The Law of Natural Healing | Part 1

After years spent un-doctrinating myself from modern medical education, it is time to embark on a new journey.

Into Darkness

As with any endeavor, the indoctrinated are incapable of seeing the shortcomings of their dogma from within. They need insight, inspiration and guidance from the outside to allow themselves to see the problems.

I will forever be grateful for the people and events in my life that led me away from the reductionist and industrialized practice of medicine, which every medical student in the West has been indoctrinated with for the better part of the last 100 years. In recent decades, this indoctrination has made its away around the globe to such a degree that the practice of medicine in many parts of the world are indistinguishable from that in the West.

One of the pivotal moments in the history of medical education was what followed from the Flexner report (1910), a Rockefeller funded analysis of the state of medical education which proposed path forward.

After Flexner, medical education would be formally recognized from the Allopathic lens - i.e. the modern MD degree. All other schools of medicine which had survived for hundreds and thousands of years would be discarded as alternative, outdated, or pseudoscientific. Thus, plunging medicine into the Dark Ages.

The Dark Age of Medicine

The Revival

One of the first books I read which got me started on the path of exploring the ancient medical arts was by Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, a physician trained both in the Western and Tibetan disciplines.

A few things struck me about the language of the ancient arts. First, the framework for understanding life, health and disease is narrative - a story. It is not a reductionist or materialist perspective, which to some suggests that we are merely “meat on a stick.”

Everything from creation to the fundamental constituents of life, and the path between diet (for example) and well-being has a story.

Brief excerpt:

Let us briefly examine the functions of each of the seven bodily constituents and the three waste products. Blood is produced from the nutriment of the food and drink that one ingests. Blood has the function of supplying moisture to the body, it is of primary importance for sustaining the life-force, and it allows for the growth of the flesh, which fills out the body.

Fat lubricates the body, and the function of the bone is to supply a firmness and structure to the body. The function of the bone marrow is to provide the vital essences for the body, which are closely linked to the body's vitality.

To many people, this may seem a bit superfluous. But, to someone who has been exposed to the standard medical model…it is actually quite refreshing.

Not only is it refreshing, but most of the “story” either aligns with what has been observed scientifically…or, at the very least, does not contradict these observations.

Now, I am sure you can find someone who will say something along the lines of…

No, this is pseudoscientific nonsense. Because, we know “X” about such and such.

You can easily insert microbiology and infectious disease for “X”.

My opinion on germ theory and infectious disease has been made quite clear in the past, and you can start here to get a sense of it:

Germ Theory is Incomplete | Part 1

Unfortunately, many people take for granted that things are “known” and “facts.” Alas, they forget that many of todays “facts” were yesterdays correlations based on last week’s faulty assumptions.

I first read Dr. Dhonden’s book in 2022, and since then have tried to get a bird’s eye view of the traditional medical arts. Including schools of medicine from the East, Mid-East, and West.

You may think that these would be vastly different, since it was before medical practice was unified & standardized under the industrial western model. But, you’d be wrong.

The core concepts that flow through the Tibetan, Chinese, Islamic, and Western tradition are similar, if not analogous. This sort of convergence in geographically widespread schools can be thought of as a positive indicator. To me, it suggests that evidence moved authentic empiricists in a similar direction.

I could be wrong.

The Law of Natural Healing

Cartoon of Ibn Sina, known as the Latinized Avicenna

I’ve been saying for some time that the traditional medical arts is not for the uninitiated. What I mean is, to be able to comprehend…to read…heck, to even pick up a book on traditional medicine, requires some degree of openness to the possibility that the modern MD school of thought is incomplete.

It means appreciating that there is something our ancestors have to offer us when it comes to understanding and re-constituting health. Unfortunately, we live in a time that normalizes and glorifies discarding our forefathers.

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of Fire.

Over the last several years, I have tried to get a grasp on the themes of the traditional medical arts. At the same time, I have been looking for scientific discoveries and observations which can account for these ancient thoughts on the nature of life and disease.

For example, recent experiments have demonstrated a scientifically plausible mechanism by which Homeopathy may work.

The Modern Case for Homeopathy

Through this double-ended approach, it seems to me an appropriate time to dive deeper into one of the great works of traditional medicine.

al-Qanun fi’l-tibb

al-Qanun, or The Canon, is a compendium written by the late great Persian polymath ibn Sina - known colloquially as Avicenna.

I chose this book for a couple of reasons.

First, ibn Sina was alive during the later phase of the Islamic Golden Age. An era famous for scientific, economic and political flourishing which began with the Abbasid Caliphate around 800 AD.

During this period, scholars from across the world flocked to Baghdad, which at the time was the cultural center of this vast empire. As a result of this global shift, ibn Sina was perfectly situated to consume and build upon the known wisdom of classical civilizations from across the globe.

Works from several cultures were actively translated into Arabic and Persian, and more easily produced by the advent of paper, a technology adopted from China and eventually spread to the Iberian Peninsula during this period. So great was the impact that for the first time people could make a living from writing and selling books.

This breadth of knowledge is evident in The Canon.

Ibn Sina clearly draws on the works of Galen, Aristotle, the mid-east and even Hindu medical practices in the composition of this work.

I chose this edition in particular because of the multi-disciplinary effort to decipher and translate this great work.

For instance, O. Cameron Gruner MD closely followed the Latin translations. Mazar Shah MD had followed the Urdu translation. Both of these translation were correlated with the Arabic by Jay R. Crook.

A New Journey

Suffice it to say, I have officially embarked on this new journey of marrying the traditional medical arts with our modern understanding of the physical, biological, and spiritual world.

One of the things that really hit me in the introductory sections of the first Volume, was a description of what life is. Without knowing life, we cannot really understand health.

The Canon draws on a Hermetic concept, in that the constituents of the universe consist of three great divisions:

1. Body (jism)

2. Soul (nafs)

3. Spirit (ruh)

From this emerges the esoteric concept of causation which describes life as the movement of the soul, towards the Divine Spirit through space (the body).

The details concerning the material of the body, the seat of the soul, the passages through which they move, and the Spirit towards which it moves is the content of this work. This is the fundamental framework for understanding life, health and disease.

The editor beautifully relates this to another great work of the late Sufist poet Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, in which he describes a reed yearning to return to the bed from which he was torn:

Join The Journey

As I journey through these volumes, I will be writing about what I’ve learned and how I plan to adapt this wisdom into my life and those I care for.

If you’d like to join me on this journey, this series will be exclusively for paying supporters of this publication.