The Case for Decolonising Medicine and Wellness

The medicine has been out there.

Hey fren, waagwaan?

This past month has felt so strange for me. I am incredibly anxious, yet incredibly grounded— I see the return for the work I am putting in, and yet the uncertainty still tears me apart. I am especially grateful for you though, reading these letters I have been pouring my heart into and giving meaning to my thoughts. This week’s letter brings our awareness to the body, and asks us to reconsider how we approach caring for the foundation of our connection to this life experience. If you didn’t know, I write on topics rotating between mind, body, spirit, community and journal. Happiness and actualisation comes from a holistic approach and I hope to help you find that balance through our little communal contemplation here at the Many Faced God.

My grand-aunt has been battling gut issues for years.

She has been to several doctors and has experimented with her diet in all sorts of ways. She has read books about gut health and, as she reported to me in a recent catch-up call, she is even more confused than when she started. My aunt's case is not unique. Ask anyone about their experiences with their local GP, and they will tell you stories upon stories of feeling dismissed, lumped together, and generalised, prescribed the same tired painkillers, antibiotics, or steroids.

Talking about this with people over the years has led me to wonder—

does anyone ever come out of the doctor's office feeling heard, cared for, and healed?

“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” — Milan Kundera

It pains me to see how many people are struggling with illness when the medicine has been (and is currently) available and affordable for centuries. Cultures around the world have developed intricate systems of healing based on natural remedies and a deep understanding of the human body. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Indian Ayurveda, Indigenous healing practices from the Americas, and African herbal medicine are just a few examples of ancient traditions that have effectively treated ailments long before the advent of modern pharmaceuticals. You don't even need to go so far to find remedies. Open up Instagram and TikTok, and a simple search will reveal that everybody and their meemaw from all corners of the world are there to share with you natural ways to heal and prevent ailments.

These popped up after 2 seconds of scrolling, and I did it on different accounts with different algos

On a recent coworking call with the

Locked In

community, an echo of similar frustrations broke out as we complained about limiting dogmatic thinking getting in the way of holistic, and indigenous, healing. I even found a fellow Western medicine hater (I jk I jk...but not really)

Karla Marie Sweet

, who shared with me that she is working on a new book all about the natural medicine that the West is missing out on. So, people are thinking this.

Yet despite how hungry people are for natural wellness and affordable healthcare, Western medicine continues to not only centre pharmaceuticals but condemn herbalism to a pseudoscience. In an article by Nicole Karlis in The Salon interviewing Christine Buckley, the author of “Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life”, they share Buckley’s stance that “herbalism and modern medicine can be complementary.” Wow, what a revolutionary concept, huh?—nature as medicine? I can feel every ancestor in my cells rolling their eyes. Karlis, the author of the article, continues to explain the novelty of Buckley’s hypothesis, saying that "[it] is both a fascinating and frankly political proposition given the current cultural moment when both modern medicine and the big tent of "alternative medicine" are polarising topics.” The title, "No longer foes, science and herbalism find common cause" alone, hints at our unwilling ignorance to the thousands of years of cultural and medicinal heritage at our disposal.

How could science and herbs ever be foes? What do people think are in the pills?

Regulated Herbalism

In another quote from the same article, Karlis suggested to her readers that "herbalism is not as ancient as one might think" and made reference to root doctors in Louisiana who were practicing "as recently as the 1980s". She writes as if herbalism had ever left us.

In East Asia, natural medicine is an institutionalised and mainstream science available at every general hospital. Even in Japan and South Korea, countries a bit more removed from the everyday cultural and spiritual significance of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda, provide two prescriptions or combined prescriptions after each hospital visit—one Eastern and one Western. The doctors inform you of the side effects of each medicine and give you suggestions on when to use which or how to use it in conjunction.

Once when I was living in Tokyo, I caught a strange virus that had my throat swollen to freakish conditions. It was so bad that I couldn't swallow my saliva and was using some random dish as a spit bowl by my bedside. I dragged myself to the hospital, and the doctor gave me two prescriptions and said, "If you can endure a longer recovery, follow the Eastern regimen, and if you cannot stand the symptoms, you can take the Western medicine." He said it was up to me to decide which to take, but both needed to be taken with the right dosages and the right frequency. Whenever I tell these kinds of stories or remind people that there is tested, regulated, and affordable herbalist medicine out there, I am met with flabbergast and awe, shortly followed by a bit of outrage.

"So we are really being poisoned, huh?"

Capitalism and Medicine Today

What I am getting at is, the medicine has been out here. Long time. So where is the disconnect? Why isn't the great modern science all over these healthier ways to heal and support human health?

In The Oneness vs the 1%, an ecofeminist perspective on our fight to heal the planet in an age of billionaire colonialism, Vandana Shiva describes how Big Money, Big Pharma, and so on create commodities out of originally shared knowledge by "destroying self-organisation in nature and society to engineer monopolies through mastery, conquest, invasion, and dictatorship by the tools [Bill Gates] owns," or the patents the wealthy create—"for rent collection, which in double-speak, [is called] ‘innovation’." In other words, ancient knowledge cultivated by normal people, openly shared with normal people, is seized, 'innovated', 're-invented' and packaged with a name to be sold as medicine.

Shiva provides us with an example, GMO Golden Rice, which is a genetically engineered rice with two genes from the daffodil plant and one gene from a bacterium, resulting in a yellow colour that is supposed to increase beta-carotene, a precursor of vitamin A.

And there are many other examples outside of the ones Dr. Shiva presents, ones that immediately come to mind are the Kapooravali plant for cold symptoms, neem for birth control, lion’s mane mushroom for ADHD and so on.

Modern science may have provided us with life-saving, late-stage, interventional medicine, but whether or not its core morale is wellness for the human race is yet to be seen. If health was truly the priority for such a medicine, why wouldn't doctors be trained to research and recommend natural remedies that can assist with a far greater range of wellness issues? Why assist in proliferating a culture of 'wait until it’s too late'? Is it common sense alone to the general public that medicine should include early-stage support for the body? I find that hard to believe.

Across the Water

Traditional kinds of medicine are not only effective but holistic. Eastern and Indigenous medicine takes into consideration the environment the person is in, stressors, psychological state, and individual physiology. It considers the outer world a reflection of the inner, and seeks to create harmony to allow the body to heal itself and be stronger to prevent illness rather than intervene at a critical state.

The mechanistic, Western mind hears the word 'holistic' and freaks out—holistic?? You mean hocus-pocus?!

In a paper entitled, Eastern and Western Approaches to Medicine, Dr. Tsuei explains that "The Western approach clearly divides health from disease, yet the Eastern approach considers health as a balanced state versus disease as an unbalanced state. The Western approach tends to change the environment, and the Eastern way is to prefer to adapt to the environment." She goes on further to explain that Western medicine cannot hope to understand the validity and place of Eastern medicine without trying to understand critical concepts such as "the state of equilibrium expressed by the five elements; the concept of pathophysiology expressed by the external and internal insults; the concept of maintaining and promoting health expressed by the circulation of chi and hsieh; the therapeutic concept in Chinese medicine—the normalisation or reestablishment of balance of the body function; the concept of preventive medicine."

The real question is why the East can study and benefit from both schools of thought, while the West is caught stuck on the ego of their own dogma. They act as if all non-American, non-European, non-elite forms of science are not science at all. Instead of helping to bring scientific thinking and discernment to normal folk leading with other forms of experience and intelligence, they would rather keep everyone in the dark and reveal only enough to profit on the hunger for more. Dr. Shiva describes this phenomenon as a 'knowledge apartheid' and a compulsory 'mechanistic worldview',

"crafted to serve industrial capitalism which elevated an inadequate, reductionist, mechanistic paradigm to the level of science, while scientific thought, based on the awareness of a living earth, was politically relegated to non-science, even anti-science."

A Living Earth

Part of what makes herbalism and grassroots movements an easy target for the discerning eye of Western society is its deeply intertwined connection with human spirituality. Traditional Chinese Medicine is the magic of ancient Daoist alchemists. Herbalism is coming straight from the witch's cauldron. Ayurveda is a gift from the Hindu god Lord Brahma. Western society, similarly to its aforementioned relationship with nature, pits spirit against science as well. Earth and all its living creatures are nothing more than commodities, ingredients, and dead matter—the mere postulation of greater integration offends Big Science. It has to, because a naturally organised and intelligent earth would be one that is better off without the conquerors and capitalists of our time, one that is self-healing and self-evolving. A living earth—one that is complex, diverse with vast symbiotic, interdependent pieces all with great innate value would strike away the basis for capitalism, racism, imperialism, and wealth as a virtue. Instead, as the West would have it, we get Tai chi without the chi, massage without the medicine, yoga without the somatics, mindfulness without meditation, and so on.

"Like everything under capitalism, the erotic (our capacity for pleasure) is atomized to certain acts and certain kinds of relationships, conscripted into patriarchy’s pleasure, and then there is suffering, boredom, loneliness, lies."

"The dualisms created by the mechanical mind prevent us from imagining that we can be both local, rooted in a place, and planetary in our consciousness; that we can be distinctive, and unique individuals while we are part of one humanity; that global integration does not have to be vertical, with the 1% extracting life and freedom from nature and society and crushing those who support them, but the planetary and horizontal unity of consciousness and compassion, of interconnectedness and interbeing."

So yes, it's woo-woo, but before you look at this as a sign of antiquity and backwardness, ask yourself what we as humanity lose by separating mind, body, and soul health. Ask yourself why you feel that everything must be atomised and separated in order to have legitimacy. Ask yourself why we cannot honour our existence, and by extension, view our wellbeing as a holistic exercise? Separation is the greatest illusion, and it is in fact violence against humanity causing illness in all forms. By only subscribing to a Western prescribed clinical version of human heritage, we are losing the intelligence of Spirit, the intelligence of A Living Earth, and of One humanity. This is why we need to recognise the diversity and pluralism of knowledge systems as well as the diversity of languages to benefit from a fuller picture of what life has to offer us. Only then can we tap into true science and medicine guided by experience and wholeness rather than money and elitist separation.

They say that we do not know anything,

That we are backwardness,

That our head needs changing for a better one.

They say that some learned men are saying this about us,

These academics who reproduce themselves,

In our own lives.

What is there on the banks of these rivers, Doctor?

Take out your binoculars

And your spectacles.

Look if you can,

Five hundred flowers,

From five hundred different types of potato

Grow on the terraces

Above abysses

That your eyes don’t reach.

Those five hundred flowers

Are my brain,

My flesh.

— Jose Maria Arguedas, Quechua poet from the Andes

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Footnotes

1. Root Doctor article that is the most sus thing to link in this kind of article honestly https://www.chicagotribune.com/1987/05/24/root-doctors-spell-trouble-for-sick-folks/

Aaaand that’s that on that. I’d love to hear your thoughts and meemaw remedies in the comments or email replies✨

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