Medicine does not mean (chemical) medicines.
Pharmacology is the field of (chemical) medicines – Pharmacology is the one dealing with the study of chemical substances that are normally poisonous (pharmakon = poison), and can sometimes be used for therapeutic purpose.
Medicine is the Art and Science that heals. It is not reduced to Pharmacology alone. It’s not only “the science of chemical drugs and surgery”.
Do not mistake these 2 terms – Medicine and Pharmacology. Do not limit Medicine to this alone – it would be a great pity.
It is infantile to think like this – to believe that anything can be treated with a chemical pill (or with the scalpel), and nothing else has any therapeutic value.
For patients, the acceptance of this association is perhaps due to the commodity of not taking responsibility for one’s own health, putting the blame on someone else (microbes, genetic inheritance, etc.), and looking for the most comfortable way of treatment, without making too great a change in one’s diet or way of life.
For doctors, it’s a manner of thinking that was borrowed from the ancient Alchemy, where there was the search for immortality, the transmutation of ordinary substance in something precious. However, this was not borrowed in a wise mode.
Mercury (or cinnabar) was an important substance in Taoism, in the metaphorical way – it was a symbol for the precious vital energy, stored in important places in the body. Unfortunately, allopathic medicine at its beginnings has actually abused mercury… when mercury administration and bloodletting (exsanguination) were the main practices in the newborn “modern” medicine, around 1800. Nowadays it’s a well-known fact that mercury is neurotoxic, and yet there are still terrible battles fought to administer it without being noticed, for instance in vaccines, as preservative (or maybe not?!) – in spite of all the clear evidence that incriminates it, in spite of the lack of evidence regarding its safety (the $100,000 prize offered by DeNiro and R.F. Kennedy is still waiting for its winner), in spite of the thousands of children damaged for life or killed by it, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars offered as compensation to the grieving families.
Anyway, beyond mercury, nowadays medicine is still searching for “the magic pill that will cure any illness”.
It doesn’t talk much about the influence that the other aspects of life have on Health – the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, the thoughts, the emotions, our whole way of life. And even less about other Healing Arts, such as those from Oriental Medicine, which have remained as efficient as thousands of years ago, and very often much superior to the “modern” ones.
Let us not forget that the Pharmacology of nowadays has developed from the ancient knowledge of Pharmaco-Botanics – almost all chemical drugs that we now know are derived from a herbal remedy, from a herb. Still, it appears too many doctors have developed memory issues, otherwise how could they say “herbs have no clinical effect”?
Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is made from Salix alba – the bark of the Willow tree.
Papaverine and Morphine are made from the capsule and fruit of Poppy (Papaver).
Penicillin was made from the Penicillum molds.
Digitalis (an important drug for tonifying the heart muscle)- is made from Digitalis purpurea (common foxglove).
And the examples can continue… for all possible chemical substances have already been discovered in our environment… and “there’s nothing new under the sun”, in truth. Despite the huge funds allocated to research in pharmacology, the remedies have already been there, for thousands of years.
However, Medicine means so much more than that.
And if today most people (and medical students, doctors, patients) have gotten to think like this, to associate Medicine with only chemical drugs (and surgery), and to lack information about the vastness of the other branches of Medicine – in an age when we have an over-saturation of pharmacies per square mile, and of drug commercials per minute on TV – we should be asking ourselves the natural question:
Who has had the interest – and the financial power – to deviate and to limit the thinking of the majority of population in such a way that it would only bring profit to their companies, hiding under the rug all the garbage inherent to such a limitation (side effects of chemical drugs administered correctly cause at least 100,000 deaths every year in the USA alone)?
And why, with all this explosion of pharmacies and drug commercials, we have more and more sick people? Instead of having empty hospitals, transformed in children’s playgrounds, or in centers for elevating the human spirit through culture, art, philosophy, mystics? Or centers for cultivating Health, not disease?
And the conclusion is pretty simple – the answer is pretty obvious, like in the most simple riddle.
Someone said, two millenia ago – and His words will echo in eternity:
“You will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free.” From suffering.
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P.S.
Even some germs have become resistant to chemical drugs, have adapted and evolved beyond them – the human species has yet to awaken completely…
This is why antibiotics (anti-bios = against life) have begun to lose the war – because Life always wins.
Perhaps it’s time for Medicine to make a major paradigm shift: to focus on Life – not on disease and death (since it begins the study of the human being in the medical school from a dead body, not from a living being, as the artists do).
To respect Life, to support it, to cherish and protect it – and perhaps thus it will understand more from Its Mysteries.
Dr. Adrian Petre, MD, DMD, LAc – founder & director of Universal Healing Arts
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Oh, so true. We could blame the vulnerability or changeability of the brain. The insidious neuroplasticity of the human brain becomes very apparent when you see patients and physicians alike fixating on just medications and invasive interventions…and not “thinking” or challenging themselves beyond what is forced upon them.