Redefining Health

Drug sales in the US suggest that up to 80% of adults ingest at least one medically prescribed drug every twenty-four hours while the average doctor in the UK writes a prescription every few minutes. Iatrogenic illness, the result of side-effects from drugs, is now the fourth leading cause of death in the US.

The bio-chemist Ernest Krebs Jr has been one of many to highlight the persistent illusion of pharmaceutical drugs: ‘In the history of science no chronic or metabolic disease has ever been prevented or cured except by non-toxic factors normal to the diet. The corollary is that no disease has ever been prevented or cured by factors foreign to the diet, foreign to the biological experience. These are axioms that admit no exception.’

In the same way that we cannot add chemicals to Gaia’s systems without creating systemic impacts on the surrounding ecology, so the introduction of toxic drugs to the human system will always produce systemic side-effects. In the same way that planetary health continues to be severely jeopardised by human activities, the health of the human organism itself is often undermined by the very medicine supposed to cure it.

Instead of constantly addressing the symptoms of planetary and bodily dysfunction, new paradigm thinking directs energy and resources towards the causes of our malaise. For example, many alternative health practices place an emphasis on preventative medicine, using nutritional supplements to build a healthy immune system, thus building the body’s capacity to deal with many of the pollutants and toxins now linked to modern degenerative diseases, from Electro-Magnetic Fields (EMFs) to carcinogenic dioxins.

In the same way that biodiversity provides resistance to pests, and healthy soil produces healthy food, so good nutrition can boost the resilience of the human body’s systems. Similarly, the exponential increase in cancer rates will only stabilise when we stop introducing toxic chemicals to our air, water and food chain, by turning our linear manufacturing processes into cyclical systems that eliminate the concept of ‘waste’.