Nov 18, 2009
No Remedy
During the 14th century the bubonic plague struck with devastating results, wiping out half of the population of Europe and much of Asia. Called the Black Death, it was caused by an infectious bacterium which was spread by flea-infested rats.
I can remember as a child watching a movie about that time and being struck by one scene in particular: a big man, all dressed in black, drives a cart from house to house, picking up the dead and carrying them off for burial. I remember thinking, “How is he getting away with this?” Here is an incredibly bad bug, killing one out of every two people, and this guy is going into infected households, and handling infected bodies, and somehow still managing to put in a sixteen hour day!
Since the fourteenth century, we have learned a lot about bubonic plague. We fully understand the bug that causes it: what it looks like, how it lives, how it travels, how it affects the human body, and how to kill it, which we have proven successful at doing. Yet we know little about the man driving that cart and how and why he lived on. While we have conscientiously studied the half of Europe that died we have ignored the half that survived.
Doctors now say, “The survivors just had greater resistance; they had natural immunity.” But what does that mean? How did they get it? Was it God’s will? Were they born with it? Were they just lucky? Or could it have been something in their diet, or their manner of thinking, or the way they processed their emotions, or how they prayed, or perhaps some combination of any or all of these factors? More importantly, as we come to better understand the survivor’s experience, can we successfully transfer it to others?
In fundamental ways, Western medical science over the past few hundred years has avoided addressing these questions. We have enthusiastically dissected the dead while showing little interest in the living. We have stayed away from questions of individual immunity and natural healing while focusing our intellectual energies and research on defeating specific disease symptoms, battle by battle, with an increasingly complex array of hardcare weaponry. Rather than a softcare investigation into the nature of wellness—How do some people manage to stay healthy without resorting to doctors or medicines?—we have chosen to wage a hardcare war on the real and imagined agents of disease.
The hardcare medical model posits that every ailment has a specific causative agent (the bad germ) and for every such agent we can and will eventually find a specific remedy (the magic bullet). It is a model that totally ignores the individual involved — is she under stress, is she a happy person, is she motivated to go on living, does she express her emotions, how is her family life, what was it like growing up, is she loved — these questions are dismissed as irrelevant. All that matters is figuring out which bug is causing the problem and then administering the proper remedy.
And yet, we harbor flu viruses for most of our lives without catching colds, and we are exposed to carcinogens on a regular basis without developing cancer. Half of the population of 14th century Europe contacted the plague but did not die. There is more to it than “you catch the bug and it makes you sick,” and much more to it than relying on a “magic bullet” to make things better.
The more to it resides somehow and somewhere within all human beings. Though it can not be captured in a bottle and measured out in clear dosages, nor carefully produced in a laboratory and shot into the body with pointed precision, it is more potent than any such remedies, and can surely heal any and all wounds.
While it is reassuring to know that we now have a cure for the bubonic plague, remember that the man driving the cart had a solution six hundred years ago.
Michael Sky | CommonHealth
Michael, I don’t know if you wrote this or not but you have several really good points. I am not saying I have the answers either. But one of the points I read into your writing was that there is a big difference between being infected and being colonized. (colonized is living with a bacterium or virus and not being sick or infected) most of us are comfortably living with things that we are terrified of. If we can practice optimal health as defined by each of us with a generalization towards many practices being consistent then we have a great chance of slowly building immunities to these dreaded bugs. They, the bugs, are largely like fearful thoughts. We live with them everyday and seldom do they really stamp out our life. just my two cents. Well written.
Hi Steve, the posts that aren’t specifically attributed to someone else, with link, are mine. And yes, I’m saying that we are colonized by all sorts of microbes, many of which can turn bad if our body/mind is less than optimal. The germs don’t cause the sickness; the sickened (less than optimal) condition allows the germs to proliferate.
I have forgotten.
Was it Hippocrates that said, “I am more interested in what kind of person has a disease, then what kind of a disease a person has.”
Twas. He also said: “If someone wishes for good health, one must first ask oneself if he is ready to do away with the reasons for his illness. Only then its possible to help him.” Most of the reasons for americans are things that we eat and drink that we are not “ready to do away with.”