Putting Health in Context

What is health? How can we restore our health once it’s been compromised? Let’s start putting health in context.

Like every life form, we are designed to thrive, simply, naturally, in the measure that we live in accordance with our design.

There is foundational knowledge for your health that is profound and useful. I hope this supports you in the long and beautiful Journey to becoming a trustworthy, responsible and wise adviser for your own Life.

Not all the sources I recommend for your education are in agreement with each other. If you apply yourself, the nuances, details and subtleties will reveal themselves and you will come to your own appreciation of how it all fits together. None of this should be misconstrued as medical advice. It is offered for purely educational purposes.

The quality of the Life we live depends on the quality of study, attention and action we bring to it.

That’s up to YOU.

Today’s invitation will provide our readers with a huge, global and both modern and traditional approach for putting health in context. For deep transformative growth to occur, our cellular substrate has to be healthy and support building the new neural connections required for learning and providing the energy for new, exciting and challenging engagements.

Before we get started, however, I’d like you to just imagine something which may sound utopic or remote, but which was the “state of humanity” in many communities, around the world as recently as the 1930’s, so here goes:

Your Neighbor’s Smile

Imagine a society where dentists, doctors, police, judges and jails are unnecessary. Instead of imagining what kind of “policy” you would “implement” to make that real, I invite you to take a different tack.

Think of the Biological Qualities of the sorts of humans who would spontaneously compose societies where people are healthy, well-nourished, live lives of meaningful engagement together, are capable and happy to be alive.

• Can you picture what people who live well together would look like, physically?

• How would they smile?

• What would the sounds and tones of their conversations be like?

• What gestures of theirs would communicate a sense of well-being, of grace and competence?

• What would their bodies and their movements be like?

Today we’ll Journey around the world, in a whole host of such communities, real communities, without dentists, doctors, jails, judges or police and with no need for them. Healthy communities emerge, naturally, from healthy individuals which emerge, naturally, from healthy cells.

Living Systems are Emergent Systems: the vital qualities at the larger level reflect the vital qualities at the levels composing every subsequent level.

Our adventure starts high up in the Swiss Alps, in the early 1930’s. An American dentist on vacation, Weston A. Price D.D.S., hiked up a trail to a remote village whose inhabitants lived with their own cattle, crops and community providing them self-sufficient sustenance. When Dr. Price and his friends arrived in the village, the villagers came out of their homes to welcome them with something that left Dr. Price amazed: their smiles!

Dentists have a different kind of appreciation for smiles than the average non-dentist. Dr. Price not only noticed how friendly these people were, he immediately noticed that all of them had straight teeth and broad jaws with plenty of room for all those teeth. He didn’t see any of the anatomical tooth and jaw deformities that were so common in the States or even in the Swiss village that he had just walked to this one from!

His curiosity was piqued. Since they didn’t have a dentist, he offered the whole village a free dental exam. He wanted a closer look. Those exams confirmed what their smiles and broad faces revealed: these were extraordinarily healthy people who practiced no “dental hygiene,” yet cavities were extremely rare and dental deformities non-existent. Nobody needed their wisdom teeth pulled. Dr. Price wondered what these people did that the Swiss in “modern” villages didn’t.

There were no roads to this village, only a walking trail. The sale of manufactured foods wasn’t commercially viable.  All their food was locally grown. Weston Price began to study what they ate, in detail. What he discovered contradicted much of the new “medical advice” that was making its way onto the scene in the United States, with devastating consequences for dental as well as overall health.

As an aside, the cardiologist who cared for U.S. President Eisenhower when he had a heart attack will put our current plague of “heart disease” into perspective, a perspective I was never privy to during the entirety of my professional training and career as a Critical Care Nurse, caring for countless patients with heart attacks:

“Heart disease in the form of myocardial infarction was nonexistent in 1900 when egg consumption was three times what it was in 1956 and corn oil was unavailable. . . . See here, I began my practice as a cardiologist in 1921 and I never saw an MI [myocardial infarction/heart attack] patient until 1928. Back in the MI free days of 1920 the fats were butter and lard. And I think that we would all benefit from the kind of diet we had at that time when no one had heard the word ‘corn oil’”  –Dr. Paul Dudley White, M.D., known as “the father of modern cardiology,” one of the founders of the American Heart Association, as quoted by Sally Fallon Morell (Presenter) (2008). The oiling of America [DVD].[comment in brackets added]

In our previous post, Journey Out and Back, I pointed out how, as “moderns” we have had our perspective on the human experience shrunk almost to a vanishing point. This goes for all aspects of our human experience, even our most basic notions of health, medicine or what a healthy human is. If I, and the nurses and physicians I

worked with, had known that heart attacks were virtually unknown in 1928, do you think that would have changed something about how we viewed heart attacks and the sort of advice we gave cardiac patients? Could the same be said about the diabetes, obesity, cancer, auto-immune diseases and the rash of neurological illnesses people are suffering from and

 

 

which were extremely rare less than a century ago?

Right now heart disease is the number one killer in the United States with heart attacks (myocardial infarctions) being the principal diagnosis. I graduated from nursing school in 1989 and practiced nursing for 25 years without ever having heard this curious fact about “heart disease” which I always treated as a sad but unavoidable “fact of life.” What kind of life?

Let’s re-expand our context for understanding health in a way that is recent yet long-lived with Dr. Price’s profound research.

Dr. Price began compiling photos of people in the healthy Swiss village he hiked up to and of the much-less-healthy Swiss village where he was staying. In doing so, he discovered the life’s work to which he would devote his remaining years and compile into his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. From Switzerland Dr. Price began visiting communities, around the world, where people still ate all locally- and traditionally-produced foods, doing dental exams while taking pictures comparing those people with their nearby neighbors who were already consuming commercial foods.

The result is stunning and would be included as part of the basic training of physicians and nurses, if the intention of the medical system were to improve health. That is certainly the intention of most nurses and doctors I know, dedicating our lives to doing helping people as best we can with the best information we have. The purveyors of that information, on the other hand, do not share that intention, but please do not take my word.

The New England Journal of Medicine is one of the world’s most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. Its twenty-year editor, Dr. Marcia Angell M.D. has come out denouncing the corporate-funded fraud masquerading as “medical research” and “medical schooling” in her New York Times article Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption. She does not mince words.

If you want health, it’s going to be up to YOU to do the study necessary to grasp what that means, exactly, and to take the steps that support YOUR and your loved one’s health:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top 9 U.S.-based drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year in North America alone. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease.”  Dr. Marcia Angell M.D. – former twenty-year editor of The New England Journal of Medicine

Dr. Angell’s findings are echoed by many others.

In other posts I wrote of Western culture as a culture fully weaponized against the well-being and intelligence of its members. I mentioned the culture of corruption, a word which comes from the Latin cor: “heart, essence, core” + ruptio: “to rupture, to severe, to break.” A corrupt culture is one that acculturates its members into breaking from the essence of our Aliveness, Intelligence and Capacity as Inheritors of a Bio-Logical Ability to Adapt and Create Naturally and in Support of Our Vitality.

I never imagined that medicine was as corrupt as Dr. Angell points out until I started discovering how our very own biology is designed to heal itself, naturally. We need to be properly nourished and to stop frustrating our biology with toxic and inflammatory foods. Learning this hard lesson allowed me to heal myself, help others do the same and pushed me to Get Clear On the Nature of Perfection.

Modern cultures are the fruit of military and cultural conquest and the systematic subjugation and degradation of the conquered through a thousand-year-plus process of acculturating the conquered to a state of “useful but not too bright,” for those who rule them. There are important clues to why and how in the article Modernity: Neolithic Trickery 2.0.

Corruption happens in chains of command: we take our orders, definitions, protocols and interventions from “superiors” taking their orders, definitions, diagnoses, protocols, interventions and prescriptions, in turn, from “authorized” sources. We don’t go to the essence of things on our own.

In the busy, stressful lives of medical professionals, few if any clinical practitioners investigate the line of what we’re reading all the way up to the person doing the actual authoring of our “authoritative” sources.  If it appears in The New England Journal of Medicine, for example, we assume it’s been vetted and “peer-reviewed.” We are too busy caring for our patients and keeping up with the new protocols, research and information to tear apart every journal article we read in what we assume are reliable sources.

Drs. Parry and Spielman did investigate the nature of research getting published in medical journals. Here is what they found:

“Drug marketing is a very sophisticated system which corrupts every part of the scientific and medical network. Science has largely been taken captive in the name of increasing profits for pharmaceutical firms.”  Dr. Peter Parry, Dr. Glen Spielmans: From Evidence-Based Medicine to Marketing-Based Medicine: Evidence From Internal Industry-Based Documents, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry (2010) 7:23-29

In the realm of medicine there are few more authorized sources than Harvard Medical School. If you’d like to know how medical schools are co-opted by pharmaceutical companies, HERE is a review of key faculty at the Harvard School of Medicine who are simultaneously on Big Pharma’s payroll while indoctrinating new med school students to use the pharmaceuticals they are handsomely rewarded to promote.

I’m not going to open up a huge exposé into medical corruption. Because living systems are emergent systems, the qualities of life seen at the smallest level play themselves out at every other level that is built upon them. Modern culture is perfectly corrupt, all the way down to our cellular health, as you will discover.

Corruption itself is not only top-down but also bottom-up. An essential part of that corruption, or “rupture from our core, our heart, our essence,” is this culture of foisting our responsibilities on so-called “experts” and of asking more of others than what we ask of ourselves.

There are important links in this article to orient you to the terrain of what’s going on in “healthcare.” If you’ve got health issues you’re dealing with, you either take the driver’s seat with respect to your destiny, or somebody else will. Seek out the guidance you need to clarify your process for learning and supporting your health along the way. It’s up to you.

How we move beyond corruption is by facing our own and the entire human ecology that prepares us to play our roles in a culture of corruption. We assume our own responsibility to go to the essence, to the core, of what we are professing. It’s up to each one of us to get oriented to what’s going on and the roles we play in it. That takes moral courage.

Deep Freedom Now is dedicated to individuals with ethics, capacity, a commitment to Aliveness and moral courage. 

I like to see people LIVE WELL and to contribute to that. In a learning context, as opposed to a hospital context, that only happens with and for people who help themselves.

What we are witnessing around us, in our lifetime, is just one phase of cycles that are much greater than a single human life. We are living out consequences sown by previous generations. Cycles occur throughout Nature with interwoven cycles of growth and decay.

Some will lead ourselves to well-being instead of waiting for someone else to do it for us. In order to navigate reality we need reference points that reveal choice and consequence in the broader context of Being Human and Being ALIVE; that reveal the Big Cycles.

Today’s offering does just that. Sally Fallon is making Dr. Weston A. Price’s work available to a larger audience via the Weston A. Price Foundation, a wonderful resource for putting health in context. This global approach establishes some very important guidelines and foundational understanding for health. Listen carefully. It’s a two hour talk and powerful aid in contextualizing what health is and how very different people in very different cultures, environments and life ways have supported our well-being over millennia. Our ancestral human norm was to live in communities where dentists, doctors, police and jails are not only absent, but not needed.

Consider it a two hour investment in your education that will hopefully spare you many two hour investments in a round-trip visit to the doctor’s office. With what you learn, you might spare yourself quite a few of those trips, not only for you, but for your loved ones – if you apply it. I wish you the fullness of health.

Deep Freedom Now invites readers to bring application and care to our coherent, contextualized comprehension and engagement with what is happening with us, as humans. 

Although each article stands alone, it is part of an educational cycle, designed to draw your attention to many aspects of the human experience that we take for granted or often ignore. This series is available to you via our complimentary newsletter in the sidebar and below. Feel free to share articles with others. Thank you.

Gather Seeds,

Sisters, Brothers,

Of Wisdom, which is Way-Finding,

That You May Make Your Way

To Living the Life You Love

And Loving the Life You ARE

With and For Those With Whom

Your Living and Loving Blossom.

Make it Be So!