Doctors Know Best…Right?

In August of 2013, my husband and I returned from a 3 day getaway to West Palm Beach, Florida, our first time traveling so far alone since are three children had been born. We flew home, a short flight up the Atlantic coast to New Jersey and couldn’t wait to see our kids whose ages ranged from nearly five years to only nine months old. But as I went to enter our home something silly happened. I twisted my ankle walking up the steps to the kitchen. It didn’t hurt badly, the ankle simply folded over on itself but even that couldn’t stem my joy to be home.

A few days later it happened again. Shortly following pain in both ankles was commonplace. Then pain in my elbows. Then pain in my hips. Within months I was wracked with pain that kept me from living normally. So, to the doctors I went, because as we all know, Doctor’s Know Best.

Blood was taken, exams were had, questions asked, tests ordered and what was the conclusion after many visits, many specialists and many co-pays later? Inconclusive. The doctors couldn’t find a reason for my pain. Not Lyme’s, not arthritis, not infection, not trauma, nothing. I was prescribed steroids and pain killers with no diagnosis, just a plan to take these and see how you feel in a few weeks. Meanwhile I could sleep well, couldn’t lift heavy things, could move well without retaliation from my joints. I was crushed that the ones that were supposed to know what was ailing me didn’t know any more than I did. They were the professionals, they went to school for this!

Unable to take another office visit and a complete replaying of my medical history and symptoms, I took to the internet myself. Thanks to Web MD and it symptom checker and find rabbit trail upon rabbit trail of Internet searches that led me to learn about the far reaching effects of systemic and generic chronic inflammation. My body was literally attacking itself from the inside out because of some threat unknown to me and these threats taken very seriously by my body’s defense system.

Once I was pretty certain that my symptoms were caused by inflammation, I started researching what helps to ease and even prevent inflammation. Things like diet, exposure to toxins, stress and movement played a role. Yes, things like pain killers and steroids also ease the pain of inflammation but as I has tried that route and they solved nothing long-term, I was ready to try anything else.

That was when I started to see things differently. No Doctor had told me even once about what I had found on the internet myself. None had recommended I lay off sugar, soda, fried foods and highly processed junk. Not one. No doctor recommended I drink lots of water or even utilize beneficial foods and teas that help lower inflammation. No one told me to resist sitting down and living a sedentary lifestyle but stretch often and move throughout the day. None!

Without their medical advice, I started to do the things I researched on my own. And in time my health improved. We cleaned up our diets and were more intentional about what we did with and for our bodies. I even found myself turning toward spiritual sources of healing and comfort to ease the burden of stress that was contributing to my body’s responses of pain.

I never found out clinically why I suffered so long and why those simply changes made such a huge difference. What I did find was the beginning of my skepticism of modern medicine pit against chronic un-wellness.

When we consider what medicine is, I think we think of either a prescription bottle full of pills or a pristine and balding professional in a white lab coat, scribbling away on a notepad or computer screen with spinning wheels behind a distant look. Medicine, in our time, is attributed to the field of wellness and making people better.

But consider how some of the Native Americans understood medicine. To them, medicine was the effect something had on you. Medicine could be good or bad. Medicine wasn’t a field of study but an existence, a reality. An object could have medicine, a person could bring good medicine, a spirit could have medicine, a place or a ceremony could have medicine. If a tribe member was sick they could be suffering from bad medicine and would need good medicine to restore balance. If one wanted to curse someone who was healthy and thriving they would bring bad medicine upon them. I believe our indigenous peoples understood balance within the body, the environment and society far better than we can grasp, and medicine was the partner used to facilitate that balance.

Rather than breaking down the person into hundreds of separate components that operate independently of each other as modern Allopathic Medicine does, they understood the body as not only a unified organism within itself but as one organism unified with the others of their tribe and ultimately one unified with the land and sky. The ancient people were far more capable of treating the human through Homeopathic means, as incorporated and interconnected systems that are best treated as a whole.

If you were to go to the doctor today for an ailment in your nose, you are not looked at homeopathically, rather your primary physician send you to a specialist. An ENT. Ear, Nose and Throat specialist. They will look at your nose, your sinuses, that one small area of your face that ails you and based off their specialized knowledge will treat your symptoms surrounding that red flag. If the simple prescription fail to relieve your discomfort, they may refer you to another doctor who specializes in a smaller more focused area of your face. They have more expertise in the specific spot that ails you and have the authority and knowledge to take drastic measures to treat your symptoms. They may even perform a surgery to enlarge your sinus cavity or septum to stop your symptoms from bothering you. They may even succeed; you may leave the experience symptom free. Symptom free but still unwell.

This approach keeps the lights on at the medical facility, keeps you the patient somewhat more comfortable for the time being, but ultimately may miss the underlying problem. By targeting a laser focus on 1% of the body its inevitable you can miss 99% of the rest of it. Often times, symptoms are the target of medical action when causation of symptoms is overlooked. Usually causation in a society of chronically ill people is far more difficult to understand and pinpointing a symptom is far easier. Rather than looking at body wide inflammation as the causation its easier to look at joint pain and prescribe steroid and Motrin. Rather than looking at metabolic disfunction and why its happening its easier and more profitable to prescribe insulin. Rather than looking at prevention its easier to focus on the sick and apply the bandaid.

To be fair, it’s a glorious and wonderful field that has saved many lives and improved many outcomes that were on the brink of collapse. Modern Medicine is a gift of God for a suffering world. However the system is broken in many ways. From the way medical students are tortured and abused in the process of forming them into residents and ultimately mds is appalling and borderlines dark military tactics for mind control and prisoner detainment.

To succeed as a student and earn a white coat would of course win medical students a superiority complex on some level, they survived the harshest of environments after all, and they have the power to save lives in their hands now. Why wouldn’t they look down upon all others as their inferiors, when they alone have done the reading, the sleepless night vigils, the tests, the exams, the sacrifices. They are worthy for good reason, they simply know more.

Once vindicated and knighted into medicine as a doctor, these pour souls have not long to figure out that they owe a crap load of money to their school debt. Sure they qualify for the unique doctor guaranteed mortgages and are expected to wear this brand of clothes and that brand of watch, but the stress of being wealthy is not only a desire to meet with demand but a necessity. They need to start earning the big buck quick if they want to overcome their debt and actually enjoy life outside of their still excruciating work schedule. 24 hour on call and the pre and post call work days are no joke. Sleep depravity can’t be repaid at a high enough salary.

So regardless of how some doctors may feel ethically or personally about the Modern Medical System, unfortunately they have to be all in the recoup the investment they put in. In time, once they’ve done what is necessary they can make the changes that should be made. After they have paid off their debt and have risen tot place of importance and significance they will be the change they want to see in the world.

Do they want to spend their days whizzing through a patient list, quickly scanning charts and writing prescriptions for localized specialized symptoms, or do they want to be thoroughly and intentionally invested in each patients underlying causations, piecing together the puzzle to get to root of all pain? Of course the latter! They became doctors because they want to help people.  However the system is led by doctors wanting to help people, the system of modern medicine is guided by pharmaceutical companies would want higher profits every year and by corporations that make profits through industrial medical facilities that need beds filled, tests run and prescriptions filled. And lets not forget insurance companies that underlay everything, their icy grip on the medical field that isn’t letting go anytime soon. All want their cut, their portion and doctors are their unlikely pawns, pushed into their artificially lit mouse mazes, chasing dreams, then validation that their career choice and sacrifices weren’t made in vane, and eventually chasing  reprieve and survival like everyone else.

Doctors are just people. People who have specialized in a certain branch of information regarding the human body. They are part of a broken system and either comply, compartmentalize or quit. They are certainly the ones you want at your side in an acute trauma but if you believe they have the capacity to replace you as your primary care-giver, advocate, health provider, they simply can’t. You are a whole person and require whole care. Body, mind and spirit. To rely on doctors for your generic well being would require you to have hundreds of specialists all working together and collaborating on you together, a thing that just isn’t done. They system doesn’t allow for it. You must be the responsible agent in your life, a theme we will see repeatedly in this book.

What other options do we have beside Modern Medicine?

It’s actually comical that I’ve even said that question in sincerity. We have thousands of years of traditional medical care to pull from. Certainly some techniques of intervention have been proven unhelpful and even dangerous, but we have the Library of Congress, an online world of medical journals, archived historical records, a litany of textbooks and papers,  Ai for crying out loud. We can weed through with common sense and ask the experts.

So what has traditional medicine been based on? Another substance dubbed dangerous by the modern mainstream narrative; herbal remedies.

Herbalism was something I was introduced to years ago. I heard a radio journalism piece on the correlation between basil and ibuprofen when I was driving one day and it struck me. Modern medicines are based on powerful herbs and plants. In this particular radio piece, the expert was commenting how scientists saw the beneficially action that the active compounds in basil had on the body and how they were able to reproduce that compound in the lab. Low and behold ibuprofen was born. With my own investigation I realized that the spicy flavor of basil, strong enough to numb your mouth tasted the same as an ibuprofen tablet you let sit in the mouth. Both bitter and pungent, with a kick on the back end.

If you trace any modern medicine backward, chances are its active compounds are mimicking one found in nature. The problem with modern medicines is they again trade quantity for quality. It’s easier to manufacture substances in a lab and warehouse rather than growing plants carefully and patiently. Pills can be made exact, repeatably and with full control, while plants can’t be, they are living things and are uncontrollable to a degree. Also, plants can’t be patented and profited from like controlled substances. A pharmaceutical company can’t sell you an herbal remedy for $200 that you can grow in your garden for $2.

In our own home, we’ve forsaken antibiotics, steroids, and cough syrups as a first-or even second-option, opting to research our own solutions for temporary ills and symptoms. There are whole unfairly bastardized schools of herbal practitioners who have successfully treated patience from disease, trauma, cancers, viruses and infection with nothing more than what the earth produced and the ancient traditions from which to curate their medicine.

We’ve personally seen success in treating scrapes and bruises, headaches, sleeplessness, sinus infections, stomach bugs, and toothaches with herbs we’ve grown, tinctures I’ve produced, salves we received from friends, teas we’ve brewed, syrups we’ve concocted from extracts we’ve made. No unnatural chemicals, no contraindications, no pharmaceutical companies, no co-pays; just an incredible sense of self empowerment, gained knowledge and experience, and less reliance on the system we don’t agree with.

All remedies aren’t necessarily physical ones.

There is another avenue of medicine that modern western doctors are incapable of administering or even addressing. That is of the one that is spiritual. To be a Modern Doctor is nearly synonymous with being a person of science and not the supernatural. Miracles have no place on a person’s medical chart, and hope is confined to statistics and test results. This is another area that I’ve found that Doctors Do Not Know Best.

In 2017, I had a slightly debilitating flare up of lower back pain. Sure, since my 2013 inflammation era, pain was nearly eradicated, but every now and then, my lower back would spasm to the point I could hold my children, couldn’t get in and out of the car without wincing pain and couldn’t even pick thing up off the floor. Some back story on my back pain is that for years I painted house interiors, and after so many hours of rolling paint on ceiling, my muscles contorted my spine and pelvic bones into the wrong places, that tied with occasional bought of inflammation, left my back askew and impervious to relief. My diet was dialed in perfectly nor my stress, since we were undergoing a huge life change, and I was struggling to do what I knew I needed to do.

Well, one Sunday after church I asked for prayer for my back, I was getting hopeless. My husband and I headed to the back of the school auditorium where service was held and two people prayed from me, laying hands on my shoulders as people milled out of the room. The man declared I was healed, not in a cocky and presumptuous manner as her prayed, but rather in genuine faith, and the women echoed his prayer of firm belief. As she prayed I literally felt a heat and tingling reverberate out from my back and throughout my body. I felt their prayers, I felt the Spirit of God move in power in me, I felt it and I too believed.

Within moments I could actually pick up and hold my daughter who was around three years at the time, an action I physically could not do 20 minutes prior. And the pain and stiffness stayed away, not only for minutes or days but months! It was crazy. There were moments here and there when I was putting away laundry or doing simple tasks and the hint of that familiar pain would creep into my body and mind, but my spirit compelled me to confront it and remind my soul that I was actually healed, that the pain I felt was a spirit of fear and it didn’t belong and couldn’t stay and don’t you know, the pain would be gone and I could resume with life as if I was fine.

There is something very real and powerful about the medicine of the Spirit of God. That is a medicine doctors do not understand and cannot prescribe or speak to, unless they are led by the Spirit themselves.

So, if Doctors Don’t Know Best, what are we to do? Look at things differently!

To be clear, some Doctors know best, regarding some things, sometimes. We must take responsibility for understanding and prescribing wellness for our health, ourselves. Leave Doctors to handle acute trauma and medical emergencies. We can hope for and advocate change in the medical system at large, so that doctors are released to do what they set out to do, and help people. Removing profiteers from medicine so that preventative care actuals prevents chronic illness and disease, and treatments shift from interventions and symptom management to wholeness and wellbeing from the ground up.

I was always told that if I was sick, to go to the doctor. Now I focus on not getting sick so we don’t need to go to the doctor. Now we use common sense and try to manage symptoms at home with patience, confidence and natural solutions before seeking professional imputs. We still value modern medicine but we’ve put it in its appropriate place in our lives. Emergency Care. Last Resort. The realm of necessary preventative care or trauma induced surgery and intervention. Broken bones, excessive bleeding, birthing backup, bloodwork workups, that kind of stuff. Regarding diet, lifestyle and traditional remedies, we look to those who have retained such wisdom from forerunners and are devoting their lives, their 10,000 hours to those topics.

What do you think?