

If you are like me, you have been thoroughly propagandized into viewing homeopathy as pseudoscientific quackery - as Wikipedia will readily tell you.

One of the many criticisms that our mainstream medical regulators assert is that homeopathic medicines contain a substance that is so dilute with water that the original substance can hardly be found. On this basis, they dismiss the notion of any healing property.

Think what you may about this 19th-century idea…however, consider this 21st-century discovery.

Through the work of modern physiologists, namely Gilbert Ling and Gerald Pollack, we know that water is a rather miraculous substance.

So miraculous, in fact, that it may very well vindicate the entire basis of homeopathy and the concept of water having ‘memory’ of the substance that once occupied a space within the water matrix.

The combination of these, and many other schools of thought, have led me to conclude that I must take homeopathy seriously. At least insofar as reading the treatise itself.

I guarantee that >99% of doctors who call homeopathy “quackery,” have never read Hahnemann’s treatise.

To join me on this journey to understand the connections between traditional medical wisdom and modern human physiology, don’t forget to subscribe!

Related: If homeopathy is no more than ‘just water’ - then, why did the FDA just ban ‘water’?

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P.S. As I will be transitioning job and life this summer, my posts may be more erratic than usual for a short while.