Why Health Science is Making You Sick

My naturopath saved my life a few years ago. I was a stressed-out mess and I didn't know where to turn anymore (my physician wouldn't help me with my stress, but did offer to remove my breasts to prevent breast cancer. And he gave me a pamphlet about IBS).  Then I went to a naturopath. She cared about me and gave me attention and yummy things. I didn't begrudge a single dollar of the thousands that it ended up costing over the long haul of supplements and meridian balancing and the rest of the woo-woo.

But now I can solve my health problems without consulting the experts. And I can do it for (almost) free: basically only the cost of a few odds and ends to take the edge off of healing symptoms. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd gather materials from the wild.

I also spent thousands of dollars on chiropractic adjustments and massage therapy. After years of weekly or twice-weekly adjustments, there was no particular improvement in my vitality or even in my back pain. I enquired about this and the chiropractor told me that I'm supposed to get adjustments at least once every two weeks for the rest of my life. How lucrative!

Knowing that health is innate, that our minds and bodies always move toward health when given the chance, I decided that if my back pain and other health problems weren't getting better, then I must be doing something to keep causing the problems. I decided my lifestyle must be wrong. 

Well, the first things to go would have to be the things I hated the most about my life. So I quit my job, moved to a new town, and started doing what I felt was important instead of what others told me to do. I also took a 10-week yoga course. I'm pleased to report that I had almost total and permanent relief of my back pain, hypoglycemia, panic attacks, and allergies by doing this. And this was before I knew the science of what, specifically, causes these symptoms. Without even knowing exactly why I had these symptoms, I was able to solve them in a broad, systemic way. 

I solved my health problems by loving myself.

Health experts are experts at the wrong thing

I believe that most health experts - whether using conventional or alternative methods - are good at temporarily easing our symptoms. But very few of them know how to address the underlying problems that drive us to seek expert advice in the first place. And virtually all experts have been trained to look at the parts of us that are in pain and not at whole system. This is probably because most of us don't really understand the whole system.

We have a strong cultural prejudice toward trying to understand reality by looking at the smallest physical parts of it. Creationists might be dismayed to discover that this approach is the very definition of the scientific method. We look at the details, and are blind to the big picture. "Ours is not to wonder why," we are trained from a very young age.

The word "science" derives from Indo-European, Sanskrit, and Greek words meaning "cut," "separate," "discern," and "split." Closely related in meaning are the words "diabolical" (to throw apart), "hell" (to be hidden or separate from), and "devil" (to draw away from). 

I'm not saying that science is evil. I believe that we must have separation or split because without separation there would be no compelling force to draw the parts back together to form union. The laws of thermodynamics wouldn't work, and neither would any of the spiritual laws. The physical universe would not be able to exist if there wasn't something that kept the parts of it apart and trying to get back together.

And getting back together is the point of everything. The word "health," means "whole," as in the word "wholistic," or "holistic." This word is closely related in to the words "one," "union," "heaven,""happy..." 

...and "love."

Science isn't the Truth, it's just a little piece of the Truth

A scientific approach to anything is, by definition, the opposite of a healthy approach. 

However, this does not mean that science is wrong. The scientific method is a technique used to arrive closer to the whole truth, and it's often the only feasible way to arrive at some parts of the truth. For this reason, every holistic approach needs to have a scientific component in order to get complete results. 

But the results of scientific enquiry must not be treated as the whole truth. Science is useful only to sort through questions for which the answer is not clear. With science, you get a small idea of a possible truth about how, say, a muscle works and how you might bring that muscle toward greater health. Then you apply the scientific method to your small idea about how a muscle works. You do this by rigorously testing your idea to find out if it is a lie. 

You have to try to disprove your own idea!

If the idea holds up against all the tests and logic that you can think up, that small idea can be put into the collection of ideas about what you reasonably believe is The Truth. So a scientific approach can be a healthy approach ...if you can keep track of your purpose in making the inquiry in the first place. In other words, your science can be considered valid if you're coming at the question from a holistic, loving position in the first place.

Selling the trees, forgetting there's a forest

This is where modern "health science," including many alternative health practices, has gone badly wrong. All along the way, since the invention of the monetary system, whenever people have gotten an idea about health or healing, they've had to choose between pursuing the truth by trying to invalidate their own ideas ...or earning a living.

You can guess what most scientists, most of the time have gotten into the habit of doing. Because of the profit motive, science has become a PR game, a propaganda technique, a marketing tactic. In order to ensure our funding for the project, most scientists have descended into a process of disproving our opponents' ideas.

But this isn't the proper application of the scientific method. It's a logical fallacy. It's based on the idea that I can make myself look right if I make you look wrong. And, if I want to earn a living and compete against a whole lot of othe people who want to make a living, the odds are high that I am going to give in to this very unscientific - and unloving - approach.

Medical science must destroy the Truth

For centuries, the medical industry has relentlessly applied the "scientific method" to disprove any hypotheses that might support a holistic, love-based, physiological approach to healing. There's no mystery as to why this is. We have a profit-based social system that requires everything become more and more complex so that there are more and more problems to solve so that there are more and more profits to be made. The economy must grow. If people were healthy or could take care of their symptoms as soon as those symptoms arise, the seventh-largest industry in the world would be out of business.

Worse than that, if people could feel confident that they will always be able to be healthy, they wouldn't need the health care system anymore. They might not need other parts of the financial system either.

And so, scientific discovery after scientific discovery, the Truth has been obscured in favour of higher profits. 

The greatest example of this is the work of Louis Pasteur, which has become the underpinning for virtually all medical science over the past century. All significant medical research is based on Pasteur's proposals. the multi-billion-dollar cancer, AIDS, and 'flu industries, pharmaceuticals, and the entire fields of immunology and vaccination are all utterly dependent on Pasteur's sacrosanct vision for their existence.

But, if you looked at Louis Pasteur's life, you would quickly see a world of deception, manipulation of data, and plain old wrong-thinking. His science was poor at best. He was correct in proving that germs spread and that germs are involved in turning milk sour ...but his belief that germs are malicious causers of most other forms of disease was a great leap of logic and was not only unsupported, but was disproved several times within his lifetime. By real scientists. 

"Bernard was right. The milieu (environment) is everything. The Germ is nothing" ~Louis Pasteur, on his deathbed

But his ideas were adopted by Carnegie and Rockefeller in the U.S. and were used to influence medical research and education in most of the developed world. All for the same purpose that Carnegie and Rockefeller made most choices: to sell something. In this case, they were selling pharmaceuticals that were being developed from the waste products of the coal and oil industry (most synthetic drugs are made from organic chemicals of fossil fuel origin).

This is just how our economy works. It's the same for all problem-solving. Henry Ford almost single-handedly created the suburbia nightmare that has put so many North Americans into desperate financial straits these days:

"We shall solve the city problem by leaving the city,"

said Henry Ford, thereby combining his great social leadership with his (even greater) financial self-interest. It was not his problem that it ruined America both economically and environmentally.

So this is what most of what modern health care has become. It's become a way to make a lot of money. It has not become a way to be healthy or to heal from cancer, AIDS, MS, diabetes, autism, or the hundreds of other diagnoses that the medical industry has dreamed up for us to medicate and "live with."

The bulk of humanity has become almost totally unaware of how, exactly, our mind-body instruments work, what the purpose of our existence is, and just where the controls are over this whole process. The net result of all this is that we feel we are dependent on the profit-generating machinery of modern capitalism just to stay alive. For most of us, there is no question whatsoever about whether we need or have a right to this health care: only a question of how to pay for it.

The scientific, and loving, way to save a LOT of money on health care

It is money-saving for you, the flesh-and-blood human being, to know that illness does not begin with germs or in the cells or with free radicals or trace toxins or with unbalanced nutrition or with mold on peanuts or with anything small or chemical. Science will not find the origin of disease in anything tiny.

Illness begins in the brain, which runs everything in the body. The brain responds to instructions from its master, which is the mind.

There is a remedy for most discomfort - physical, emotional, relationship - which consists of spending ten seconds going within and asking "What's really happening here and now?" This isn't complicated or even difficult. It's just in direct opposition to our cultural training.

That cultural training is that we must continuously distract ourselves and seek answers to our health questions from experts. Even though they've been wrong about an awful lot. Even though they are paid when we're sick, not when we're healthy. Even though they justify their "science" mostly by slapping down anyone who comes forward with questions as being quacks.

Health science (and much of all science) has succumbed to our cultural pressure which suggests that we should avoid worrying our pretty little heads about things that we can't do anything about anyway. Besides, we've got to earn a living. "How can I avoid this present reality by putting it off to some future time?"

Going within and finding out what's true for us right now is the opposite of this. It's a loving approach, and it happens to work because it is based on seeking the truth, not seeking to prove someone else wrong. 

Mindfully facing ourselves in the present is much easier said than done, I suppose. But it's much cheaper than conventional medicine, or even most alternative medicines for that matter ...and certainly much cheaper than being sick and scared.