Time to Take Your (Bitter) Medicine

Why real medicine must always be bitter, and the bitterest pill of all.

Here's why all real medicine is bitter medicine. And the bitterest pill we have to swallow is that the entire edifice of modern medicine is built on an impossible fantasy.

To set the stage: illness means you're off the narrow path of health, which like all virtues is poised between opposing extremes. Health requires a balance between toxins and nutrients, activity and rest, consumption and fasting, light and dark.

The only reason you've strayed one way or the other off the path of health is because of your desires. The desire to do more and rest less, eat more and fast less, taste more sweet and less bitter, stay up late with the lights on longer than nature intended and spend less time in the necessary dark.

Even if you do know the way and try to stick to it, without a knowledgeable and impartial guide to help you are constantly being driven off course by yourself reasoning why it really would be better to shift just a tad this way instead of that.

Then, any number of slight misdirections in various parameters will compound over time to become significant departures, and after months or years people suddenly wake up to find themselves far off course, unable to any longer avoid realizing they aren't truly healthy anymore.

So, true medicine will always taste bitter to the one who is sick, because medicine can only work by bringing them back into balance and it's their very self that is out of balance. And the self tends to love nothing more than itself, regardless of whether it's healthy or not. The desires that brought you off balance to where you are, are the same ones that have to be opposed to bring you back to where you should be.

You can push a person back into balance in many ways. Mentally, emotionally, physically. With mantras, and meditations, and exercises, and herbs. Some ways are more subtle than others, but they all intertwine. Pushing in one spot will apply pressure on all the rest. Deep, subtle and delicate energies are difficult to maneuver without great skill, but the superficial physical level is easy and forgiving.

That's because the human being has layers, like gears. On the outside you can turn a wheel, and a level lower it will turn many smaller ones, and those will turn even more and even smaller ones still, all the way down to the microscopic level and beyond, wheels turning ever finer and ever more wheels.

In computer engineering it takes skill that is humanly unattainable to work exclusively at the level of machine language, moving ones and zeros around in the deepest guts of a computer (let alone at the level of electrons zipping around in silicon), which is why even the best software engineers almost exclusively interface with higher-level languages, and the majority of users with even simpler graphical user interfaces.

Of the most fundamental failings of modern medicine is to go microscopic, into the realm of irreducible complexity which, news flash, no one fully understands. We have not even fully mapped all of human biochemistry - all the chemical interactions happening within our own cells, let alone within every cell of our microbiome, which includes thousands of distinct species and makes up more cells than our own and works synergistically with them. We certainly haven't broadly taken into account photobiology and bioenergetics. What else are we entirely missing that we don't even know to consider?

We know we can't fully predict what will happen when we introduce new chemicals into our bodies. The problem is worse than dealing with machine language in a computer, because at least there we fully understand it and can map it all out, it's just too vast and intricate to hold it all in our heads and manipulate it. With the body, mind, emotions, bioenergetics, microbiome and more we can only effectively and safely interface at a higher level, using a more easily understood software language encoded for us by nature itself, so using natural means and messages, applying broad principles to create recipes that gently nudge every level from the macroscopic to the submicroscopic back into balance.

Working at microscopic and submicroscopic levels will always and forever be unattainable because they will never be fully understood. Without complete understanding it is only possible to destroy something when you interfere with it. It is impossible to fix it. It would be like asking a precocious 5 year old who wants to grow up to be an engineer to troubleshoot your spaceship just before taking off for the moon. Only someone utterly insane would allow that. Yet almost everyone nowadays allows blindfolded and intellectually out-of-their-depth "engineers" going by the name of doctors to tinker around within the most complex vehicle in the universe, comprising their own body, heart and mind.

It's well past time we all woke up from the toxic anesthetic of modernism that has put us into this dangerously confused fugue state, allowing in some cases very difficult to reverse damage to accrue by the misguided acts of fools masquerading as experts.

We must begin with a healthy and profound respect for Nature, ourselves and our forebears. Only then we can get back to first principles and rebuild the real medicine left in disarray and ruin by the ancients.