There’s a difference between health and medicine. Don’t be fooled by big hospital advertisements like, “Thrive” that continue the meshing of medical treatment with living in a healthy way. It’s great that people high up in their ranks are making an effort to encourage healthy living, albeit in an effort to bring more people to their hospitals. But their food recommendations come from the Food Pyramid, their exercise recommendations from supposed experts, and their diagnoses are influenced by the medications that they are comfortable prescribing. It’s hard to reasonably accept “health” advice from a business that Thrives on surgery, pharmaceutical treatment, and office visits paid for by insurance companies.
To be fair, most of us pay insurance companies for all of these “benefits”. We’ve bought ourselves into the system. We believe that doctors exist to keep us healthy. When they tell us to take a pill or use an ointment or get surgery, we go ahead and do it. We know that it’s expensive to see a doctor and to get those additional treatments. So we get insurance. The problem is that we believe that this is our way to stay healthy.
Medical treatment exists for wounds, injuries, diseases, and conditions that individuals can’t properly self-treat. But you can see that the list of things we believe must be treated at a hospital or doctor’s office or from a pharmacy increases exponentially over time: a sore throat, headaches, an aching shoulder, weight gain, cavities, bone loss, high cholesterol, lack of focus. And because we’re already paying insurance companies, we might as well make use of that copaid office visit to get it treated.
Health is different. Being healthy involves the food you eat. It involves the way you move every day. It involves what you do with your thoughts and how you act. It originates from your decisions and most basically from your will. Sure, it’s very important to read and learn about food from people who have experience and who have learned from people before them and they before them. It’s important to know how to move, and to learn from someone who knows how to move and how to keep the body functioning well. It’s important to know how to cultivate your mind and to learn this from people who have done so and who have good minds and strong spirits. But most importantly it comes from your will to be a healthy creature.
Will yourself to good health. Don’t count on the “medical community” or the government and their food pyramid to bring you to good health. They will not. You will. Figure out what is causing your pain, your suffering, and discomfort, and see if you can’t get rid of it on your own. Since when did a person have to get permission from a doctor to do something good for their own health? Never. You give yourself the permission to observe and test and try and explore the old knowledge and experience that humans have had and will need to rebuild to be healthy. Your health is yours to build. And when you need medical treatment, you go to a doctor you trust and hear them out and get treatment according to your rational judgment.
But before that, go to your grandparents or someone old and trusted and ask them what their parents and their grandparents ate. Look up what our ancestors ate and how they lived. Scientific thinking involves evaluation of the one million years of human existence, not just the effects of a pill on a symptom.
Free yourself from the system. The system is there to do something efficiently. If you don’t need that something done, you don’t need the system to do it efficiently for you. Freeing yourself to act for the good of your health is not as hard as you think. It’s just different. Remember the moment when Neo was freed. It wasn’t after being chased by agents, taking the pill, or getting dunked and reborn and unplugged. No, it was the moment he decided to follow the white rabbit. It’s the decision.
Live powerfully.
The Brilliant Beast Blog 