The question of health is one I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past year. I took a year off of school particularly to have a break from the stress and busyness of academic life. School is all I’ve ever known and it didn’t feel like a healthy choice to continue through the motions of education without intention or a priority of taking care of myself.
Refreshed from a year of travel and solo growth time, and more than ready to get back into an academic community, I’ve been trying to prioritize my own health this year. This is primarily through taking the time to know myself and my needs and maintaining a level of balance throughout my life.
As we looked at health this past week, I was struck by how narrow much of the conversation about health is. The majority of our class believed that modern medicine is the key to better health and agreed that the biggest environmental health concern is that caused by environmental injustice. I tend to agree that both are vitally important, but I’ve come to put more faith in natural health.
I had the challenge this week to take on and defend the perspective of “The Natural Way is the Healthy Way” in our debate and found myself struggling to defend it. There is surprisingly little research into traditional healing methods and, in such a scientific community, it is hard to get anyone to see the validity in most natural healing when there isn’t much science supporting it. This means questions about the natural way’s limitations are hard to argue with.
Modern medicine has been able to accomplish a lot and many of us live much longer and “better” lives because of it. It is so important to us that it has defined how we consider “health.” But does healthy mean living as long as possible? Does healthy mean suppressing symptoms of illness so that we can go about our regular lives, that even may have caused those illnesses?
Many modern health conditions are a result of us pushing ourselves and our environment and resisting how we are naturally designed to live. The modern obsession with being “sanitary” has created an environment in the West that is damaging the diversity of our microbiomes, leading to more and more cases of allergies and asthma. The fact that highly processed sugar and other ingredients are in everything we eat are contributing to the obesity epidemic and an increase in diabetes. Improving technologies are flooding our time and mind with a mass of media and pressures in quantities that we aren’t evolved to handle. We also are busier than ever, taking on much more than may be healthy, causing chronic stress and even death from fatigue.
Modern medicine may have alternative medicine beat in plenty ways, but it is limited in its approach. It might even be making us care less for our whole selves because we rely so heavily on it. Rather than living a more balanced lives and stepping back from things that stress us out, we take a pill when we get a headache. Is this really in our favor?
Plenty of research has also been done about the relationship between mind health and body health, and the results are fascinating. When we experience stress and anxiety emotions all the time, they do manifest in our biology. The mind has incredible powers we don’t fully understand when it comes to their affect on our bodies. One study we talked about in my SOAN class was how more testosterone in males doesn’t make them more aggressive — rather, males in aggressive social groups and situations creates more testosterone in the body.
Our environment shapes our biology more than we realize. This is why it is critical to emphasize holistic health and treating not just from a biological perspective, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Putting so much faith in modern medicine makes its miracles possible, but also might blind us to the true causes of and solutions to many of our modern health issues.