Any Therapy Must Involve Our Body
Otherwise, there is no therapy. Just potential toxic drugs, age-old herbs and foods (often also part of therapy) by themselves without our body don’t constitute therapy. Depending on our beliefs, our body is given by God, or it has been evolved through gazillion years from chemicals to groups of them, to living cells, moving organisms, and eventually to us, before we were aware of our human existence millennia to millions of years ago. Regardless, our body is extremely complex, with billions of living cells as well as chemicals, enclosed in a unit with distinctly unique but different interconnected parts functioning individually, and in concert, with amazing efficiency. Furthermore, no two of these units or our bodies are exactly alike. Any part of our body out of harmony would reverberate throughout the whole unit.
During the last 2 centuries, many Nobel prizes have been awarded to scientists who studied minuscule parts of our body, trying to figure out how it works and how to treat diseases. Up to the present, have we solved our body’s mysteries? Or have we eliminated diseases? The answer is no. Instead, only recently had we started the first of many drug-caused new diseases, such as Tardive Dyskinesia described in the last post? God, for his/her/its creating us, has not received any Nobel prize. Nor has father/mother Time that has gotten us to our current state of human existence, been thus honored. It’s obvious that this prize only honors the world’s scientists with the most important accomplishments. However, few of the humans belonging to a club of brilliant people and the moneyed class honoring them seem to see the wonders all around us. If they did, they would have seen their extraordinary accomplishments (the best of human intelligence) easily dwarfed by these wonders, including our body.
Our body’s existence and how it works is still a mystery, just like the universe and the cosmos. The scientific work done in a minute segment of our body, no matter how brilliant, is nothing compared to the whole body’s billions of similar minute segments, coordinated by some force to function as a whole in harmony. Fixing it has been a centuries-long challenge. It is easier to build a robot for a specific job and fix it when any of its parts breaks down than to tamper with our body trying to deal with a disfunction or a disease in it.
Because of our body’s infinite complexity, a disturbance in any small segment is most likely to reverberate throughout the body. Here are two of my main thoughts regarding therapy.
- Traditional herbal medicines are no different than foods. They are what they are, as a result of trial and error over time. During this time (thousands or millions of years), through actual human experience, we have learned which herb is safe, which is toxic, and what we can do to make some toxic ones safer or less toxic. The key element involved is time. They are all based on actual human experience, and we already know most of them are safe and effective, based on at least 3500 years of continuous documentation (at least for Chinese herbs and formulas).
- Modern synthetic drugs are based on artificially designed ‘scientific’ experimentation, not actual human experience. Since synthetic chemicals are brand new to our planet and to us, we have never had experience with them. We have no idea how edible or toxic they are. Just like if we don’t know a mushroom, we won’t simply pick any mushroom and eat it. We leave it alone until we can find someone experienced with mushrooms to tell us. Since we can’t just ask anyone whether a newly synthesized chemical is safe, we design some elaborate scientific tests to find out. So we test them in the test tube (in vitro), living matters (in vivo), via small animals, and finally in clinical trials in humans for 10 to 20 years before they are approved for human use, despite their always being accompanied by ‘tolerable’ side-effects during these periods. However, the real test by trial and error only starts then, after being put into actual human use. Though time has not been on modern synthetic drugs’ side. These modern new drugs have no long human-use history as opposed to traditional herbal medicines whose safety or toxicity has been continuously tested in humans for as long as millennia and centuries (all documented) or many decades more than just 20 years during modern clinical trials for synthetic drugs.
As a scientist knowledgeable in the big picture of drugs and herbs used in human therapy, I simply don’t understand why some fellow scientists can’t see the difference between time-tested herbs (no different than foods) and synthetic chemicals (mostly made from reactions with or among new petrochemicals). Unless, of course, if they are part of the consortium of drug makers, sellers, and their interdependent associates who control the vicious cycle. Then, they have no choice but to defend their self-generating money-making machine whether or not the drugs they produce work or continue to cause more diseases, which is more to their own benefit.
In my next post, I’ll discuss the three elements of therapy.