Where is Galen in modern medicine ?
Modern medicine exists in a technological desert devoid of meaning. It lies separate from traditional medicine, its history, from Galen and from every other major system of medicine.
Modern medicine is almost entirely dependent upon technology and on pharmaceuticals, without which it cannot make a diagnosis or organise a treatment. Modern medicine is progressively stripping out all elements of traditional practice.
It is impossible to separate a civilisation from its technology, from its lifestyle and from its medicine. As lives becomes more dependent upon technology, so does the medicine that accompanies them.
Without doubt, medicine or technological medicine can save you from some dreadful conditions. From bodies destroyed by bombs, by bullets and smashed to pieces by cars. It can also save people from severe heart disease, cancers, and organ failure. Yet all of these conditions are the products of a technological civilisation. Before the twentieth century most of these conditions were unheard of, without a car, there are no car crashes, without bombs there are no victims of bomb blasts. Without idleness, ignorance, saturated fats and environmental pollutants, there is no heart disease or cancer.
For the most part, Technological Medicine does not provide protection. Instead it offers screening as a form of early diagnosis, made before the body has a chance to heal itself.
The only form of prevention on offer is vaccination. Vaccination depends upon injecting DNA and other foreign materials directly into the body, breeching the bodies natural defences with the intention of stimulating the body's immune system. Ever since the swine flu fiasco, every drug company in the business is jumping on the vaccination bandwagon. Even though the evidence for the benefits of vaccination are, at best slim.
Teach Yourself Medicine is based on Western Traditional Medicine, rather than Technological medicine. Its philosophy is one of making links between the different schools of medicine, just as Galen steered a path between the Empiricists and the Methodists to develop a school of medicine based on first principles.
The same dilemmas faced by Galen, are still in place today.
The modern empiricist is the "Evidence Based school of thought". Evidence Based Medicine is a type of medicine based on the results of treatment regardless of the underlying logic or medical theory
The modern "Methodists" are represented by the doctors, nurses and health advisers who advocate guidelines and protocols. As long as a doctor follows the rules and protocols prescribed by the establishment his or her practice will not be impuned.
There does not seem to be an equivalent of Technological Medicine but that Technological Medicine is based on technological "measurement" and Division and Categorisation rather than a more holistic approach based on first principles and the process of making a diagnosis
"Teach Yourself Medicine" seeks to reconnect medicine with its past, including Galenic medicine, and more recently traditional medicine and to show from first principles the links between Western Medical Systems and other major medical systems including
Evidence based medicine
Guidelines and protocols
Technological medicine
Evolution and evolutionary approachs to disease
Galenic medicine
Aruvedic medicine
Chinese and eastern systems of medicine
Complimentary and Alternative therapies
The foundation of Teach Yourself Medicine is traditional Western Medicine. It is based on medical principles and the process of making a diagnosis through observation and hypothetico-deductive analysis.
In other words, look carefully, discover what has happened, work out what is going on and find a solution.
Finally
The split between Modern or Technological Medicine and other forms of medicine is in part because of the massive amounts of money invested in and spent by Technological medicine. Nothing and no one can compete with the vast fortunes available to Technological medicine. It is a battlefield where only the very rich can afford to play.
The rest of us must look after our minds and bodies in the way that nature intended, taking simple care and following simple rules and being clear about what we do and why.
Copyright (c) Dr. Liz Miller
www.lizmiller.info
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